Soul Gate Ermor tips?

[Chris Byler]

The other reason to ignore blood as a dead Ermor is, of course, that you need population to hunt blood slaves. Demons want *living* sacrifices.

I don't know if this was mentioned before, but along with death, sloth, and turmoil 3, take cold 3. Some undead, including some of your summoned commanders, have a chill aura; all (IIRC) are cold immune (while most living troops take extra fatigue in extreme temperatures). This gives you plenty of points for luck and magic, which combine very well to give you extra gems often. This is important because you will have relatively few mages.

Beware of priests. SG needs a magic scale to keep their spectral weapons from being resisted too much and compensate for lack of mages, but that also makes them more vulnerable to banishment. Although spectral legionnaires have higer MR than Ashen Empire's junk troops, losing them hurts more. It might not hurt to spend a few gems on banish-bait (they will tend to go for the closest and/or lowest-MR undead), or better yet, get some flyers and form a priest extermination squad.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by LintMan:
1 - It seems the unholy priests are unable to preach. So you're left with just temples, prophet & pretender to boost your dominion? Does this prove to be a big liability?

Yes, this is a significant liability for Ermor: You have no real ability to spread your dominion beyond taking a strong dominion, and spamming temples: The dominion spread of your pretender and prophet cannot be considered to be significant beyond a localized basis: At best, they can temporarily disturb an equilibrium situation.

2 - My home province only started with ~7K pop - is this a map setup, or something related to SG Ermor?

Dead Ermor receives less starting population than other nations. SG gets slightly more than AE.

3 - Is it worth pillaging your provinces to try to eek a bit more money out of them before all the pop dies? Or summon apparitions at 100 pop(!) apiece? Or is it better to try to prolong the pop survival to get continued tax income?

Jack taxes up to 200, loot, pillage, and burninate. That's what I always do. If you're having dominion control issues and have taken some rich provinces which persist in remaining outside your dominion, it doesn't hurt to farm them and perhaps rake in a bit of blood if you get an get one of your D3B elders there, but don't count on this occurring, and definitely attempt to rectify the problem, so you can go back to looting, pillaging, and burninating.

*DO*, however, greatly value the provinces with gold mine sites: Pillage them down to 0 population so you don't have to deal with the whiny peasants, then crank the taxes up to 200. This will double your income....because the undead always pay their bills in full.

4 - I notice that my home province has some gold income despite having no population in the province. And the Ermorian castle is 0-admin,so there shouldn't be any income from surrounding provinces. On my most recent turn the 70 income dropped to 66, and I'm puzzled by that also.

I don't think that's your provincial income, but your entire nation's income. You may have misread the display. It is still possible for Ermor have to income even under 0 population, though: It's possible that you received a lucky gold mine that will now yield income: Always crank taxes on these puppies up to 200, so they'll yield double the income. The undead always pay their bills in full.

I built another castle to see if they all do this, but it does not have any income. I assume this is some sort of home-province bonus?

This is either you misreading the upper display, or receiving free gold sites in your home province as a result of luck scale.

5 - If my domain spread out into indy provinces, they should start to die off. If I wait long enough, will this serve to starve out the indy troops and eventually kill them off?

I've never seen this happen, but I rarely care to wait that along, either.

6 - I like using mercs a lot, but the gold situation seems really tight... Are using mercs a bad idea for ermor?

Using mercs is great for Ermor: Mercs demand no upkeep and offer properties that your one-dimensional undead horde doesn't, such the ability to actually consistently hit and kill targets of decent MR. They're even better if the other players in the game have neglected them, causing their price to fall.

7 - A rabble of troops gathers in all provinces. Actually getting those troops to where they're needed seems rather micromanagement intensive. Do people tend to keep circulating leaders to constantly gather up these forces, or is it more typical to wait unti there is a large horde waiting before sending a commander over to collect them?

For SG Ermor, a Shadow Tribune will eventually spawn in the province sooner or later: He's capable of commanding 70 undeads and is generally what I use to collect the local rabble. Otherwise, they can be collected by any passing commander on the way to the front: Rarely do I need to specifically circulate a commander just to harvest the horde, although sometimes too many Tribunes spawn in one province, and I boot them into a nearby province that is commanderless to collect the horde. Other times I just leave them to raise shadows, or spirits if there are still corpses. Or burninate the countryside.

[HJ]

I'm not an Ermor expert (nor expert in general) but in my experience:

1. Yes, no preaching. Even holy priests you recruit are going to be unholy (unholy level= holy-1). It's not a liability in SP, but you have to be more careful, and protect your temples better than usual. Surpressing enemy dominions is a bigger obstacle than maintaining your own.

