Some Ashen Empire Ermor questions,need some advice

[Sheap]

A "long game" strategy needs to have a big payoff in the late game in order to make the early sacrifices worth it. I'm not sure what you get by taking low dominion and dormant with AE Ermor, which has more points from scales than any other nation. Taking drain just causes problems by making your research bad, so in the one part of the game where you should be dominant (the end) you're not. And, taking low dominion just makes your immortality worse. On top of it all, human players will hate you just for being AE Ermor, so your chances of getting through to the late game unmolested are quite small.

AE Ermor has enough points to take an awake pretender, decent magic paths, and luck+magic, or a dormant pretender and really good magic with the same scales, and do it all with decent dominion. Since AE can't use blood and the liches all start with a bunch of death, you can afford to just buy all the paths you want. For a more rainbow, less combat-oriented lich you can take the master lich instead of the lich queen.

If you sacrifice magic and awake you can buy an extra level or two in most of your paths, but that's not that important - by the time there are spells that you can actually cast with those levels, you'll have enough gems to forge booster items or just empower if you must.

With a rainbow mage pretender, your biggest constraint is not paths, or even gems, but simply not having enough time for all the stuff you will need to do.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Sheap said:
A "long game" strategy needs to have a big payoff in the late game in order to make the early sacrifices worth it. I'm not sure what you get by taking low dominion and dormant with AE Ermor, which has more points from scales than any other nation.

Ah, you misunderstand. Dominion should definitely be 9-10 as usual! It is just that you don't spread it far in the first 10-13 turn because all spread is done by your home province, its temple, and, if you really feel you need it (you might not) a prophet, meaning that when it DOES start spreading at the usual speed, you have an expanding number of provinces it has not reached yet and won't reach for the next many turns, while the provinces it does reach first will all have castles built with your extra money.

Taking drain just causes problems by making your research bad, so in the one part of the game where you should be dominant (the end) you're not.

No, it really does not. Given that you cannot count on independent mages (you might find them, you might not), what you have is researchers recruited for death gems and, as soon as you reach construction to make skull mentors, you get cheaper research by making mentors than summoning more researchers either way. (Of course, if you do find independent mages, you have more gold income to sustain a decent number with while still castling). It does take longer time to reach this point but once you start the summoning factory after your pretender breaks free, it doesn't take all that long time (and not particularly longer than if your pretender had been awake unless you had dedicated your pretender to research).

The long-term research impact is neglible - the bonus to magic resistance in your own dominion is there to stay, and it helps out all of your troops and commanders. Where it hurts and leaves you very vulnerable is fundamentally having no mages the first 10-13 turns and no real battlefield spells the first 20 - the early game.

And, taking low dominion just makes your immortality worse.

I agree, but low dominion on the pretender is not the idea - just limiting the initial spread.

On top of it all, human players will hate you just for being AE Ermor, so your chances of getting through to the late game unmolested are quite small.

Depends on whom you play with, the game setup, &etc - anyhow, so long as they don't start molesting until the midgame it can work. If you are playing with a bunch of "let's all unite against Ermor early on" players, you should of course never attempt this gambit; as stipulated, it is not for every occasion.

AE Ermor has enough points to take an awake pretender, decent magic paths, and luck+magic, or a dormant pretender and really good magic with the same scales, and do it all with decent dominion. Since AE can't use blood and the liches all start with a bunch of death, you can afford to just buy all the paths you want. For a more rainbow, less combat-oriented lich you can take the master lich instead of the lich queen.

I prefer having 4 in all elemental, astral, and nature with whatever is left for death to maximize sitesearching [leaving out blood] when I do start searching and to give a host of nice blessings to the Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre and the Lictors (who turn into really impressive infantry this way, but that's more of a side effect).

