[Antpile]

I have had trouble vs yomi as of late. Me and my friend frequently do hotseat games and I normally win pretty handidly. However, my friend discovered that he likes Yomi and has since proceeded to beat me in almost every single early game matchup we have.

Yomi's troops, for the most part, are not very resource dependant. They are also insanely easy to use and mass huge numbers of that I just can not fight against. My only chance against him is to get to him quickly and deprive him of income, or if we throw a computer player in, hope the computer player messes with him enough that I stand a chance.

So, to discover why I am getting trounced so badly, I played a SP game as Yomi myself, and holy crap are they Dom3 on easy mode. Doing as my friend does in an attempt to find the strats weakness I totally ignore bandits and goblins and go straight to recruiting nothing but Ao-Oni's right from the start. He normally sends that starting army that is entirely stealth straight out to try and find me and begin herassing undefended provinces. It takes two or three turns to get yourself 40-50 Ao-Oni's, but once you do that army can very easily conquer all provinces surrounding your home province. While these units are doing said conquering and taking almost no losses, I can begin recruiting a bunch of Aka-Oni's for a second army. Get a few of those and with about 10 or so Kuro-Oni's, set em all to fire with no specific targets, and proceed to own pretty much all indepent spots between you and your opponent taking almost no losses due to your units semi-immortality.

Anyway, in a MP game vs him, I have to get to him before he conquers too many provinces and gets too much income (as resources are of minor importance to the mass recruitment of demons.) Soon he'll have a second castle and be marching on me with a demon army 250 units strong of all very difficult to kill units chucking fire and poison at me (which seems to be more effective than my archers are.) We may engage in a large battle at some point, and unless I win it will be something like 300 units lost while killing like 28 of his, due again to that immortality of their's. The game is now over as he will add another 200 or so demons to that army while I try and rebuild what I just lost as he marches over everything I own.

Just to add insult to injury, none of his demonic units eat, so he can eventually just get an insane stack of units marching around killing everything and not even have to worry about supply. This also allows him to defend a castle almost indefinitely, but I rarely get a chance to put him on the defense like that.

I've tried everything I can think of. None of the demons have very good protection and none wear shields, but my arrows stop working as soon as half of his weenie units he places in the front become ethereal ghosts. I've tried using a mass banishment strategy, but all of his units have around 15 MR base which makes it rather ineffective. Also, He usually has the game pretty wrapped up before I can get any sort of magic based strat going due to never losing any units to independants. By the time I have the spell combo I was going for his income is just insane and he's probably pushed me back to my home province.

The only race I can do decently well against him with is Caelum, both due to their bountiful use of magic ice weapons (which hit those damn ghosts) and my ability to find him very quickly and begin herassing his provinces/income. I've tried with Pangaea, but by the time I've located him and got a stealth army over there he has the money to start dropping province defense all over the place.

So my question is two fold. First, am I the only one that feels Yomi is entirely too good of a nation right now? Secondly, how do I fight against these demons without resorting to using Caelum and rushing him hardcore. I'd really like to be able to use Agartha vs him, as I'm on an Agartha binge lately.. but they just get freeking rolled every time I play him.