Eriu guide
 

Eiru is a nation that upon first glance doesn't seem to have too much going for it. The infantry ranges from mediocre to mildly good – reasonable for indie expansion but nothing to hang a core strategy on once you start slugging it out with other nation's elite troops. They've got no cavalry (other than commanders), and no archers other than slingers. Their cap-only mages giving you weak access to earth and water and strong access to air and nature, while your non-cap mages are a fairly weak 2a, 1n or an even weaker (and still expensive) 1a 1n - neither of which is a cost efficient researcher.

So, what do they have going for them?

Firbolg infantry. As previously mentioned, is reasonable infantry. Their armor and weapons aren't anything special, but they have above average strength, attack, and defense. This isn't enough to put them up into the realm of the real elite troops, but it does give them enough of an edge against indie troops that you can use them for fairly reliable initial expansion. You've got two flavors, one with spears and javelins (and slightly better defense) and one with axes for tougher opponents. Against the indies it's a good idea to use a mix, when you start fighting players use your head as to what is more appropriate.

Tuatha. This is your top shelf mage, and although expensive is pretty good. Between his glamour, defense, armor and slightly above average hitpoints he's got some survivability. With his glamoured stealth, map move 3, forest survival and ability to cloud trapeze he's got a lot of strategic maneuverability. Every one of them can cast thuderstrike, and it's fairly common to have them get 4a which will give you a pretty decent ability to lay down some lightning damage early on. As your research progresses you can, with no boosters at all cast fun things like wrathful skies and fog warriors and you've got plenty of N3s and an occasional N4 to cast mass protection, mass regeneration, etc. These guys are expensive, but you'll want to start recruiting one every turn as soon as you can afford to…10 thunderstrike spammers can do a whole lot to even the playing field against an early push by superior enemy troops – particularly since they're spending their time chopping up your PD while your Tuatha retreat after blowing their load.

Sidhe Lord. This little guy, upon first glance, seems a rather malformed chap. He's too expensive to be a good researcher, his magic is not strong enough to really do too much damage on the battlefield, and he can't join in a communion. So, how is it that he's going to be the centerpiece of Eriu?

The Sidhe Lord could hardly be designed to be a better PD raiding chasis – just exactly what he needs and no more. His magic isn't strong, but it does give him access to the following spells which you can mix and match as appropriate:

Mistform
Barkskin
Air Shield
Resist Elements
Resist Lighting
Resist Poison
Blessing

He's got a high natural defense and glamour, and if you throw an earth blessing down on top of barkskin his protection soars over 20 with his stock equipment as well as having a functionally 0 encumbrance. The rare lucky shots which do land will be caught by the mistform and reduced to a single point of damage, if your blessing also includes a level 6 nature component he'll have 3 hitpoints regen to take care of those. Your national mages can easily forge frost brands and vine shields which is all this guy needs to take out just about any PD in the game. As available mix in fire plate, girdle of might, ring of water breathing and amulet of antimagic to make this guy immune to just about anything other than strong astral magic or other SC killers depending on which resistances you script. Frost brand + fire plate + resist elements = 100% frost and fire immunity. Resist lighting/poison if you're fighting anybody who likes that. Amulet of MR will send your MR north of 20 and will let you mostly ignore anything but concentrated astral spam. Note, Tuatha can do everything a Sidhe Lord can and more and can be substituted in a pinch, they're just not nearly as cost effective and the opportunity cost of other things they can do for you is high.

Now, realize this guy is relatively cheap (compared to other recruitable thugs), recruitable everywhere, deadly effective with just 15 gems of equipment (not even assuming a dwarven hammer)…and is stealthy and cloud trapeze capable. Now you're starting to see…opening turn of a war is 7 or 8 of them having snuck inside the enemy territories each attacking a different territory while another 7 or 8 cloud trapeze into the back side of your enemy's lands. This isn't a late game strategy, this is fully doable in year 2 – and fully doable against an opponent who doesn't even share a border with you. This is a surprise rush and the war will be over at the same time your opponent realizes there is one – no time to react.

