How to play Ermor

[Aracon]

Hi there! I'm new at the game (just received from post), and i'd like to begin playing with Ermor. Can u give me any advice? I've been searching forums and i've not find (by search menu) anything like a "guide" or any link to one...i've seen guides to other races, but not this... well, more than a "how to play Ermor", i search for advices, especially on how to obtain gems and how can i make gems production boost, because i've found i couldn't summon troops every turn with SG theme.

Thanks for help

PD: What means 'SC'? Thx again ^^

[ July 22, 2004, 23:14: Message edited by: Aracon ]

[Teleolurian]

SC means supercombatant.

Ermor is dramatically easy to play versus the AI once you get the concept. Basically, drop all of your scales and use the points on your pretender; alternatively, increase Magic to +3 to hasten your research. Most of your undead summons are in Enchantment, but some special summons requiring dual paths (like King of Banefires) will be in Conjuration. Skull Mentors and Nether Darts are useful.

As people die in your provinces, you will end up with hordes of cheap screen units. A cheap castle type will allow you to build several and use them to recruit cheap commanders to lead this growing horde, but you'll need something with more guts to destroy a well-trained army. Against the AI you can hold off enemy attacks and rush towards Tartarian Gate as an exercise in entertainment. This is likely not a viable MP strategy, though some may argue.

Other flavors of Ermor (Broken Empire, Soul Gate) require different modes of play, since BE is more like a near-undead Pythium and Soul Gate deals in spirits. As I have little experience with SG and none with BE, I'll leave discussion of those to wiser heads.

[Teleolurian]

Forgot the most important thing: you want a dominion of 10. Your negative dominion is a powerful weapon because it hurts everyone else much, much more than you.

[Yossar]

10 dominion is usually overkill. 10 costs a whole lot more than 9, and 9 dominion + 5 temples gets you the maximum 10 dominion. Save the points and stick with 8 or 9 dominion if you want it that high.

[Arryn]

Actually, 6 dominion should be enough to begin with, especially considering how easy it is to raise by building temples. By mid-game, if you've been building temples on a regular basis, you can easily be at 10 (see my AAR for an example of this).

Higher dominion will spread somewhat faster, but the initial cost in DPs is so high that you're likely much better off spending it on boosting magic picks.

[Vynd]

I don't know that you will ever have enough Death gems as Ermor. That's just a weakness you'll have to work around. There is a second level Conjuration spell called Dark Knowledge that can be used to find all of the Death magic sites ina province. You should probably use that on every province you own.

A few other general tips about Ermor:

Since your population will die soon anyway, go ahead and pillage it. Also, set taxes really high. You might as well get as much gold from them as possible.

Once all of your people are dead money will be hard to find, so save it for important things like forts, temples, labs, and powerful independent commanders. Generally speaking, don't buy independent troops (that is, non-commanders). You can't afford them and won't be able to feed them.

The best of your free units will only appear where you have temples and/or forts.

As Teleolurian said, be sure to set most of your dominion scales all of the way negative. The positive scales like Order won't help much once everyone is dead. I do recommend setting your magic scale to +3 however, because your mages are expensive and not very good at research.

Use all of the dominion points you received for taking negative scales to build a majorly powerful Pretender and to get a very high starting dominion.

Remember that your troops can go underwater early in the game when hardly anyone else can.

[Vynd]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Actually, 6 dominion should be enough to begin with, especially considering how easy it is to raise by building temples. By mid-game, if you've been building temples on a regular basis, you can easily be at 10 (see my AAR for an example of this).

In general this makes sense but I don't know if it is a good idea as Ermor. Ermor is relatively cash poor, it's a expensive for them to build up all those temples, let alone temples with castles on top of them to keep them from getting trashed by raiders. Also, the stronger Ermor's dominion the more free undead they get, right?

[ July 23, 2004, 03:59: Message edited by: Vynd ]

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Actually, 6 dominion should be enough to begin with, especially considering how easy it is to raise by building temples. By mid-game, if you've been building temples on a regular basis, you can easily be at 10 (see my AAR for an example of this).

Aren't we discussing the population killing themes of Ermor here? Jotunheim can afford to build many temples, Ermor certainly can't. Unless they happen to get _extremely_ lucky with fire gem sites, they won't be building 20 temples before about turn 50 or 60. Unless of course, you don't care about protecting them with a castle. If that's the case, you had better be able to prevent your enemy from ever taking one of your provinces.