Now, in practice having 2-3 in most paths will be quite enough, of course, there aren't that many 3-4 sites and the blessings aren't in any way essential, but I've got more points lying around than good is, so why not spend them on something fun and beneficial? The exact allocation of points has nothing to do with what this gambit is about, you might reasonably prefer another allocation. (You again seem to assume that part of the point of playing this gambit is to get extra design points. It is not. The point is delaying initial dominion spread to increase your money-earning capabilities for a long, long time. The extra design points are just gravy to be blown on whatever toy you fancy)

The reason to take a Lich Queen over the Master Lich is that she starts with Dominion 4, he starts with Dominion 3, and she can fight. Even assuming you go a nearly full rainbow, excluding just blood, the cost difference between them at dominion 10 is a mere 81 points, a trivial sacrifice for Ermor to get a pretender who survives longer in combat and is viable for suicide-teleportation attacks, able to survive against most any assassin players can come up with (quite useful if your pretender ends up holding a global enchant and you have nasty enemies in the mid-to-late game, immortality is fun but it is funnier not losing the items/globals you are carrying)

If you sacrifice magic and awake you can buy an extra level or two in most of your paths, but that's not that important - by the time there are spells that you can actually cast with those levels, you'll have enough gems to forge booster items or just empower if you must.

I agree, but again, in this gambit the point of "sacrifing" magic is not to get extra design points (it is a conscious choice to get tougher troops in the face of battlefield magic and you could easily choose to focus on magic instead of drain while playing the gambit - I apologise if I made it seem that going drain was an important part of the gambit, it is not), nor is the point of sacrificing awake to get extra points (it is to delay initial domain spread, which is the entire point).

With a rainbow mage pretender, your biggest constraint is not paths, or even gems, but simply not having enough time for all the stuff you will need to do.

Indeed it is, and what's even better, normal rainbow strategies work even worse when you go dormant... But then again, normal rainbow strategies are not the point either. The entire point, and I realise I am repeating myself, is to buy time to earn $$$ fast and to keep generating more gold every single turn while you are expanding and for many turns after you stop compared to starting awake - the fact that you'll probably end up with a rainbow pretender able to do some real good siteseaching in turns 14-25 or so after summoning the first 2 dusk elders is really nice, but it is not the goal.

[Sheap]

It's true that I didn't understand your plan entirely at first. Preserving gold income longer and trying to keep your living population and units longer is an interesting choice. Since you are containing your own dominion as much as possible, you can still take suck-for-scales. Really, this strategy works for anyone, not just AE-ermor. In a way it might even be worse for AE-ermor because you don't have any nation-specific troops to recruit in your provinces. You'll be dependent on indy living units and fewer freespawns than normal, and you won't have any order to boost your economy, leaving you still worse economically than a normal nation. And, your living troops won't be able to go into the "death zone" because of supply problems. You'll be short in the military department with a bunch of units that don't really work well together.

While it's true that skull mentors are immune to drain, the mages that use them aren't. Even if you add another +research item to each mage, you are still looking at ~30% drop in total research. But, if you can keep them out of your drain-afflicted territory, you could cut that down to more like 15% for not having magic, which is probably acceptable.

In a really big map the strategy seems better, not only because you have more time to "boot up" but because you can keep your dominion out of more of your own provinces.

It is definitely unconventional, I will give you that much. I guess I am not convinced that there is enough of a gold bonus compared to just pillaging everything to death, since once your dominion DOES get into a captured province, everyone will still die promptly.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Sheap said:
It's true that I didn't understand your plan entirely at first. Preserving gold income longer and trying to keep your living population and units longer is an interesting choice. Since you are containing your own dominion as much as possible, you can still take suck-for-scales. Really, this strategy works for anyone, not just AE-ermor. In a way it might even be worse for AE-ermor because you don't have any nation-specific troops to recruit in your provinces. You'll be dependent on indy living units and fewer freespawns than normal, and you won't have any order to boost your economy, leaving you still worse economically than a normal nation. And, your living troops won't be able to go into the "death zone" because of supply problems. You'll be short in the military department with a bunch of units that don't really work well together.

Not quite. The only living troops I'll recruit are indy mages and mercenaries [and I have the income to pay top dollar for them, practically guaranteeing that I get them, thus also depriving others of early game expansion boost], plus some cheap archers/crossbowmen if I come across them (though preferably not - upkeep is bad except for mages) - makes for an awesome (and cheap!) combination. As for the "death zone", that's only in the core of the realm, and that's not where the living troops are being used - they are being used on the fringe to expand the empire, so the "death zone" is irrelevant to the use of living independents/mercenaries.

And while fewer undead will be generated, you'll still get plenty enough from your capital and provinces nearest it once dominion overspills from the capital to keep beating up independents, even at the higher independent settings. NOT enough to deal with a player early on, of course, but again, that was one of the stipulated risks of this gambit.