So, while your Sidhe Lord raiders are conquering everything without a mage supported army and leveraging their stealth against anything that can kill them, your research is ramping up. Those Firbolgs who were just mildly nice before are now quite easily buffable by your choice of fog warriors, mass protection, mass flight, mass regeneration, arrow fend, and quickening – and your buffers are not only stealthy, they're all cloud trapeze capable so your opponent never knows where the heavy buffers are. Heck, for the cost of a handful of gems 2 Tuatha can drop in and turn moderately high PD into a near impenetrable defensive force before retreating so if something goes wrong you're just out the gems and PD. Now, since your pretender has high earth magic you can mix in armies of lead and weapons of sharpness for the really important fights (for fun all around, make sure fog warriors goes off first then drop 4 or 5 earthquakes). Flying, quickened, armor piecing axe wielders will chew up most anything, and regenerating fog warriors are pretty much invincible outside of very strong combat magic.

So, to recap:

1) Take an Earth/Nature blessing. Nature only really needs to be at 6, earth should be at least 9.
2) Use Firbolgs for initial expansion
3) If possible find sites to recruit indie mages for research
4) Start site searching early on for water sites, you've got no natural water income and you'll need them for early frost brands. In a pinch you can use snake bladder sticks, but they're a bit riskier and eat into your ability to make vine shields.
5) Get a couple extra castles up, then start cranking out Sidhe Lords and Tuatha – if at all possible do this exclusively for awhile and don't recruit any troops.
6) Once you've got the critical research done quickly forge some items and fall like a ton of bricks on your most likely neighbor. Hey, now you've picked up all those sites your neighbor was nice enough to site search for you while you researched other things!
7) Follow that up leveraging the highly mobile Tuatha battle mages to support your Firbolg troops– first with lighting evocations, then with powerful alteration and enchantment spells.
8) You've got no astral or death magic, so time is *not* on your side. If the game gets to the wishing/tartarian stage and you're not already in a very strong position you're fairly screwed.

Re: Eriu guide
 

I like that! Sounds very nasty.

How well would Sidhe Lords fare without the Nature blessing? Eriu is inherently strong in Nature, and e.g. Astral blessing would make the thugs more resistant to Astral spells. Would it be just switching one possible weakness for another, or do enough hits get through their defences that the damage accumulates and they die?

Re: Eriu guide
 

Yes, the same thought occurred to me, unfortunately the regen turns out to be a critical factor. Depending on the race's PD when surrounded the Sidhe Lords do generally take a hit or two every other round or so and they've only got 15 hitpoints so it ends up being hit or miss when attacking stronger PD and afflictions rack up relatively quickly. With the regen though, I've successfully hit well over a hundred PDs from Man, Abyssia, T'ien Ch'i, Atlantis, and Arco and not lost a single fight when there was just PD there. I did lose one to an indie cataphract charge though, watch out for those first strike lances!

Re: Eriu guide
 

What about their sacreds? I am playing Eriu in MP with dual bless (S/F) and they chewed up Ermor along with the cheap priests (granted I am way behind because it took a while to generate enough troops to demolish those hordes of undead but at least I have the satisfaction of occupying almost every slot in the hall of fame).

Re: Eriu guide
 

Yes, their sacred infantry are not bad, but they are capital only and not really good enough to carry a strategy in small numbers - as you say you mass them far too slowly. You can certainly mix them in as a bit of a bonus but I haven't found they make that much of a difference. For the cost of one of the Daoine Sidhe you can get three Firbolgs, and outside of the bless each Firbolg is almost as good.

Re: Eriu guide
 

I just lost a Sidhe Lord(fully buffed) to a volley of Mictlan PD slings. I'm guessing that was just unlucky?

