The New Hinnom Nation

[Alderanas]

hah i had the great idea to make a big army of those giants that eat your population. they killed everything i sent them against but at the time i had forgotten that they ate the population. So when i tried to build the smaller giants they all starved. It was pretty much liking fighting the dominion of late age ermor.

[Loren]

Alderanas said:
hah i had the great idea to make a big army of those giants that eat your population. they killed everything i sent them against but at the time i had forgotten that they ate the population. So when i tried to build the smaller giants they all starved. It was pretty much liking fighting the dominion of late age ermor.

Yeah, I was just experimenting with the Himmon. I wasn't paying enough attention to the population eating and ended up with a depopulated capital. It doesn't matter, though--against the standard AI I so overwhelmed it that the game is near victory without my ever attacking any AI, only the independents. Against 9 AI's I took something like a quarter of the total map--and nobody took the water at all so I really had well over a quarter. I put very heavy PD on all border provinces, once the borders were drawn I recruited nothing but mages for research and a few priests to build temples.

One AI fell to another one, of the 8 that remained I've popped 6 by dominion and lost only three provinces during that time. (And one of those doesn't really count--it was vacant, I took it with a priest. An AI cast Ghost Ship Armada, the armada attacked.)

[MaxWilson]

It's been mentioned before, but if you want to up the AI difficulty a notch try Edi's Better Independents mod, which prevents the AI from recruiting most independents. The AI does better when it's recruiting national troops, not hordes of useless indies. Some indies are of course an exception.

-Max

[Edi]

The mod is not available currently. A better version will be available soon.

[dirtywick]

I may actually consider using the province attack rituals against Hinnom. Research Alt 4 and you can start bombarding their capital and fortresses with pop killing spells, and they'd probably have a really hard time recovering, rendering their troop production centers useless pretty quickly. Blight, E2D1 at 5 gems is probably the best choice if you have E/D mages, Wolven Winter at W3 for 5 gems is a little harder if you don't have access to water but not to boosters.

There's some other ones either higher up research or require a more powerful mage, like Black Death or Volcanic Eruption, but those probably come too late in the game to be a real strategy. Baleful Star and Melancholia though would be helpful to cast once on each city you're doing this on, if you can cast them. But I could see casting these spells with 5-10 mages (you can do that right?) for a few turns on key provinces and crippling the whole nation because they can't grow the pop back if they want to continue to use the fortress to produce troops.

Unless the mechanics work differently? I'm actually not so sure how pop effects production, I haven't played Ermor in a very long time. Supplies and income will be an issue if not so perhaps hitting their high pop lands instead would be better. Their capital at a minimum almost certainly will never recover, I don't know if that's worth pursuing though.

[MaxWilson]

Of course Hinnom can hit you right back with Rain of Toads, which is three times as good as Blight in terms of causing unrest to shut down production.

-Max

[Sombre]

They aren't really a great blood economy nation though, Hinnom. Their blood hunters are pretty expensive, cap only and eat the population.

[dirtywick]

Yeah, that spell is pretty nasty. I don't think it'll hurt you as much as it hurts them, though. You can always patrol, lower taxes, and recover the population. They'll have a hard time doing all three because they need the income and growing the population back is tough. Patrolling with indies is an option for them.

Upon further thought stealth armies would hurt them too. Let them blow cash on PD, or better yet march large armies around and patrol trying to find you, killing their pop the whole time.

I don't know, I haven't really tried any of this. I played against them twice in SP. They were close neighbors both times so I eliminated them early through regular means. Just some ideas I'm shooting around.

[MaxWilson]

Edi said:
The mod is not available currently. A better version will be available soon.

Intriguing!

-Max