[DominionsFan]

Peter Ebbesen said:

Lesson one about fighting Ashen Empire: The REAL war has little to do with number of troops and everything to do with commanders.

So long as you focus on number of troops where Ashen Empire is concerned, you are worrying about the wrong thing and are setting yourself up for defeat if fighting a human controlled Ermor.

There are lots of ways to deal with the troops (drive-by-priesting for attrition, archery and high protection units shielding ranks of mages using the anti-undead spells or priests banishing for all they are worth, and later in the game you can use mass casualty battlefield spells) - the real war is killing off their commanders. As a rule of thumb, the loss of a single Dusk Elder or Arch Bishop hurts an Ermorian player more than the loss of a few thousand troops on all but the smallest of maps.

The only nations I consider close to broken are those with sacred units with high survivability, high overall stats, preferably two attacks, AND cheap production costs. Very few nations have the combination of all four, but those that do are absolute monsters with a F9W9 blessing strategy.

A few nations, mainly from the early age, come to mind as being in the "those sacred should cost way more gold and resources than they do currently" category, namely Vanheim, Helheim, and, to a lesser degree due to lesser survivability, Sauromatia. Their sacred units would still be good for high-bless strategies if their gold and resource costs were doubled.

mictlan, and tienchi are also very strong in the EA in blitz games. You can mass produce the cheap and good sacreds. Nifelheim is also very good, however their sacreds at least expensive.

AE Ermor is a special nation, and dont think that you can beat AE Ermor with a simple priest - banish tactic.