MP Guide to LA Ermor - The Ashen Empire

[hunt11]

why do you need a rainbow mage more then anything else because Ermor gets tricky to use unless you have a god with death level 7

[Endoperez]

hunt11 said:
why do you need a rainbow mage more then anything else because Ermor gets tricky to use unless you have a god with death level 7

If you mean Tartarian Gate, your pretender should have better things to do than casting that.

Ermor will have access to both non-unique Death boosters (Skull staff, Skullface), and will have several Dusk Elders with D4 by that time. A Rainbow pretender will be able to forge a Ring of Sorcery (S4, so S3 + Starshine Skullcap or S2E2 + cap + Crystal Coin): that's another +1 Death and puts the Elder at D7. If Ermor manages to grab the +3 Death sceptre, that alone will allow another D4 Dusk Elder to also start summoning Tartarians.

[hunt11]

I mean soul gate because you need as many free spawns as possible, anyway with all the negative scales you take you can easily have a rainbow mage and a very powerful death mage as well

[Viajero]

I have started having a few games against the AI to practice this advice but i seem to run into gold problems constantly. The main advice is to build castles everywhere as it helps with the better quality spawn but how you guys build tehose with no gold?

[Trumanator]

Alchemization can help if its important. Otherwise, you can also try to "farm" others' dominion to help your income.

[thejeff]

What are you spending on? Other than temples and castles?
Most of your funds should be coming from luck events.

Also keep your eye out for any gold-generating sites. If/once they're not in high population provinces, drive the population down to near 0 and tax at 200%. You get double the sites income with no unrest since there's no one to revolt.

[Viajero]

Originally Posted by thejeff

What are you spending on? Other than temples and castles?
Most of your funds should be coming from luck events.

Also keep your eye out for any gold-generating sites. If/once they're not in high population provinces, drive the population down to near 0 and tax at 200%. You get double the sites income with no unrest since there's no one to revolt.

Only castles.

Do i have to wait until population nears cero to set tax to 200%?

[thejeff]

You don't have to wait. I've never been quite sure whether it's more effective to boost taxes at once and get as much as possible while pop is still high, but lose more to unrest, or to tax more lightly while the province is still producing a decent income.
The key to the income producing sites is to drive the population to 0 so you can double tax without unrest.

You do also want to build temples to push your dominion. You're not actually going to get castles & temples in every province, just as many as you can.

You may just not be expanding fast enough. In SP, growth should be pretty explosive.

[Viajero]

Originally Posted by thejeff

You may just not be expanding fast enough. In SP, growth should be pretty explosive.

Thanks for the replies so far.

Expanding fast is another one, how do you go about forming effective armies in the first 15 to 20 turns of expansion? you build one?, two? which leaders? how many troops are required to have decent chances to expand properly in those turns? And in the middle game?

Do you spend in DP to maintain expansion?

[Agema]

How big your army needs to be is a judgement you have to make yourself. You'll need to reanimate with priests early on to get your armies going. Once your Dom develops, you can let the freespawn do all the work.

Your armies will need to be bigger than equivalent non-undead. Longdeads have half as many HP, their armour is rotted/rusted to about 80% effective, and they often have bad equipment. Savour your Ermorian specific undead, longdead legionaries etc. for this reason, as they are reliably well equipped. Soulless are tougher and stronger, but have dreadful Att/Def values.

If there's no priest around, you'd probably want about twice as many longdeads/soulless as you'd use humans. Once priests start arriving, your troops can be annihilated at an astonishing rate, so you'll need vast, vast hordes.