Ermor?

[quantum_mechani]

You are not using enough, else ermor is using more powerful undeads than thier normal freespawns. Level 2 priests are ideal banishers- partiularly Man's which are almost half price.

[Agrajag]

Priests which have water magic can cast quickness on themselves for double efficiency (I think a water-9 blessing would work well in most cases as well).
Anyway, the ultimate undead horde (AE) killer is alteration-7 Bone Grinding, it doesn't say so in the spell description, but since AE undead are... Well... Bones, it grinds them up and kills them all, or atleast that's how I lost a horde of longdead horsemen to an AI once. It is however quite hard to get enough death magic levels on one mage to cast the spell (unless you are Ermor...).

[Endoperez]

As said before, there are many anti-undead spells, items and even units. Using them, superior numbers of undead won't be enough. AI can't use these tactics correctly, and playing Ermor's, Pangaea's or C'tis' undead themes against AI is very easy.

[sushiboat]

Astral mages casting mental attack spells like Paralyze, Mind Burn, Soul Slay, etc., ignore the mindless undead, and those spells have 100 Range and 100 Precision (but MR negates). If you are fighting the Ashen Empire theme, often the only units with minds will be Ghouls and the commanders. If you can kill alll the commanders, the mindless undead will stop fighting and dissolve.

[magnate]

Agrajag said:
Anyway, the ultimate undead horde (AE) killer is alteration-7 Bone Grinding, it doesn't say so in the spell description, but since AE undead are... Well... Bones, it grinds them up and kills them all, or atleast that's how I lost a horde of longdead horsemen to an AI once. It is however quite hard to get enough death magic levels on one mage to cast the spell (unless you are Ermor...).

Er, don't you mean Wither Bones? Bone Grinding damages *all* units on the battlefield, normal and undead alike, including your own. Wither Bones is undead-specific.

CC

[Cainehill]

A number of other spells are very effective against the petty undead hordes as well, presuming you have the proper mages. For example, Abysia can easily destroy huge armies of normal undead using spells like Falling Fires, never bothering to cast Holy Pyre or Banishment. Bladewind is also pretty good, especially against Soul Gate's ethereal but fragile minions.

And of course, one thing no one's mentioned here is the need for nature magic, as you really need to get wine skins or other supply producing items to go very far into Ermor's dominion (unless you're using summoned troops with no need to eat).

[Agrajag]

magnate said:

Er, don't you mean Wither Bones? Bone Grinding damages *all* units on the battlefield, normal and undead alike, including your own. Wither Bones is undead-specific.

CC

Let me rephrase my misguiding quote:
Bone Grinding auto kills all skeletal undead because they are made purely from bones.
I'm not 100% sure its true, but 300 Longdead Horsemen and some more misc. Longdead troops say otherwise.

So with one spellcast, you destroy all of the undead.

A good spellcaster for that is the Lich, you can easily give him the requiered Death paths and he is immortal, so he can attack the army, grind, and escape, with no risk at all (under friendly dominion) and with a great chance of destroying an entire (or most of) undead legion.

[Gargoyle]

I recently posted that in my current SP game Ermor had a few spots on the map where it had over 400 troop. But I found that I could win an open battle against it with an army of about 150 mixed troops, a couple of mages and a couple of priest.

[Valandil]

Solar brilliance too. Fairly high level, but destroys armies. My quickend priest-5 prophet with the forbidden light currently has about 6000 kills. Big spells like flame stome are good, as is fire storm. Not niefel flames.

[The Panther]

This whole discussion overlooks a few big problems with Ermor:

1. Ermor can pile out troops in the early game and can easily overrun most any nation by turn 20. You simply can't have enough priests nor high enough research early on to counter this. Ermor can easily rush better than any other nation.
2. Fighting Ermor nearly ALWAYS requires multiple nations to join in. This seems to me to be an obvious flaw in the game design if one specific nation normally can't be beat in a 1-on-1.
3. If you want to have at least a fighting chance to beat Ermor in a 1-on-1 in the first 20 turns, you MUST have a good anti-undead nation such as Pythium or Marignon. But who wants to only play those races just because Ermor is present?
4. If you start near Ermor, you have basically no chance to win the game. Even if you put together a coalition right off the bat and kill Ermor early, you will take too many troop losses doing so, plus you will have provinces with no population and no resources. So you will easily lose to the guy on the other side from you who has a normal nation with normal troops and lots of mages.
5. Soul Gate troops simply CANNOT be banished by level 2 priests. Their MR is too high. Even Level 4 priests have trouble banishing Soul Gate troops. Low priestly nations like Man and Ulm have almost no chance against SG Ermor.
6. Don't forget supply. If you cannot get a nature mage, plus nature gems, plus CONSTRUCTION 4 (!) you can't invade Ermor. Your starving, 5 morale, diseased troops will never win any battle in enemy territory.

Your best bet when an Ermor death theme is in the game? Start as far away as possible so you have time for the necessary research and artifacts needed to kill the undead!