LA Ermor - myth, legend, or overrated tripe?

[Nick_K]

LA ermor is incredibly potent in SP. Try playing as them and you'll find that the AI simply cannot deal with you at all.
However, the general belief is that this is due to limitations with the AI. I don't play MP, but it seems that the ashen empire in MP is a shadow of it's single-player self

[Sombre]

Playing against an AI ermor is also more challenging than otehr nations - it seems to eat lots of territory up and cn be harder than normal to go on the offense against (still not exactly hard).

[TwoBits]

I suspect you'd need to insist on keeping the LA magic site frequency setting at "default" in order to make LA Ermor worthwhile in MP. That way, your starting gem income (15 vs 4 for everyone else) is more telling. But since I've never actually played them in MP, I'm probably just blowing smoke...

[Nick_K]

I think extra magic sites helps ermor. Ermor uses gems instead of gold for its elite troops, priests and mages. They really need all the death gems they can get.

[Velusion]

I'm playing LA Ermor in the 18 player Eventide game (check out the forum). I seem to be doing fairly well (my army size is like 10x higher than the next runner up) but I don't think I'm in the lead by a long shot.

It's a completely different sort of nation. You are almost playing a whole different sort of game. You overtax and sometimes pilliage your own population - you burn down any fort you can't be sure of keeping - you liquidate the enemy counryside so you win the long war, even while loosing lots of other battles - You put a castle & a temple in every province you can hold - you don't recruit indy troops unless you really need them (ala archers sometimes) - etc...

Diplomacy is everything... do what you have to to make a friend early... bribe, deal, pledge your first born...

The turns also take 2x-4x as long as a normal game - lots of micromanagement. Lots of raiding. You have extremely limited access to non-death magic which is frustrating. I have lots of minor priests spending thier days raising the dead. You are often fighting one or more plays at the same time all the time...

[Gandalf Parker]

Its not the strengths of Ermor. Its the killer dominon. It must be stopped before it spreads too far ruining large parts of the map for anyone but Ermor. Most players recognize this and target Ermor quickly by making lots of priests (basically atomic against LA Ermor). Its also possible for people NOT next to Ermor to help by sending Ermors neighbors some anti-undead weaponry which is unlikely to help that nation later when the two non-ermor nations meet in combat.

Now if you tried a sneaky strategy by EXPECTING those tactics and developing an Ermor which surprises everyone then it might be worth trying but unlikely to work many times in a row.

[Aleph]

I don't hear people making the same sorts of comparisons about LA R'lyeh. Same killer dominion, fewer problems for invading due to starvation, but on the other hand invading commanders invariably go insane. They also have extremely nasty missile troops which work underwater, they start underwater so it's hard row to hoe to dig them out, they still have a gold economy, and in a game of any length they'll end up with hordes of prophets. Is it that they're stronger in MP than Ermor so people don't feel the need to belittle them as much, or are they generally seen as weaker and therefore not needing to be talked about?

[lch]

Velusion certainly surprised me in another game we're playing in Middle Age. I had a game against the AI back in Dom2 when I never saw anything from Ermor except the insanely high troop graph until it was almost too late and the first two armies composed each of 2k undeads came and hit my provinces - I was doing fairly well before. Before that, I was sure of winning, at that moment I was close to defeat and I only got the upper hand back by bringing up the Eternal Pyre and forging Flambeaus like crazy. The game was getting quite interesting because of the sudden change, as I only had about half a dozen Dom2 games in total and I was totally unaware of the situation before. So, I was expecting this type of game with hundreds and thousands of undeads in Middle Age, too, for which I soon prepared temples, priests and spells of mass destruction like Earthquake, but I got hundreds of Principes and Shadow Vestals instead - high defense units which I have to fight in totally different ways because I can't even hit them, and even if I do, I'm not doing much damage because they either have good protection or etherealness.

I don't know how to surprise somebody as LA Ermor, but it might be worth a try to think and play outside of the box.

EDIT: Aleph, I might be wrong, but I think that unless Ermor, R'lyeh's dominion does not kill the population in provinces that they don't own, it "only" makes your commanders insane. Then again, you should either make sure to have dominion in your provinces where your troops are, or not have any troops in there at all. I also believe that the effect from R'lyeh is not as strong as from Ermor when it comes to decimation of the population. And freespawn from R'lyeh are still humans or atleast humanoid, so they suffer from fatigue etc., unlike undeads. Maybe it's because the insanity thing is an added disadvantage for R'lyeh and kind of a funny effect, too.