[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Wendigo:

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I prefer Ermor with turmoil 3, misfortune 3 over turmoil 3, luck 3, but both are certainly viable.

Disagree, at least regarding competitive MP. Missfortune Ermor might be viable playing with rare events, but on standard event settings it's a poor choice IMO.

Without even considering the bad events (lab/temple losses, master thief...) you would be giving up on Money events, mine events, gem events & Etimmu.

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Etimmu's usefulness depends on whether you are playing Ermor AE or SG. For AE he is an enormously beneficial hero - for SG he is only slightly better than the standard Wraith leaders.

You would still be getting some gem events, e.g. the ones where the witch curses your troops (who cares)

I only play with standard event frequency and have not felt real pain with misfortune 3 as Ermor SG. It costs a few temples every now and then but that is certainly survivable, so long as you have a good alchemy based economy going.

While Ermor has lower monetary needs than live nations alchemy & pillaging can only take you so far to cover these...you have to pay for forts, temples, labs, indep wizards to expand your narrow magics & scouts. Which of those would you sacrifice? How can a few more magic levels on the pretender compensate for such sacrifice?

We are talking about 240 points difference here. That is more than a "few" more magic levels. It is enough for an extra path to reach 9 - or, to my mind preferable, boost a few extra paths up to 4.

The pretender can still only search one province per turn, cast one ritual per turn, forge one item per turn or fight one battle per turn. [/qb]

Completely true. However, the pretender with 4 in most any path will find all magic sites in the province he searches including the rare sites that reduce spell costs. The pretender with 2's and 3's will not.

And while the pretender is only able to do one thing at a time, the pretender is able to do very nearly anything. Summon any unit (including all the high-level spell-casting uniques) and cast any global (with the possible exception of astral if you chickened out of high astral). You are able to adapt to any magical situation on hand, assuming you have the magical gems. You are never in the "I have to boost my pretender two levels with items in order to summon a monster than with a mere three boosts from items is capable of performing the summon" situation.

With the pretender taking a province and searching it on alternating turns for the first many turns, the better magic pretender can create a huge initial advantage in gems and good sites.

The utility of this is highly dependent on map size and the expected game length and it goes without saying that turmoil 3, misfortune 3 is risky: turmoil 3, luck 3 is certainly safer.

...But try an SG Ermor with -3/-3/-3/-3/-3/+3 some day. It is an interesting experience