Re: Eriu guide
 

There almost had to be more than bad luck there. I don't think glamour defends against projectiles (somebody please confirm or deny this), but mistform will reduce all damage to 1. There is a 1/100 chance of any attack dispelling it, but if you're lord is even lightly armored (did he have a shield?) then the odds of slingshots taking him out or pretty slim. An improbability drive powered ship didn't fly by, did it?

Anyways, there might be a rare bug in the randomizer that lets wonky things happen.

Re: Eriu guide
 

With a shield and at least a 21 protection (assuming earth bless + barkskin) slings shouldn't really be able to touch you and mistform should catch any few wildly lucky shots. I've repeatedly taken out PD of 20+ from T'ien Ch'i and they've got compound bows - though admittedly I do script air shield in that circumstance.

Re: Eriu guide
 

Just a shield will give you 90% protection against the bullets, assuming you're around 45 fatigue from the buffs, and if you had an air shield on top of that, the chance of a bullet hitting you is around 2%.

The bullet probably got a critical because of your fatigue, there's a 1 in 6 chance of that at 45 fatigue.

So now a 9 damage bullet versus 10 protection (halfed for the critical) needs to do 1 damage, and pop the mistform with a 1% chance; or 25 damage to pop the mistform, reduced to 1 (that's also around a 1% chance). 2% chance of popping the mistform, and that's generous.

And then you still need more bullets hitting to start doing real damage, unless you lost your shield arm from an affliction on the 1HP damage.

It's all really unlikely, if the manual is correct about fatigue and criticals.

You could run with -ddddddd to try to see what happened.

Re: Eriu guide
 

I appreciated this guide a lot, I'm playing around with Eriu (and Tir and a couple other new countries) and found this helpful. (I guess Fir Bolg are better units than I thought...shows what I know)

So newb question:

Superficially, Eriu has a lot in common with Vanheim (air magic, glamour, recruitable thugs) but Vanheim seems to be a more popular (I mean, cmon, it's Norse! And they have a bless strategy, which seems to be all the rage!). Eriu has the songs (which are nifty, especially for removing spell fatigue) and better access to nature, but Van has Earth (on the smiths) and even Blood, and what seem to be better national troops. I haven't played either country extensively (although I sorta want to go vanbless some mp game, just so I understand it better) but I'm interested to hear some veteran players thoughts on this comparison.

Re: Eriu guide
 

They do have one of the few sacreds that actually benefits from a blood bless, though that isn't something anyone should give them given that they're slow, cap only and generally pretty weak.

Re: Eriu guide
 

I don't think so. Glamour for Vanheim is more widely available than for Eriu, where it's limited to commanders and capital only troops.
I certainly don't play Eriu well, but their having to rely on indeps to do any kind of research certainly takes most fun out of them for me. They are really bad at research, even when you try to give them owl quills, which is the only thing they can forge to help research.
As for Fir bolgs, it should be noted they cost 13 gold, which is still a bit expensive for what they are worth. With the cost of Tuathas, fielding an army of any size is quite hard imo, and research is poor.

I believe a surprise attack with sneaky leaders can be nice, particularly if you coordinate a lot of attacks at once, but I can't see how you can build enough units and research to get it to work without being attacked by someone first. You certainly need to be good/lucky in diplomacy to be able to pull this out.

Re: Eriu guide
 

Vanheim and Eriu have a lot of the same notes, but the melody is very different. The strength of Vanheim is in it's troops, the strength of Eriu is in it's commanders. Dual blessed Vanheim sacreds are among the very best units in the game, while none of Eriu's troops are better than passable. On the flip side Vanheim's commanders lack nature magic which is a critical component. Without nature you lose
barkskin - your protection is now 14 instead of 21. BIG difference as now your average spear wielder has a good chance of causing damage.
resist elements/poison - many, many counters now open up

Also, the E/N bless required for commander blessing is completely different from the classic W/F bless which most benefits the sacred units.

