soul gate question
 

When you are playing the ermor "soul gate" nation, what determines the number of spirits your priests can call with the "call spirits" command? Does having more than one priest in the same province make them less efficent? Does priest level matter?What is the best - calling spectres, shadows, or apparitions?

Re: soul gate question
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">what's calling spectres ?

for the numbers there's a graph on page 21 in the manual .
priest level matters. the higher your priest level the more you gain through the various call commands .
unfortunately the only always awailable command which doesn't need either population or corpses is call shadows . i myself find these shadows quite weak .

i prefer ae ermor . the advantages of sg ermor are their immortal commanders like wraith consul , wraith centurion ... .
but they are more expensive than the ae counterparts . and the ae summons are ihmo a bit more useful especially the knights of the sepulchre and longdead horseman .
and later with conjuration 7 you get wraith lords anyway which i personally think are even a bit better than the wraith consul and cost only 5 deathgems more .
with death 3 they can cast soul vortex which i consider a big advantage .

Re: soul gate question
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">what's calling spectres ?

for the numbers there's a graph on page 21 in the manual .
priest level matters. the higher your priest level the more you gain through the various call commands .
unfortunately the only always awailable command which doesn't need either population or corpses is call shadows . i myself find these shadows quite weak .

i prefer ae ermor . the advantages of sg ermor are their immortal commanders like wraith consul , wraith centurion ... .
but they are more expensive than the ae counterparts . and the ae summons are ihmo a bit more useful especially the knights of the sepulchre and longdead horseman .
and later with conjuration 7 you get wraith lords anyway which i personally think are even a bit better than the wraith consul and cost only 5 deathgems more .
with death 3 they can cast soul vortex which i consider a big advantage . </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">SG Ermor gets the Wraith Consul and Centurion as well as Dusk Elders, etc.

ash - I think you meant "dispossessed spirits" instead of spectres?

I don't think having multiple priests doing the calling makes them less efficient, but it does seem to me that when I have multiple priests calling, the province seems to receieve less (or no) "auto-summoned" units. Actually, there have been times when it seems like I'm getting less "called" units than I should for my priest's level, but I'm not sure it's related to having multiple calling priests in the same place. There's some wonky stuff going on here, though, it seems to me.

Anyway, as Boron said, the priest level is what matters as far as how many you'll get. But spirits and apparitions have other requirements for summoning: You need to have corpses in the privince to summon spirits, and you need live population to call apparitions (100 pop used per apparition). The game does not warn you if the province doesn't meet the requirements, so the call will just quietly fail if you don't.

If I had a province that had both corpses and living pop (so all 3 call types were available), and my priests were high enough level to summon them, I'd generally summon apparitions - I like the disease effect, and you don't get many of apparitions normally. If I can't get apparitions, I generally go for the disp. spirits because you get more of them than shadows, and you can't call them anymore once the corpses run out so I try to take advantage of the corpses while I can.

Re: soul gate question
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If I have a province that has both corpses and living population, I'll generally assign one or two high level guys to apparitions while the rest do spirits: This is because the calling of apparitions produces corpses as a byproduct, and if you have several guys, say, 3-4, for every senator or consul on Apparitions, you'll also get to use the corpses produced there. If there are many preexisting corpses, I may assign up to 6 guys per Apparitioner on Dispies: This isn't really a tradeoff, as generally you have a dogpile of Tribunes lying around, and it's either shadows or dispies for them.