Some Ashen Empire Ermor questions,need some advice

[Corwin]

I am thinking of playing Ermor in MP game soon.

However I haven't spent much time playing Ermor before, mostly played against Ermor. Also I have heard it has been changed quite a bit in Dom3.

So I've put together a list of question that I hope other more familiar with Ermor players might be able to answer.

Here it is:

0. Could somebody well familiar with this nation describe these changes for me?

1. How quickly Ermor's dominion kills population? (in numbers please if you know them). I assume it is directly proportional to Dom strength? Does "death" scale in particular province matters as far as dominion deaths concenred? (other than basic -0.2% of population of course) Does it matters if the province belongs to you or not?

2. How the free undead spamming in conquered provinces tied to Dom level? (again, if you have some numbers it would be great).

3. What affects what type of undeads spams in the particular province?

4.Does remaining population, or the ammount of unburied corpses matters for the reanimation or for the free undead spamming? (other than reanimating armed vs unarmed soulless with your bishop)

5. What is the best tactic for Ermor player once they conquer new province? Rise taxes to 200%? Pillage?


6. If you have chosen Prince of Death as your pretender - how may additional undeads he will get and what type of undeads? Does it depends on dominion level?

7. Any additional tips and suggestions on playing AE Ermor?

8. How do you feel about AE Ermor in dom3 in general?

Thank you.

[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.

[thejeff]

Note that the AI is still incompetent against AE Ermor.

You can get away with a dormant or imprisoned pretender against the AI. It's not even hard. I didn't use any weird tactics, just used my prophet to reanimate longdead horse and built lots of temples to get better units.

The main question is what to do with the points? You don't need scales and don't really benefit from a bless. Which is also why they don't really suffer from not taking a dormant/imprisoned pretender.

[NTJedi]

thejeff said:
Note that the AI is still incompetent against AE Ermor.

You can get away with a dormant or imprisoned pretender against the AI. It's not even hard.

Very true... this nation is best used for a human in multiplayer games or as a computer opponent or a first time SP gamer. The main reason is the AI will blindly starve its own troops which results in diseases and low morale thus any human playing Ermor only needs to survive the early phase of a SP game.

The good news is this has been fixed within Dominions_5.

[Tyrant]

I'm pretty sure that you stop getting ghouls once everyone is dead.

[thejeff]

The other main reason the AI loses is that it doesn't react to being attacked by all undead armies by recruiting more priests.
It just keeps throwing regular troops at you. You get more troops faster and they don't route, so even if they're weaker troops you win.

[Agrajag]

Just to add a bit:
IIRC in dom2 the AE dominion killed 5% of the population each turn (I'm not sure if that's dominion dependant or not, but it definitely only kills in friendly dominion regardless of ownership)

As for strategy, if you don't mind the MR, then Turmoil-3,Sloth-3,Cold-3,Death-3,Luck-3,Magic-3 is pretty much the only way to go (with some variation on magic and luck).
You want the extra points from Cold and not from Heat, since more undead have cold auras, so you might as well give them a minor boost, the Luck-3 (maybe 2) is mandatory due to Turmoil, and works really well with it, especially with death ("a super rich person died in your province, you get a giant pile of cash").
Magic 3 is debatable due to MR, but your research won't be too amazing early one (atleast until you get skull mentors and enough gems), so the boost is really tangible.
Beyond that - Try and get some of those Arch-Bishops, they can spam Longdead Horsemen (or do they have a slightly different name?), which are atleast quick enough to suffer banishments for less turn until they (hopefuly) reach the enemy priests.
Remember that Reanimation (from priests) is also dominion dependant (unless changed from dom2), so it pays to have your Reanimators stay in your capitol for a few turns to get some beefy forces.
Make sure to cast Dark Knowledge on every province ASAP, death gems are your income.
If possible get some Earth on your pretender, not only will it help with finding valuable mine sites (which you need to completely clear of population and then tax to 200%), but its a great way to get nice forges for your death thugs, and generaly works well with death.
Another important thing to remember is that you need to forget about admin, forts are there only to protect bottlenecks and important provinces, so don't worry about placing forts next to each other.
Your priests can't preach, so build many temples and take good dominion.

Umm... That's all I can think of right now.

[Taqwus]

Hm. Earth also lets you find Firbolg Fortresses, possibly the most common free fort type. That's valuable since you won't have much income.

For the same reason of low income -- you do need to be careful with temples. 400 Au is a lot more of your income than it is of anybody else's. True, you don't spend it on troops... but a temple loss will hurt a lot.

[thejeff]

High dominion gives you more freespawns, so I'd go with a 10 dominion, unless you can't afford it. Which you should be able to do, since you can get so many points from scales.

What controls the spawning of the free Mound Kings? Just dominion? It always seemed to take awhile to get the first one, then they'd come fairly often. Nice to not have to use summons to ferry troops around.

[thejeff]

If you can expand rapidly, tax everything at 200% and have some luck events, you'll have no problems with money.

Temples are really all you have to spend money on. And the occasional fort.

Maybe a few labs and Indy mages with useful paths.