[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Vicious Love:
A) AA Ermor can afford the best Pretenders

True. And you're going to need it, because hiring living units at the beginning of the game is hard, and your starting legionnaires are woefully inadequate to overcome most independent resistance, and it will be awhile before you can amass enough units. That means a pretender-led push.

B) The killer Dominion provides a splendiferous defense against non-nature armies and can rather easily do irrevocable economic damage to which the AA itself is immune

Not entirely true. AE itself is not inherently immune to the economic damage that your killer dominion causes: If you don't keep up your own expansion, your dominion will have profitlessly killed all of the people you needed to pillage. Also, you DO get income from the people while they're alive, albeit not for long.

C) Utterdark and Burden of Time are practically game winners for AA/Soul Gate Ermor, while the Broken Empire, Desert Tombs C'tis, and pretty much all death nations save Carrion Woods Pangaea gain relatively little.

BoT is surprisingly hard for Ermor to cast: You're gulping down Death Gems at a furious rate just to maintain parity in research, and probably cannot afford the gems needed to ram up a BoT such that it will not be dispelled. In SP, for instance, it's often Tien Chi or Jotunheim which casts it, not Ermor! If you're hoarding death gems in quantities that would ALLOW you to ram a 300+ point GE up, you're also probably behind in research by a lot

Utterdark is L9 and not on the horizon in the near immediate future, and will likely suffer from the same death-gem-crampage that BoT does.