MP Guide to LA Ermor - The Ashen Empire

[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.

[fantasma]

let the pretender build the path boosters and hand them to your elders for further forging/summoning. Especially the rings and elemental stuffs should prove to be very useful. You should have found some indie N1 shaman, with a mace you are in nature business.

So, construction 6 should be considered for starshine caps, water bracelets, etc.

With a ring of wizardry, an elemental stuff and another booster your random elders are at 4 in their path (replace staff with coin for S).

That's perfect for lab duty, you should look into summons/communions for battlefield magic, though.

[Viajero]

Originally Posted by fantasma

let the pretender build the path boosters and hand them to your elders for further forging/summoning. Especially the rings and elemental stuffs should prove to be very useful. You should have found some indie N1 shaman, with a mace you are in nature business.

So, construction 6 should be considered for starshine caps, water bracelets, etc.

With a ring of wizardry, an elemental stuff and another booster your random elders are at 4 in their path (replace staff with coin for S).

That's perfect for lab duty, you should look into summons/communions for battlefield magic, though.

Thanks for the advice. This means I need to stop my pretender doing site searching though and he is the only one with Astral in my fleet. Also, for battlefield magic communions seems a bit far fetched no? dusk elders dont come with much astral and tehy bring +1 elemental for the most part unless I missed somehting?

[vfb]

Spectral Mages (Conj 6) will give you a bit more diversification, and Const 6 will give you more path boosters.

The Strategy Index (stickied) links to the Magic Path Booster Guide:

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=37423

Which is also on the wiki somewhere (it's down at the moment):

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Main_Page

[Viajero]

Cool, thanks.

Also given the fact Conjure Spectres, Ether Gate and Well of Misery are all in the Conj path, should I give up my current resarch in Alt aiming for the battle spell Darkness (Alt 6) and focus rather in Conj all the way to level 8 (Well of Misery)?