MP: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]

[Legendary League]

Originally Posted by Shardphoenix

Unless in darkness. And Ermor without Darkness is just a dead meat anyway.

Well of course! You can counter that, though, since Ermor's research lags unless they get to Const-4 for Skull Mentors [else Spectators are woefully inefficient: 12 gems for 5 RP in magic-1, vs 10 gems for 9 RP]. As a result, their early/mid game research is quite constrained, especially since they need to rely on death gems for most of it, and can't expand research growth with castles.

2 Lammashtas * 50 turns = 100 chaff killed at most. Doesn`t sound like a good usage of mage time - better spam Dust to dust, I`d say.

Summon Lammashtas takes only one battle turn and a death gem to use (you can then spam Dust to Dust afterwards). It's more effective for tying up the chaff before they reach you so you can have the time to spam those spells that you need. And if you can effectively stall the turn long enough (and they're attacking), you force them to autorout. So just having one mage spend a turn summoning lammashatas per battle can be very worthwhile. Basically when facing Ermor with magic, in my experience, the two things to keep in mind are 1) How can I most effectively, cheaply, and quickly kill the mounds of undead chaff they throw at me?, and 2) How do I keep the chaff tied up long enough for me to wipe them? At least in my experience.

Flambeaus (Holy Pyre: Fire Cloud which deals x3 damage to undead, combined with say boots of quickness) and larger AoE spells are much more powerful counters to Ermor. Also, communion'd holy priests if you have the option (Ulm for instance, can build up a communion of Iron priests and rain down things like H6 Banishment [permanently, too with a minor earth bless given 0 fatigue cost] with penetration items {which are overkill with H6, really]) just rip Ermor chaff apart (Ulm also has the option of Iron Blizzard spam). Cleansing water too, if you're a water nation. Blood nations can do the same with Sabbaths (and if necessary, can suicide diseased mages with massed Hellpower. An Earthquake or two is also incredibly useful against massed chaff: not sure about Bladewind against national Ermor undead, though it's effective against the unshielded chaff (these are all level 4-5 Evo; Hellpower is Blood 2). There's also Purgatory if you can put it up in time and are that hard pressed (Tham 7): wipes undead hordes off the map.

I'm personally more worried about Rl'yeh (since being a water nation naturally protects them). For that, I'm just going to be cheering Atlantis on, and getting high start dominion (since Mari starts next to a coast). And if I'm next to Rl'yeh, hey. I can try and go for a dom kill with blood sac .

Also, 4 yeses thus far. Need 2 more people to agree before we open it up to pretenders.