Some Ashen Empire Ermor questions,need some advice

[Tyrant]

I'm pretty sure that you stop getting ghouls once everyone is dead.

[thejeff]

The other main reason the AI loses is that it doesn't react to being attacked by all undead armies by recruiting more priests.
It just keeps throwing regular troops at you. You get more troops faster and they don't route, so even if they're weaker troops you win.

[Corwin]

Thanks a lot for your great suggestions guys, it was very helpful.

[Peter Ebbesen]

ad 6) Pretender, the one-and-only pretender for Ashen Empire must surely be the Lich Queen. While the Prince of Death is a nasty fellow who can fly inherently, the Lich Queen provides immortality (which even if she never dies is also recuperation and that's an awesome ability in its own right in a world that features eyeloss and armloss weapons amongst other things), a starting dominion of 4, good overall stats, and decently priced paths (sure, 40 isn't the best in the world, but is is better than many).

You can easily make her something like a mighty rainbow pretender (4 in most/all paths, higher death) with dominion 9 or 10, though less if you take high magic for better research. My personal choice of scales is the turmoil 3, sloth 3, cold 3*, death 3, luck 3, drain 2, going with the extra MR and points to spend on the pretender over better research (which delays the point where your research explodes which is when you start to forge skull mentors but certainly doesn't cripple you).

* exception: Cold 3 is usually the best climate choice but if you know you are going to be facing tough players playing cold nations and less tough players playing hot nations you might reasonably choose Heat 3 instead. Every bit helps.


On awake/dormant/imprisoned...

The rational choice in almost cases would be awake. However, should you be about to embark on an MP game that, for whatever reason, you know or have a reasonable suspicion might be long (players involved, few players on large map, agreement beforehand, whatever), one interesting option is to go dormant, partially for the 150 extra design points, partially for the change it does to your opening gambit - the "low domain undead approach". (If it turns our you were wrong, and it is a short game, you are hosed - hey, it is a risky gambit with a potentially huge payoff)

With a dormant Ermorian pretender, your dominion will spread very slowly at start meaning fewer undead but also considerably more gold since your provinces will stay alive for much longer. With an awake pretender, you'll often be best off just pillaging provinces/taxing 200%, but with a dormant pretender it works really well to do a normal 100% tax, recruit every single mercenary company for insane prices (you can afford to offer more than anybody else as you have no real expenses), and just conquer as much land as possible with the undead you do get and the mercenaries, preferring farms over all others.

Depending on number of mercenaries available, you will be stuck at 1 province/turn longer than otherwise, which sucks, however, when your pretender does break free, you'll have 150+ death gems stored, and it will take you only 2-3 turns to get a research/recruitment factory up and running
1) Dusk Elder [total 1]
2) 2xDusk Elder [total 3]
3) 3 or 4 mix of Dusk Elder/Archbishops [total 6-7]

You'll hit the floor running with lots of provinces generating a few undead, your capital generating lots of undead, a huge income compared with what you'd have had with an awake pretender from turn 1 spreading your dominion like mad (not only are most provinces dying only slowly, they don't have your scales either), and not significantly behind in overall research since your mage recruitment earlier would have been limited by gem income anyway. This has allowed you, during the rounds until awakening and for the next many, many, rounds, to build way more fortresses than you'd have been able to afford with an awake pretender. As for temples, just start building them when provinces (with fortresses) reach dominion 9-10 to start raking in those Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre - no reason to build them earlier in this type of strategy.

An additional advantage is that with a domain that'll for the first large part of the game stay mostly within your own borders or even behind your borders you appear significantly less threatening to your neighbours - and to the graphs (if they are enabled).

The major downside, and there's no hiding it, is that you forfeit 10-13 rounds of sitesearching with your pretender (say one every 2 turns) - that's a really significant hit to your gem income that shouldn't be underestimated. On the other hand, it shouldn't be overestimated either, just like the ability to maintain a low dominion and high income for a long time shouldn't be underestimated where fortress construction is concerned - many undead from non-fortress provinces or fewer but from fortresses? You can call it either way.

Another downside would be if the game turns into a short game or a blitz, but then, the assumption of choosing this opening gambit in the first place is that it'll be a long game - that's just a risk to assess before play begins.

Ah, well, it has worked for me in one MP game and it might for you, but then again, it might not.



EDIT: It seems that some people have misunderstood the "low domain approach" to mean that the pretender should have a low dominion. Far from it! The pretender's dominion should be the usual 9-10 of Ermor (and more likely 10 than 9), the "low" comes into play because it takes longer time to spread it throughout your realm since it takes longer time to get going, spreading only via home province and temple check until your pretender breaks free. That is what allows you to rake in the cash to build castles with, castles that'll soon enough have maximum dominion generating lots of good undead. It is more money per turn for more turns with the expected long-term payoff of being able to afford more castles, temples, independent mages (if you find any), while still generating the best undead troops in large numbers from fairly early in the game. I apologise for any confusion that may have arisen from my description of it as a "low domain approach".

[thejeff]

You're still a death dominion nation. It'll take some luck and good diplomacy to keep your neighbors from attacking you early.

Interesting approach, though.

[Peter Ebbesen]

thejeff said:
You're still a death dominion nation. It'll take some luck and good diplomacy to keep your neighbors from attacking you early.

Yep, as stated you NEED to have some sort of - if not guarantee, then at the least strong hunch - that it'll be a "long game" for it to be worthwhile to risk. The situation I've encountered it in with my bunch of MP friends is when we play on large maps with mighty AIs filling out the spots of missing players - with such a setup, the game tends to turn into a "beat the AI first, THEN go for the other players' throat when we've all built up" unless the player nations get positioned right next to another in a corner, since a destructive player-vs-player war while the other players eat a couple of AIs usually means a loss for those fighting players if the guy who gets jumped puts up a spirited defense.

I can think of other setups where it might work in MP, but the dormant low-dominion (early game) gambit is definitely not something for general use. It does feel weird to rake in the cash without having to waste any turns (and troops for those turns) on pillaging as Ashen Empire in the early game.

[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.