[sushiboat]

Ermor Ashen Empire has some nice advantages for novices. You don't have to worry about buying troops; you get them for free. In fact, you do very little with money besides constructing buildings. You can take very bad scales (Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, Cold 3, Death 3) and get design points to buy up a lot of magic on your Pretender and high dominion. Other nations have difficulty invading your dominion because their troops starve.

With Ermor AE, the two challenges are research and diversifying your troops. Your mages have to be summoned, and your gem income won't grow as quickly as others' gold income. You can forge Skull Mentors to help your researchers. Your Pretender should start searching for gems early as your empire expands.

Diversification is an issue because having armies with only undead is a weakness. Priests can destroy large numbers of undead, and there are many anti-undead spells and items. Also, most of the AE undead are mindless, so mages with Astral mind attack spells ignore them and target the commanders. Ivy Kings can summon Vine Ogres cheaply, and some of the Elemental Queens and Kings can summon elementals for free. For the parts of your empire that have adequate supply to support some living troops, Call of the Wild summons a Werewolf and wolves. The Werewolf can summon more wolves for free.

One thing about playing Ermor AE (or Shadow Gate) is that it is very different from playing any living nation. There are fewer techniques that you can transfer from Ermor to another nation. However, since you can afford to put a lot of magic on your Pretender, you will get to play around with most, if not all, of the available spells and items in Dom 2.