[Taqwus]

No specific numbers from moi. I'm not that methodical.



0. Some changes that come to mind:
- Unholy is now folded into Holy.

- Banishment is significantly stronger, making your task much harder.

- Beware R'lyeh, which gets many, many H3 prophets if it lives long enough -- and that's a Dom3 H3, comparable to Dom2 H4.

- Relative to the other nations: the other nations can take dormant or imprisoned gods, but you -can't- unless your plan depends on burning lots of death gems for empowerment, getting lucky with Etimmu's arrival, or simply doing without a death mage in the early game.

- Soul Gate is now a global enchantment, not a theme.

- Spectres, once researched, used to be a fairly cheap way of getting other paths since they had TWO unrestricted randoms. They appear to have restricted randoms (WESD?) now. I haven't checked whether Dusk Elders are similarly restricted, 'tho, but they only have one random.

- Going underwater is more feasible than before, because tritons no longer 'fly' underwater.

1. Death depends on dominion, not ownership. A high AE dominion makes ordinary Death +3 scale look like Paradise.

2. Yes, if memory serves. Don't expect oodles of freespawn in weak or enemy-dominion provinces.

3. Presence of fortress and presence of temple. IIRC, w/o a fortress, you won't get Legionnaires, just ordinary longdead and soulless. KotUS require both fortress and temple, if memory serves.

4. Freespawn reanimation continues well after everybody's dead. The corpses will decay over time, so if you feel like using them, do it fast. I don't recall noticing a difference in freespawn due to pop or corpses.

5. You might as well do both, because the population is going to very rapidly die anyway. If there's a magic site that produces income (typically an Earth site that's a mine) -- 200% tax will double site income even when there are no people. You will almost certainly want sources of Earth and perhaps Fire magic (mines and alchemy).

6. Gets ordinary longdead. Chaff. Don't recall dominion effect. Small numbers, insignificant compared to ordinary freespawn.

7. Consider bad scales in everything but Luck. If you do take drain, your research will be quite poor until you reach Cons 4 for Skull Mentors; but if you take Magic scale, you will lose MR in your dominion and Banishment becomes even more dangerous.

Take high dominion. Pick at least moderate Death (3 is absolute, absolute minimum -- Dusk Elder summoning). Include Earth and Fire. Consider getting low levels of other paths -- you should have quite a few points from lousy scales. Skip Blood unless you're feeling profligate. You won't be getting many blood slaves unless you do it by Wishing.

Construction 4 has two very useful items for you: Skull Mentors (+9 research, D2 = 10 gems) and Skull Staves (+1D, D2 = 10 gems again).

Don't worry THAT much about bless effects ex. the much-liked F9W9. Your Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre will be fairly few initially and cannot be summoned or recruited by any means. Wailing Ladies are sacred but you'll likely have even fewer for quite some time. You will have very little money, so magical income becomes important.

Oh, and if R'lyeh is in the game, kill them fast. Their dominion spawns hordes of slightly insane commanders, and will drive them more insane over time; and during their insane periods, they will declare themselves prophets, becoming H3 priests. R'lyeh also gets mindblasters (which will generally focus on your commanders, since you have few other units with minds -- and your mindless hordes will dissolve if the commanders are dead) and astral magic (which is helpful for Solar Rays even early on). Even Water now has anti-undead spells -- Cleansing, IIRC.

8. The inability to take a dormant/imprisoned pretender (well, unless you're feeling reaaaaaally lucky), the banishment upgrades, and Dreamlands prophet-hordes make the Ashen Empire less powerful, overall.