[Peter Ebbesen]

Sheap said:
A "long game" strategy needs to have a big payoff in the late game in order to make the early sacrifices worth it. I'm not sure what you get by taking low dominion and dormant with AE Ermor, which has more points from scales than any other nation.

Ah, you misunderstand. Dominion should definitely be 9-10 as usual! It is just that you don't spread it far in the first 10-13 turn because all spread is done by your home province, its temple, and, if you really feel you need it (you might not) a prophet, meaning that when it DOES start spreading at the usual speed, you have an expanding number of provinces it has not reached yet and won't reach for the next many turns, while the provinces it does reach first will all have castles built with your extra money.

Taking drain just causes problems by making your research bad, so in the one part of the game where you should be dominant (the end) you're not.

No, it really does not. Given that you cannot count on independent mages (you might find them, you might not), what you have is researchers recruited for death gems and, as soon as you reach construction to make skull mentors, you get cheaper research by making mentors than summoning more researchers either way. (Of course, if you do find independent mages, you have more gold income to sustain a decent number with while still castling). It does take longer time to reach this point but once you start the summoning factory after your pretender breaks free, it doesn't take all that long time (and not particularly longer than if your pretender had been awake unless you had dedicated your pretender to research).

The long-term research impact is neglible - the bonus to magic resistance in your own dominion is there to stay, and it helps out all of your troops and commanders. Where it hurts and leaves you very vulnerable is fundamentally having no mages the first 10-13 turns and no real battlefield spells the first 20 - the early game.

And, taking low dominion just makes your immortality worse.

I agree, but low dominion on the pretender is not the idea - just limiting the initial spread.

On top of it all, human players will hate you just for being AE Ermor, so your chances of getting through to the late game unmolested are quite small.

Depends on whom you play with, the game setup, &etc - anyhow, so long as they don't start molesting until the midgame it can work. If you are playing with a bunch of "let's all unite against Ermor early on" players, you should of course never attempt this gambit; as stipulated, it is not for every occasion.

AE Ermor has enough points to take an awake pretender, decent magic paths, and luck+magic, or a dormant pretender and really good magic with the same scales, and do it all with decent dominion. Since AE can't use blood and the liches all start with a bunch of death, you can afford to just buy all the paths you want. For a more rainbow, less combat-oriented lich you can take the master lich instead of the lich queen.

I prefer having 4 in all elemental, astral, and nature with whatever is left for death to maximize sitesearching [leaving out blood] when I do start searching and to give a host of nice blessings to the Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre and the Lictors (who turn into really impressive infantry this way, but that's more of a side effect).

Now, in practice having 2-3 in most paths will be quite enough, of course, there aren't that many 3-4 sites and the blessings aren't in any way essential, but I've got more points lying around than good is, so why not spend them on something fun and beneficial? The exact allocation of points has nothing to do with what this gambit is about, you might reasonably prefer another allocation. (You again seem to assume that part of the point of playing this gambit is to get extra design points. It is not. The point is delaying initial dominion spread to increase your money-earning capabilities for a long, long time. The extra design points are just gravy to be blown on whatever toy you fancy)

The reason to take a Lich Queen over the Master Lich is that she starts with Dominion 4, he starts with Dominion 3, and she can fight. Even assuming you go a nearly full rainbow, excluding just blood, the cost difference between them at dominion 10 is a mere 81 points, a trivial sacrifice for Ermor to get a pretender who survives longer in combat and is viable for suicide-teleportation attacks, able to survive against most any assassin players can come up with (quite useful if your pretender ends up holding a global enchant and you have nasty enemies in the mid-to-late game, immortality is fun but it is funnier not losing the items/globals you are carrying)

If you sacrifice magic and awake you can buy an extra level or two in most of your paths, but that's not that important - by the time there are spells that you can actually cast with those levels, you'll have enough gems to forge booster items or just empower if you must.

I agree, but again, in this gambit the point of "sacrifing" magic is not to get extra design points (it is a conscious choice to get tougher troops in the face of battlefield magic and you could easily choose to focus on magic instead of drain while playing the gambit - I apologise if I made it seem that going drain was an important part of the gambit, it is not), nor is the point of sacrificing awake to get extra points (it is to delay initial domain spread, which is the entire point).

With a rainbow mage pretender, your biggest constraint is not paths, or even gems, but simply not having enough time for all the stuff you will need to do.

Indeed it is, and what's even better, normal rainbow strategies work even worse when you go dormant... But then again, normal rainbow strategies are not the point either. The entire point, and I realise I am repeating myself, is to buy time to earn $$$ fast and to keep generating more gold every single turn while you are expanding and for many turns after you stop compared to starting awake - the fact that you'll probably end up with a rainbow pretender able to do some real good siteseaching in turns 14-25 or so after summoning the first 2 dusk elders is really nice, but it is not the goal.