Ermor balance?

[Boron]

i think too that ae ermor is slightly better .

you get lots of freespawns and lots of mound kings or censors .
sg gets "only" the shadow tribunes . they are cheap temple builders or can reanimate 1 shadow / turn .

the sg leaders are cool because they are immortal but for this they are quite expensive and in midgame you prefer bane lords / wraith lords anyway .

the main strenght of ae ermor is that they can build several raider armies with their freespawns/freespawnleaders which require still a respectable force to stop them .

because they are so huge in size they can deathpillage a conquered province in 1 turn .

while you can easy field 3-4 armies of 300-500 freespawn undeads midgame your enemy still needs about 10 priests with tough guards ( about 25-50 ) or 5 mages with tough guards who can holy pyre or wither bones .

fortunately ae ermor is thnx to swarming quite resistent to most sc's .

300 freespawns have quite a good chance to kill 1-2 scs with not too big losses .


unfortunately ermor has always a serious lack with deathgems and is only a mediocre clamhorder at best . so lategame you will have serious problems against especially arco , pythium , ryleh , caelum , tien chi if they were left alone long enough to start clamhording .

pythium because of communion and caelum because of flyby attacks is already earlygame nasty for ermor

[NTJedi]

There should be one or two nations more powerful then all the rest so the AI opponents can actually be more threatening during a single and multiplayer game.

[Boron]

Originally posted by NTJedi:
There should be one or two nations more powerful then all the rest so the AI opponents can actually be more threatening during a single and multiplayer game.

you can easy achieve that :
use impossible ai with cohens crusaders and Agrajags first Version of his umbarthium mod which wasn't balanced .
this way you will have really scary ai opponents

[Agrajag]

Originally posted by Boron:

quote:

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Originally posted by NTJedi:
There should be one or two nations more powerful then all the rest so the AI opponents can actually be more threatening during a single and multiplayer game.

you can easy achieve that :
use impossible ai with cohens crusaders and Agrajags first Version of his umbarthium mod which wasn't balanced .
this way you will have really scary ai opponents

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The unbalanced Umbarthium mod (I should get to work on 1.03 already =P) isn't that good for the AI...
He is too dumb to use the really good (AKA Gifted) troops...
I beat the crap out of him in a game that I tested against my mod =P
An overall overpowered mod will give the AI enough power though, you can just mod half price for a certain nation =P.
The one thing I hate about those things though is that most computer games (I think that doesnt include dominions) use cheating AIs anyway, if you played the RTS game "Blah blah's city of Evil" (fictional name, DUH) when you put the AI on "Super Tough and Impossible to Beat without Resorting to Reprogramming of the game" difficulty, it would just get half prices for all units, or free income, or double stats for units or any number of other things.
Which is bad! Because it means the developers are too lazy to program a good AI that they have to give it cheats to be worth something...
SO if you give the AI cheats by yourself, you are going against everything that is good!

[Boron]

Originally posted by Agrajag:

quote:

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Originally posted by Boron:

quote:

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Originally posted by NTJedi:
There should be one or two nations more powerful then all the rest so the AI opponents can actually be more threatening during a single and multiplayer game.

you can easy achieve that :
use impossible ai with cohens crusaders and Agrajags first Version of his umbarthium mod which wasn't balanced .
this way you will have really scary ai opponents

---

The unbalanced Umbarthium mod (I should get to work on 1.03 already =P) isn't that good for the AI...
He is too dumb to use the really good (AKA Gifted) troops...
I beat the crap out of him in a game that I tested against my mod =P
An overall overpowered mod will give the AI enough power though, you can just mod half price for a certain nation =P.
The one thing I hate about those things though is that most computer games (I think that doesnt include dominions) use cheating AIs anyway, if you played the RTS game "Blah blah's city of Evil" (fictional name, DUH) when you put the AI on "Super Tough and Impossible to Beat without Resorting to Reprogramming of the game" difficulty, it would just get half prices for all units, or free income, or double stats for units or any number of other things.
Which is bad! Because it means the developers are too lazy to program a good AI that they have to give it cheats to be worth something...
SO if you give the AI cheats by yourself, you are going against everything that is good!

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hm i am looking after a new game for sp with really good ai which i can play a bit too .
unfortunately i know no game with good but not too serious cheating ai do you know any ?
has space empires IV gold a good ai i don't own that one . or galactic civilizations ?

SEIV Gold has a failrly rubbish AI - OK for learning the game but not really challenging once you're up to speed. However there are a couple of mods which have made the AI opponents pretty tough. And they don't rely on cheating.

GalCiv's key feature is its AI. It's the only game I've played where, when you increase the opponent difficulty level, your opponents actually get cleverer and sneakier. On the downside, it lacks the complexity or flavour of either DomII or SEIV.

[LintMan]

[quote]Originally posted by Heironeous:

Good point. I was reluctant to do this because independent priests only have holy-2, which is fairly limited. If I'm going to spend my gold on priests, I'd really like to get holy-3 for Sermon of Courage. However, if I could go back I'd definitely bite the bullet and build an indie priest banishment squad to counter Ermor's rapid rise.

Some other things to consider: if your Ermor opponent is hiring mercs, he probably doesn't have much money spent on temples and castles to protect those temples, since Ermor has limited access to gold income once it kills off its province populations. Further, Ermor's priests are unholy and can't preach, which makes it a fair bit harder for them to undo enemy domain quickly.

So you can take advantage of this by building up a strong dominion yourself to push your dominion and keep out his dominion, and also you can conduct raids on his templed provinces if he's not castling them. Low dominion for him means less auto-summons.