MP Guide to LA Ermor - The Ashen Empire

[Velusion]

Baalz said:
Question, are the rare freespawns influenced by the luck scale (or anything else)?

I've never played without positive luck scales, so I'm not sure. I would be surprised if it was affected by the luck scales though since I almost never see the rare spawns as it is.

Baalz said:
Also, I haven't played LA Ermor yet, but it seems like some buffs from non national mages (pretender, summoned off path etc) that would be worth focusing on. A couple that spring right to mind for late game are army of lead/gold, mist warriors, mass protection. Might be worth designing your pretender with such in mind, a 5k army buffed with army of lead (ethereal from Soul Gate?) seems like it'd be worth some effort to field. Is legion of steel worth the effort of trying to field some troll kings for mid game? Anything else I'm not thinking of? Particularly I'm thinking it might be worthwhile to try and do something with buffing the horsemen mid game.

Legion of Steels is probably not worth it. Your mages that are 3+ in a single non-death field are usually important guys and fielding them in battle is always risky. Army of Lead would be really, really nice however... Anti-magic is also great.

Your biggest problem will be managing the few really good mages you have. Do you support your existing troops or stick him in a safe place and summon, summon, summon? Tough call - but the more viable non-death mages you have the more options will be open to you.

Baalz said:
Also, have you played around with fear stacks? You briefly mentioned it in reference to the banshees, but it seems like with all those death casters able to cast a couple different fear spells is a great complement to the hopefully starving people you're fighting.

Anyway, great writeup, you've inspired me to check them out!

I've never had that much luck with fear spells actually and everytime I consider getting some banshee's I look at how much they cost and quail. It would be interesting to see if a player could really exploit them though....

[Velusion]

BigDisAwesome said:
Awww, you think I'm friendly?

Friendly or Cynic... one of the two...

[Shovah32]

A prince of death is a great pretender for stacking fear in two ways. Firstly theres his naturally high fear and dominion(easy to get awe) which both makes him scarey and turns fear into survivability. Secondly being a single unit allows him to get surrounded by many units, grouping them together to be terrorized by your backline mages who should quickly rout them or atleast ensure your PoDs safety by giving the enemy horrible morale.

As expected this tends not to work on troops immune to fear, enemies using strong battlemagic, high morale troops with a strong first charge(until PoD is equipped), very strong missile fire and chuck norris.

[Taqwus]

One more note: since tax levels affect site income, don't forget to set taxation to 200 in lightly-populated provinces with income sites. The auto-tax routines won't do this for you.

There's no unrest if there's no people.

[Shovah32]

Very good point there Taqwus. If a player is spreading their dominion properly mines(or other gold sites) are likely to end up as their main source of income.

[mivayan]

Perhaps add that it can help to script Protection of the Sepxxxx several times since there's an mr check at +4, which is a bit unusual for buff spells. (but not unique).

[Baalz]

Well, I played around with fear and banshees this weekend, and there are some interesting things you can do, and as you'd guess there are some pretty effective niche uses for the banshee. The thing with the banshees is with that 0 protection and no shield you're gonna take casualties and they're so damn expensive you're not going to want to use them for run of the mill expansion. They're also not terribly effective in very small numbers, they're definitely in the bucket of stuff that needs critical mass to work right. With the opportunity cost of the death gems and caster turns I really couldn't come up with an effective use of them until you're getting "Greater Lamentation", at which point you've got some other really nice stuff to cast to.

So, what does this PITA to use, fragile and expensive unit buy you? A hellaciously offensive weapon. Their attack is a AOE 1 soul slay, and if the MR roll is made the target is still struck with a greater fear effect (which seems unresistible) and stacks with the fear aura they radiate. The practical effect of this is when you bring a dozen of these ladies up to melee you'll see a whole bunch of little red 999's floating up and the rare guy who saved is gonna have a -38 moral (I'm not kidding, that's what I saw). Nobody ever really counterattacks.

On top of the obvious use to punch a hole through enemy lines (at fort gates in particular, where LA Ermor tends to struggle) it seems like this would work well against SCs to. A dozen MR checks vs death (AOE 1, so defense and protection are useless), and even if they're passed the fear effect should be enough to overwhelm anybody (probably ineffective against golems or other unbreakable units). If you're anticipating the SC fleeing and cut off his retreat....seems like a good way of dealing with that artifact laden badass who just waded through 5000 of your undead.

[Loren]

Has something changed with the domain effects?

I decided to try what was in this thread in a SP game. It's working pretty well. I took dom 10, all scales terrible and gobs and gobs of magic on my lich queen.

It seems to be working pretty well but I'm seeing something I didn't expect. My core provinces are mostly down to 190 population--the *SAME* number in many provinces. With nobody dying I'm still getting as much freespawn as when there were thousands of people.

I'm also wondering why the #1 and #2 (in area, I am of course #1 in army size) empires both decided to pick on me even though I was #3, my domain wasn't pressing into either of their empires and there were plenty of weaker opponents out there.

[Shovah32]

Your freespawn isnt based on population but purely on dominion(iirc), if you want to make use of the corpses get some priests over to reanimate soulless. The AI is pretty stupid and usually quite aggressive so you should always be expecting them to attack you.

[Velusion]

Shovah32 is right, LA Ermor's domain doesn't care about population or fresh corpses... it is happy raising corpses that might be hundreads or thousands of years old.

Now if you recruit a bunch of priests you can raise those fresh corpses and have even more!

I need to add a section for indy priests and update with Baalz's very handy info.