Eriu and Vanheim play completely differently, there is no way one can carry out the strategies of the other.

Re: Eriu guide
 

I find that the best way to counter a very early rush is to merely expand at a reasonable rate. Rushers are generally going to pick an easier target first, if you're expanding relatively rapidly they'll often pick on somebody else. At any rate rushing in the first year is obviously going to be a bit weak out of necessity and I think such fears are largely overblown - I think in all my MP games I've been attacked in the first year maybe once. At any rate I urge you to give Fir Bolgs a try, I also didn't appreciate them just looking at their stats, but the slight edge in defense, attack, and strength really does make them fairly effective at indie expansion. Besides, with nothing but alt-3 researched you've got your blessing, barkskin and mistform - you should be able to counter-raid even the most aggressive rush.

As to needing good luck and diplomacy, while this is always true I don't think you're appreciating how much this is a rush tactic. I can give you a concrete example of how it played out in the Epic Heroes II game I'm in. I don't remember the exact turn numbers, but right around the time all the indies were claimed and everyone really started sizing up their neighbors I started infiltrating one of my neighbors - Man who was ever so slightly larger than me. 3 or 4 turns later, between my stealth troops and cloud trapeze I hit 7 or 8 provinces and took every one. After turn 2 of the war the only thing Man held were two sieged castles. 3 turns later, while my Fir Bolg armies (very shortly supported by thunder strike) descended to crack Man's castles my Sidhe Lords had infiltrated Man's neighbor Abyssia (slightly smaller than me now that I had eaten man), and fresh thugs cloud trapezed in so I hit 10 or so my first turn. 3 turns later the only things Abyssia held were sieged castles and the province containing his SC pretender. This all happened in year 2.

FWIW I made several strategic mistakes in that game and am currently on the ropes, but the rush was rock solid.

Re: Eriu guide
 

Cloud trapeze is even enough if you fit the guy with the right items. No one can defend every province at once.
Like Endo I would like to get rid of unnesesary blessing if I can. I dont know if thats possible.

Re: Eriu guide
 

Baalz: As the T'ien Ch'i in question, you were usually facing PD 11-15. I just didn't have the money to put up more than that, and I didn't expect it would do much good without mage support.

There were a few instances where PD alone would take out a Sidhe Lord. Usually if he wasn't wielding the vine shield, but very occasionally in a lucky shot if he was, especially if a previous encounter had given him an affliction.

Re: Eriu guide
 

All I know is it was a lot of arrows. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Yeah, I'll do several things differently if I do this one again. My assertion was really about unafflicted and fully equipped Sidhe Lords, I figured out pretty quick that the lack of a vine shield greatly reduced their survivability because the hits rack up faster than the regen can balance. So much so that I stopped sending them out without them despite the fact I was sitting on a bunch of frost brands and unused Sidhe Lords (well, they were pitifully researching). http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif As I said, I found that this build has exactly what it needs and no more. Remove vine shield, they die. Remove regen, they die. Remove frost brand (or some other AOE weapon) they'll often end up retreating. Remove mistform, they die. Remove barkskin, they die against some PDs- though this can be necessary if you need 100% FR. Put it all together though while stealthily dancing around the real defenders and you'll cause much teeth gnashing while only being out a couple hundred gold and a handful of gems when you miscalculate. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Eriu guide
 

Nice guide. I did have one issue. I attacked a province and drove off the PD as advertised with a Sidhe Lord equipped. I decided to try to hold the province by cranking up the PD and dropping another in and scripting windguide on the new paratrooper. When the prince of death moved in to attack I though ok, this will be interesting but my two Lords retreated (and died) after casting their spells. Did the routing of the PD even though they were not under their direct command cause the others to retreat?
-SSJ

Re: Eriu guide
 

Yes, retreting PD can force whole army to retreat.

Re: Eriu guide
 

That sucks oh so tremendously. Lesson learned.