2. It's always like that with dead Ermor themes, IIRC.

3. Yes, if they are in your dominion pillage to squeeze out more gold for the temples while you can. One good application of implementor axe here. If you don't have dominion in the province, if it has high income/population, and if you don't need to devastate it for strategical purposes, you can leave it for the time being. This is what I usually do with enemy capitals for a few turns. Btw, you can also crank up the taxes if you want the population to be gone quicker, and also to squeeze out a bit more money in the short term (or get rid of those annoying Last 10 people in it).

4. Hmm, I wouldn't know about that.

5. Yes. Cast Burden of time to speed up the process.

6. Yes. But with free summons, it's not too terrible of a loss. You can still use them at start when the supply issue is not too bad if you can afford them.

7. It depends on the situation. It also depends on the luck of getting free autosummoned commanders. You should usually play aggressive, so replenishing armies is important, and whatever suits the current situation better (many small armies coming all the time or few large ones at greater intervals) works. You'll more often run into problems of not having enough commanders to pick all of them up (like if you wait too long). And yes, it's micro-intensive, but it's hard to resist not using all those free troops.

Hope this helps a bit.

Cheers,

[Vynd]

In my experience, Ashen Ermor's dominion will kill a province's population, but has little or no effect on the Independent troops that are stationed there. In one game as AE, I had some sea provinces next to my capital that I left alone for a good long time. Mostly because I didn't feel like fighting a big army of Tritons when I had easier and more valueable targets to hit, but I also started to wonder if the army would die off when my dominion got high enough.

It never happened. By turn 40 or so my dominion was at 9 or 10 and the entire population of the province was dead, but the army stationed there appeared to me to be just as big as ever. It makes some sense, really, from a game balance perspective. If Ermor's killing dominion effect worked on troops, then how could anyone ever fight a war against Ermor? Any time you sent troops into Ermor's territory they'd start dropping dead.

I would assume that Soul Gate's dominion works the same as AE's in this respect.

[ June 12, 2004, 17:00: Message edited by: Vynd ]

[HJ]

Hmm, I haven't played Ermor for a few months now, but I seem to remember that the indies will start to starve once you kill off the population, and therefore get diseased as they run out of supplies. But maybe I'm just remebering wrong (as in, remebering cases where I already cast BoT or a province with a disease-causing site).

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Vynd:
If Ermor's killing dominion effect worked on troops, then how could anyone ever fight a war against Ermor? Any time you sent troops into Ermor's territory they'd start dropping dead.

Well, the theory is that while Ermor's killer dominion doesn't work on TROOPS, it *DOES* destroy all of the population, and thus, the supplies: So troops *DO* start dropping dead of starvation, if left there long enough.

However, it does not appear that indies ever starve, no matter what the conditions are, something that is readily apparent on Indy-9.

[LintMan]

Originally posted by Norfleet:

quote:

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4 - I notice that my home province has some gold income despite having no population in the province. And the Ermorian castle is 0-admin,so there shouldn't be any income from surrounding provinces. On my most recent turn the 70 income dropped to 66, and I'm puzzled by that also.

I don't think that's your provincial income, but your entire nation's income. You may have misread the display. It is still possible for Ermor have to income even under 0 population, though: It's possible that you received a lucky gold mine that will now yield income: Always crank taxes on these puppies up to 200, so they'll yield double the income. The undead always pay their bills in full.

I built another castle to see if they all do this, but it does not have any income. I assume this is some sort of home-province bonus?

This is either you misreading the upper display, or receiving free gold sites in your home province as a result of luck scale.

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I definitely wasn't misreading the display. I'm aware of both income values and know the difference.

I experimented further and found:
- Adjusting the tax rate to 200 doubled the province income to 135.
- I sped to get to Acashic Record, but no extra, secret gold sites showed up in my home province when I searched with it.

Then I started a new game, same map (Cradle), but not choosing the "rich" option, and discovered:
- On the non-rich map setting, SG Ermor got 10 death gem income from the home province, and 200 starting gold.
- On the "rich" map setting, SG Ermor got 15 Death gems starting income from the home province, 600 starting gold, and apparently an steady non-pop-related gold income in the home province.
- I then checked Pangaea on the same map, rich setting, and it did not get extra gem income. (I didn't check the starting gold or try to figure out if there was extra non-pop gold income).

Very interesting - I had no idea that the "rich" game option would affect things like that - I assumed it only doubled the standard province gold/resources income and wouldn't touch things like starting gem income or starting gold amount.

Anyway, thanks everyone for all the great tips and info!