MP: BSoD (Newbie, LA, CBM 1.92) [Started!]

[revenant2]

Originally Posted by Shardphoenix

Have you ever played against LA Ermor? I`ve tried once. With LA Pangaea (trampling minotaurs and "dust to dust" spam). I`ve lost, even with financial help from other players..
It`s not about killing undead - it`s about killing ~10000 of them on turn 20. And it only gets worse.

I just hope the last one of us will be Jomon - They, at least, have some nice anti-Ryelh troops underwater.

While we're waiting to sort out our player situation, I thought it would be interesting to count how many units I had at turn 20, and it was 1,137 unead. I had a pretty good start with 26 provinces at this time and was spending all available gold to building temples and forts.

I did lose several hundred troops to Patala and Atlantis on turn 20, so under perfect circumstances I might have had around 1,500, but I don't think I could have improved this very much -- certainly not anywhere near 10K.

By the way, I did some tests last night where I calculated the average troop generation over 100 turns. Here's the data:



Basically, with 10 dominion in a province with no structures built, i.e., fort or temple, LA Ermor will generate about 10 chaff a turn. Put in a temple and fort, and the average is about 23 (with higher quality units).
If I have time, I might rerun the tests with Soul Gate up.

I'm wondering if the 10K total was in the old days of LA Ermor where their dominion didn't kill population as quickly? This gave a lot more money to Ermor who could afford to buy lots of priests, who could then reanimate the recently departed into legions of soulless. However, even then, I don't think anyone could get close to 10K.

[revenant2]

My OCD kicked in and I felt compelled to count how many units I lost at the hands of Atlantis and Patala on turn 20. We lost 588 undead, or about a third of all my units in 8 separate battles -- only two of which I won (one of which was against an undefended province). That was a bad turn, although worse was to come.

Anyway, I would have had 1725 units in my empire as a best case scenario.

If I had somehow been able to put all undead into a single large horde, Atlantis would have utterly destroyed it with his scary super-soldiers. If you're curious, here is what most of my battles with Atlantis looked like at around that time:

[Shardphoenix]

Originally Posted by revenant2

While we're waiting to sort out our player situation, I thought it would be interesting to count how many units I had at turn 20, and it was 1,137 unead. I had a pretty good start with 26 provinces at this time and was spending all available gold to building temples and forts.

I did lose several hundred troops to Patala and Atlantis on turn 20, so under perfect circumstances I might have had around 1,500, but I don't think I could have improved this very much -- certainly not anywhere near 10K.

You didn`t take a combat pretender that can take provinces by himself. You didn`t overtax at 200%, didn`t hire indie priests and didn`t reanimate with them.
Nad all of this adds up

[revenant2]

Originally Posted by Shardphoenix

You didn`t take a combat pretender that can take provinces by himself. You didn`t overtax at 200%, didn`t hire indie priests and didn`t reanimate with them.
Nad all of this adds up

That's incorrect. All my provinces are taxed at 200% at the beginning -- not that it made that much of a difference because population dies so quickly.

There's not enough money to recruit priests in large quantities in the beginning -- at least not without sacrificing temples and fortresses. Even then, an H1 priest can only reanimate 10 soulless per turn and he can only do that while there are corpses on the ground, which quickly decay into nothing.

Assuming you did manage to recruit 10 priests in turn 1 and had unlimited corpses, you'd reanimate 100 undead per turn. After 20 turns you'd have 2,000 soulless. Of course, in reality you wouldn't have anywhere near that amount.

I'm not sure how a combat pretender would help very much unless you think he could help generate extra income, which he would have -- by a little bit, but certainly not enough to recruit an army of priests. By the time you did, there wouldn't be very many corpses left for you to reanimate.

I'm not trying to completely shoot you down here, but I just don't see how this would be possible. The only way I could see this method being half-way successful is if you completely focused on nothing but priests and then moved them together in a big army to reanimating after pillaging provinces. Even then, I don't think you could generate 10K armies by turn 20 and you'd totally gimp yourself since Soulless kinda suck. They are basically big bags of meat that you put on the front lines to soak up damage.

One other thing: I don't think a combat pretender on a large map as Ermor is a very optimal. The main weakness of Ermor (besides being ganged up on) is a lack of magical diversity in the end game, and the best way to mitigate this is via a scrawny rainbow pretender.