Thanks for the reply Z.
-SSJ

Re: Eriu guide
 

oops

Re: Eriu guide
 

That sucks ***.

How often does this occur?

Re: Eriu guide
 

So, what you are saying in effect, is, Eriu really does suck?

Re: Eriu guide
 

It's because of the 75% HP rule. If 3/4 of all HP worth of units are killed or routed, your "lines break", and the rest autoroute.

Re: Eriu guide
 

If I might point out a certain...thing...that struck me, reading this-what if you sent out all those Sidhe lords you're sitting on, en masse? Surely numbers would compensate for lack of a vine shield, until such time as you can rectify the omission?

Re: Eriu guide
 

Yes, in a desperation situation you can certainly send out Sidhe with just their base equipment and after they buff they'll do ok, but there's a big difference between having a 99% chance and having a 90% chance. The properly equipped guy is almost infinitely reusable unless you hit a mage supported defense, while the lightly equipped guy will probably take out a couple provinces but he'll very likely pick up an affliction here or there and shortly get one which makes him useless as a raider if he survives the fight. Also, your opponent can counter him with sufficient PD whereas the vine shield guy can take pretty much an unlimited amount of PD. Plus, lets be honest, you're not really gonna rectify the omission, that's just something you tell him. There's always another Sidhe popping out the castle to give the vine shield you just made to. ;)

Re: Eriu guide
 

I didn't mean to send them out one at a time, though. I meant instead of lining up 9 of them that you don't have equipment for, sending those 9 guys out in a group, let them chew up some territory, and then whichever of them gets the most experience/nicest heroic ability, or just fails to lose an eye, send a scout or something out to give that one the proper equipment, as you make it.

At the very least, that way you're doing some decentralization of your power base, since you've got a pretty powerful force roaming out there that, if your perfectly equipped Sidhe run into problems, or you get an unexpected threat attacking you, you can draw from that pool.

Does that make sense?

I'm always using scouts as couriers to equip a Niefel Jarl or a Prophet or something, that I've used to expand with, before I was able to forge a ring of regeneration or a frost brand, or whatever. And in any case, wouldn't Eriu eventually be aiming for Fairy Queens to get some healing going for those afflicted Sidhe?

Re: Eriu guide
 

As I've been looking at Eriu for a bit, I'm bumping this thread from who knows how many pages back.

Aside from the necessary blessing Baalz talked about, I was wondering if there were any suggested pretender designs to work with, particularly in the area of scales.

I'm mostly working with CBM, so my observations will be biased in that direction, but here's what I've gathered as far as scales are concerned. Note these are really just my uneducated observations with only a little play time to really back up anything here:

Order/Turmoil: What you take here obviously influences your choice of Luck scale. With what Eriu seems to need, signs seem to point towards Order for more reliable income in order to put up forts to recruit Shide Lords from as well as giving us more money to bring more Fir Bolg troops to the table.

However, since we also want Gems, we have room to think about Turmoil/Luck. Turmoil/Luck also gives us a good number of extra Gold events which might make up for the lower steady income, but depending on your own luck, it might not. Since Misfortune is likely a bad idea anyway, Turmoil/Luck will also save you some Design Points that you can put to use elsewhere. Personally, I tend to favor Order over Turmoil/Luck.

Production/Sloth: Fir Bolg don't need many resources, so Sloth is probably a good idea here.

Heat/Cold: You want to keep your income high, keep this as close to neutral as you can. Since the temperature tends to fluctuate anyway though, giving this a slight nudge one way or the other shouldn't kill you if you need the points.

Growth/Death: Baalz mentioned that since we lack access to some paths that would help us win in the late game, we need to be strong and aggressive in the early game. Should it come to the late game and we haven't already pretty much won, then we'd be in some trouble. Combine that with the fact that our troops and commanders pretty much never grow old anyway, this nudges us more in the direction of a Death scale. Don't overdo it though, as Death 3 is a pretty bad idea for anyone aside from LA Ermor. Death 1 or 2 should likely be tolerable for you and will get you some extra points.

