LA Ermor - myth, legend, or overrated tripe?

[TexasHawk]

Hey all,

Fairly new to the game and am enjoying it a lot! However, in reading the manual, playing several games and reading the boards, I see that there are very strong opinions on LA Ermor, most negative. My question is, I personally find the traits very intriguing and I think played and set up properly LA Ermor could be potentially unstoppable and unbeatable, and some of what I have read is to this effect.

So basically: Is it worth trying to be a 'LA Ermor' master? Will this get me shut out of MP games? Is it too cheap? What's the real pulse on this issue out there???

THawk

[Edi]

Your biggest problem with LA Ermor in MP will be that absolutely everyone will be out to kill you the second they encounter you since your dominion will kill their population. That frequently means that anyone and everyone on your borders will gang up on you just to get rid of you and divide up the spoils before they are ruined. There is really no good way for you to use diplomacy to full effect because of that handicap and your hordes of chaff are there basically just to absorb hits before your real troops (most of them summoned) get targeted.

Edi

[Sombre]

On the other hand your lands can be a pretty nasty place to try an invade - anyone looking to lay into you is going to have to accept little in the way of gains. If you point that out you can play diplomacy a little more.

[KissBlade]

LA Ermor is actually not that strong in dom3. Annoying dominion effect, a decent nation but not overpowered as it was in Dom 2.

[Shovah32]

As kissblade said it isnt as strong as it was, mainly because of the increased gold and supplies from dom2.

[DrPraetorious]

I actually think that LE Ermor is slightly underpowered.

Ermor now gets just as many troops as everyone else, but only gets mages by spending gems - and since Ermor has approximately the same gem income as everyone else (a little bit higher, but not much), this is a big disadvantage once magic becomes highly important.

The upshot is that I think all of the LE Ermor nationals should be *half* as expensive or less. This wouldn't make a big difference in the early game, but your forces would stay roughly comparable as the game goes on. It'd also enable Ermor not to fall so far behind the research curve, as they generally do.

The increase in price on spectres hurt them a lot more than it hurt other positions - which would've been fine in dom2 when they were so devastating, but now that they're not it's an over-correction.

[Nick_K]

LA ermor is incredibly potent in SP. Try playing as them and you'll find that the AI simply cannot deal with you at all.
However, the general belief is that this is due to limitations with the AI. I don't play MP, but it seems that the ashen empire in MP is a shadow of it's single-player self

[Sombre]

Playing against an AI ermor is also more challenging than otehr nations - it seems to eat lots of territory up and cn be harder than normal to go on the offense against (still not exactly hard).

[TwoBits]

I suspect you'd need to insist on keeping the LA magic site frequency setting at "default" in order to make LA Ermor worthwhile in MP. That way, your starting gem income (15 vs 4 for everyone else) is more telling. But since I've never actually played them in MP, I'm probably just blowing smoke...

[Nick_K]

I think extra magic sites helps ermor. Ermor uses gems instead of gold for its elite troops, priests and mages. They really need all the death gems they can get.