Ermor also needs a high dominion because its troop generation is dependant on dominion. The summonable unholy priests can't research after all, and you'll already have trouble keeping up in the research race even with a +3 magic scale, and the use of nothing but spectators with skull mentors. This means that you need as many automaticaly summoned troops as possible.

I might go with a dominion of 9 if I didn't expect to run into oposition for about 20 turns. I would only lower it to 7 or 8 if I was planning to play on the World map, where you won't even meet your opponents for 50 turns. It only costs 143 points for dominion 10 if you use a lich queen after all.

[ July 23, 2004, 04:05: Message edited by: Graeme Dice ]

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Vynd:
I don't know if it is a good idea as Ermor. Ermor is relatively cash poor, it's a expensive for them to build up all those temples, let alone temples with castles on top of them to keep them from getting trashed by raiders. Also, the stronger Ermor's dominion the more free undead they get, right?

Yes. And Ermor does have possible cash problems as cash is tied to (living) population, something Ermor is notorious for eradicating. So you do have a very good point. What has to be weighed is the benefits of somewhat faster dominion spread (and free undead) versus what you can do with the DPs in the form of more magic picks for your god. Both are interesting choices and it all depends on how you wish to try to win. Given that it's Ermor, if you play against an AI (only) it's all but assured that you'll win no matter what you do. The real question is which strategy is better if you play against humans. A question I'd like to see Norfleet or Zen answer.

[LintMan]

I'm not an expert, but I can (hopefully) give you a decent overview.

First, you'll need to decide which Ermor theme you want to use. I'm going to ignore Broken Empire (BE Ermor), which I haven't played, but which I believe is more standard than the other two. Ashen Empire (AE Ermor) is probably the most popular, followed by Soul Gate (SG Ermor). These two themes (AE and SG) have strong "killer dominion", which means that populations in provinces with positive dominion die off rather quickly - much more quickly than the death scales do. This dominion also "auto-summons" units in all provinces you have dominion in. The higher your dominion, the more/better units appear. You get these units in place of recruitable national units - you can only recruit independent troops (but you really don't want to do that and can't aford it anyway). Thus a high dominion is critical for Ermor.

The killer dominion also means that your provinces end up with 0 (or close to it) population in a matter of turns. These provinces are essentially permanently dead, and generate no gold, production or supplies, and *that* has several important effects.
1) The province is now utterly, *permanently* useless to your enemies and a barrier to them because their armies will starve there unless they provide them with magic supply items. So even if they capture a dead province from you, it serves them little good.
2) If your domain spreads into enemy territory, it's hurting them even if you're not attacking them. This makes you a big threat and a common enemy when you play MP games. The AI isn't so smart about this though and doesn't handle this well.
3) You (as Ermor) have very very little income and employing mercenaries or food-eating summoned creatures has the same starvation problems as your enemies, unless you can keep those units ahead of your killer domain (ie: invading enemy territory.

AE/SG Ermor have no recruitable units/leaders, but they do have some special summonable ones. You need a strong death gem income to be able to summon all the units you need - death gems are like gold to Ermor, and most actual gold will need to go to build temples and castles. You'll need to build numerous temples to spread your dominion, because Ermor's unholy priests cannot preach at all to raise dominion that way.

The main differences between AE and SG are that AE gets hordes of mostly low-end undead: ie: longdead, longdead horsemen. SG Ermor gets less units, but they are (almost?) all ethereal which means they are a bit harder to kill, and some have paralysis/strength draining ability. They also have somewhat different special summonable units.

A pretender design suggestion:
Turmoil 3 - Dead pop means no income anyway!
Sloth 3 - Dead pop means no production anyway!
Cold 3 - All your units are cold-resistant!
Luck 3 - Luck events provide some gold, and bad luck combined with turmoil is a bad combo.
Magic 3 - Faster research

This gives you lots of points to spend on stuff like high starting dominion (I suggest 8-9 to start) and lots of magic for your pretender (and/or a more expensive chassis).

You can aim to make your pretender an SC that can conquer provinces (and armies) all by itself, or go for a pretender with broad magic and strong research capabilities.

I suspect that in the time it took me to write this, many other people will have posted their own tips, so my apologies if this is repeating what others may have said!