Luck/Misfortune: I don't like Misfortune at all, especially if you're considering Death. Try to keep this neutral unless you're going for Turmoil/Luck. You really shouldn't be going further than Misfortune 1 if you're taking Order.

Magic/Drain: If you want that solid early game, you need to get your buffs and gear for your Shide Lords quicker. Magic 1 is likely all you need here.


Well that's all I have so far. I'd love it if someone might expand a bit more on that. Maybe suggest a few pretender designs, or explain if you think it can work a different way.

Re: Eriu guide
 

Hmm. CBM favours Turmoil/Luck more than vanilla, however...

Order/Luck isn't an intuitive mix, but in CBM you can afford a Dom7 imprisoned E9N6 Forest Lord with O2S2H1D1L3M1. You get +events, +good events and you don't get Turmoil's income penalty.

Re: Eriu guide
 

I really like O1/L3, with whatever else. I'd generally prefer to put the extra scale into Growth, rather than doing O2/L3. I just find that the "feel" of the balance between # events and baseline income, is optimized at O1. This is not a statistical analysis, just a gut feeling from observing many experiments with different combos.

Re: Eriu guide
 

How about taking a blood pretender with Eriu? (particularily a fountain of blood, which is useful for opening that path in general?) Blood empowerments are cheap, and it opens up communions for your national mages

Re: Eriu guide
 

PD: I've been trying this a bit, and I must say it works really well. 15 gems and you have a flying thug

However, I have also found (playing against Ermor) that if your opponent has any cursing abilities, you are likely to meet trouble: you will suffer only one dot of damage, but afflictions will pile up. Note that even after this happens your thug can survive a few battles, but sooner or later he'll end up pwned (though even in the battle he gets pwned he tends to destroy a lot of stuff)

Just saying

Re: Eriu guide
 

Oh, and I'm also under the impression that the eye shield works as well as the vine one. Maybe better

Re: Eriu guide
 

Necromanticus threadicus!

Has anybody tried Eriu with CBM 1.6? Hero Blade would appear to me as the tool Eriu has been lacking (a way to stop SC's), but has anybody tried that? The excellent thugs Eriu can field just would seem to me to be natural SC killers with a hero blade (there are other spesific SC killers, but hero-blade would appear to be the catch-all weapon (no matter if facing tartarians, elemental royalty, angels or arch-demons)), but then of course the opponent would plan for that, so not sure how viable it would be.

Re: Eriu guide
 

Hmm... if you took an imprisoned lord of the forest with an e9f6n4 bless, dom 6, O3S2H1M1, you would have exactly 1 point left. Sidhe have 14 base attack skill and a hero's blade gives +3, so blessed and equipped they'd have an attack skill of 20. Then add a burning pearl for good measure. That would be pretty tough to dodge.

Re: Eriu guide
 

I don't think taking blood on your pretender is a very good way to leverage into communion slaves. Either you have blood and/or astral already, in which case you already have slaves, or else you have to spent pretender time scaring up blood slaves to empower mages to B1. I can see blood as a good way to plug your *pretender* into an existing blood/astral nation's communions, but I just don't see it as a good way to bootstrap. It would be better to take earth/astral on your pretender and forge slave matrices.

-Max

Re: Eriu guide
 

I've played a little SP fun with those thugs, and one thing you need to be wary about is flyers. Getting yourself jumped on turn one is really painfull, as it is precisely the time your thug will last without his bless/buffs !

Never thought I'd have to be afraid of Caelum PD...

Re: Eriu guide
 

Flying PD is risky for a lot of low end self buffing raiders. I've lost plenty of thugs to Pangaea too.

The first time I played around with Sidhe Lords in SP, I was surrounded by R'lyeh & Abysia. Without more MR gear they can only raid R'lyeh in pairs (or more) and relying on Barkskin leads to problems with Abysia.