Yea, they rock in a rush. I pummeled an impossible ermor by rushing with around 3-4 of them while mass producing arcebuses in my capitol (which had 175 resources a turn). Quickly surrounded the ulmish capitol, built a fortess on every province around it, put a gatekeeper in each on patrol and then later when i had thousands of gold cranked the pd up to 60 and removed the keepers. I killed the ulmish god so many times, an e9 wyrm ended up as an e2 wyrm, then i just slammed my pretender and 200 arcebuses into his capitol and watched the fireworks.
The nation should be played at 1 Death scale. That way you will soon find yourself short on money.
Are the Gate Keepers and Arcebuses the only units you use? In the next version I'm going to remove the site with resources, its too unbalancing.
I'll think what to do about Gate Keepers to make them less SCish at the beginning of the game.
I used them and maybe 5-10 men as a shield to stop cavalry from rushing my arcebuses. I also used a tooled out bengehemon |(empowered to f4 w1) and a few other summons. Death 1 honestly dosnt have that much of an impact on your cash flow for a LONG time and with gatekeepers being the only units causing any real upkeep i would guess id still have plenty (especially if i took order)
I'm removing ethereal from all arachnids except for Overlord and Shadow Lord (but I'm lowering Shadows HP). Lowering some Ruah weapons stats. Gate Keepers are still very powerful but not SCs. And lets hope that in Dom 3 I can set the Death scale to 2.
Dont you use Key Keepers at all? Now they are faster than Gate Keepers.