Soul Gate Ermor tips?

[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.