Once you start building multiple castles (which you'll do very quickly), you'll start getting good undead as well, though you'll have decidedly fewer chaff since you won't have anybody reanimating soulless until your pretender awakes.

While it's true that skull mentors are immune to drain, the mages that use them aren't. Even if you add another +research item to each mage, you are still looking at ~30% drop in total research. But, if you can keep them out of your drain-afflicted territory, you could cut that down to more like 15% for not having magic, which is probably acceptable.

Err, you mean an increase of ~30% research going from drain to magic, not a drop of 30% going from magic to drain (a standard 0 XP spectator drops ~23%, revant 25%, dusk elder 20% - unless I remember numbers wrong) - and as researchers gain XP, it keeps dropping. Also, in case one runs across independent mages it may look better for the drain side who can afford them better - and then again, it might not. Anyhow, I guess we just have different playing styles, for while I'd deem such a gap significant in a short game, I don't consider it really significant in a long game - so long as I don't get beat to both the AQs and the artifacts.

In a really big map the strategy seems better, not only because you have more time to "boot up" but because you can keep your dominion out of more of your own provinces.

Yes - small map is a no-no for this gambit, a medium is "give it a thought, just in case", a big is "give it a serious thought"... and if in doubt, just play conventional and safe.

It is definitely unconventional, I will give you that much. I guess I am not convinced that there is enough of a gold bonus compared to just pillaging everything to death, since once your dominion DOES get into a captured province, everyone will still die promptly.

Try it out - I'm definitely not going to say based on my limited tests of this that it'll always pay off for long games or that sticking to a conventional tactic isn't, on average, better - but I do consider it a fun experiment and have been sort of surprised by how well it worked out - it takes a LONG time before your expanding periphery of provinces get more than a few candles since the first 10-13 rounds or so you'll generate a total of home province + 1 temple check per round. Provinces also survived for a surprisingly long time when you've only got 1-2 candles in them. There's really little reason to have more provinces dying off quickly than you can afford to build castles in.

It does feel a bit counterintuitive to not start building temples until you feel threatened, want an area to preemptively be safer for your pretender to move around in, or decide that that 9-10 dominion castled province really deserves to provide Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre, though, and to be happy when other players dominions cross seas and rivers to dominate your periphery, which can happen.

[Agrajag]

Peter Ebbesen said:
Not quite. The only living troops I'll recruit are indy mages and mercenaries [and I have the income to pay top dollar for them, practically guaranteeing that I get them, thus also depriving others of early game expansion boost]

And with no pretender, who has the magic skill to build the lab required to recruit those indy mages?
You could just wait for a mage mercenary, but you still aren't guaranteed to get it (and if you spend all your money on it, then you are losing the advantage of Dormancy in gold)

[Peter Ebbesen]

Agrajag said:

And with no pretender, who has the magic skill to build the lab required to recruit those indy mages?
You could just wait for a mage mercenary, but you still aren't guaranteed to get it (and if you spend all your money on it, then you are losing the advantage of Dormancy in gold)

Yup, indy mages are only after pretender breaks free and at least two rounds of summoning dusk elders or if you should get an indy mercenary mage, and only if you find them, of course, not worth spending more than 200-300 gold to get hold of. Not that that differs mightly from most other nations - few nations, even if they find independents early, will recruit independent mages the first few rounds as they've got other and better things to spend their gold on - as does Ermor; mercenaries and castles.

There are no guarantees here. As stated in the opening, it is a risky gambit, and the only thing that comes close to a guarantee is that you'll get better castle-building going and that, if you are right in your assessment and don't get jumped, you'll have a higher income for considerably longer time, resulting in a stronger non-magical position in the mid to endgame. Translating that into victory obviously depends on the circumstances of what you find.

But don't trust me saying it can work - playing styles differ, as do the opponenents you face. Try it out (in a non-blitz game on a mid-to-large sized map) and see how it works for you, or run a couple of SP simulations where you expand to the range you'd expect to do it in MP and see what your gold income, castle situation, and undead generation per turn looks like after 5, 10, 15 rounds compared to a normal awake start. Who knows, it might not ever be worth it for you in the games you'll play, but then again, it might. Depends on situation.