[Benjamin]

Well this guide is near and dear to my heart because I struggled for a while to try to think of ways to make EA aby work in MP. CBM seems to throw them a number of bones, particularly the death hero and the very much cheaper smoulderghost cast, but I don't think it saves them.

EA has so many tough nations, and particularly lightning evocations and destruction basically make your nationals very cost ineffective. I think I fell out of love with EA aby when I had my ~500 gold army of burning ones and assorted other heavy infantry get rolled by the special indy province that (unbeknown to me initially as you can't tell they're there on the strategic map) has a handful of air mages that cast orb lightning.

Soul contracts seem like a great idea, but they perform much more poorly than in MA. You gloss over too much in my opinion the difficulty involved in getting commanders for them. So if you want a devil that's either blood 5 for horde from hell, or thau 4 for gor and blood 3 for the devil himself, and you need to research construction, and you need to send mages to blood hunt, and aby's research isn't stellar anyway, and you won't have a breakneck expansion to bring in extra cash... Or you can forge banelord rods and give them to demonbreds, and also a shroud to keep the disease from killing him, but then you need a source of death gems.

It's just a very tough slog expanding, and getting a blood economy going with a cap only hunter, and doing a fair bit or research, and having to deal with no undead leadership, and you need to empower to starting forging soul contracts, and you also need to get either a nature or death income or do even more research. And getting earth is pretty tempting to, but that will be yet another thing your pretender really has to do himself.

And finally on the rhuax, he's pretty cool, but firepower is as much a blessing as a curse, and he's 440 gold for something that can't fly and is going to have a very hard time getting elemental resistances, protection over 30, etc. He will fold like a lawn chair to anyone casting a lightning bolt. You could trade for rings of tamed lightning, but that's one more thing to add to the "has to go to extra lengths to deal with" and that list is getting pretty long.

I mean just compare him in capability to the 400 gold eagle king, and he's an embarrassment. Jarls are only 500 gold, as are hinnoms whatever they build, oreids are similar price range, etc. He starts to look like an expensive chump.

tl;dr: it was an interesting read, but even with the cbm boost I think EA aby still is a very brittle nation. I don't play CBM though so maybe I'm not being fair to the smoulderghost boost.

And final trivial point: death does affect ea aby, it's only it's supply effect that does not, but pop death, old age effects and direct income loss were all there last I checked.