Ultimate Nation Balance Mega-Kawaii Answer-Question 105%!1!1

[Vicious Love]

April 10th?! Guess I musta had my finger on the mousewheel without noticing. Again, sorry about the incomplete options, I ended up having about 2 metric minutes to make the actual poll, and those were a hasty, panicked 2 minutes, to boot.
Anyway, AA Ermor not overpowered? Good, good. Debatealicious. My side of the debate is biased and inexperienced, any other takers? All I got is:
A) AA Ermor can afford the best Pretenders
B) The killer Dominion provides a splendiferous defense against non-nature armies and can rather easily do irrevocable economic damage to which the AA itself is immune
C) Utterdark and Burden of Time are practically game winners for AA/Soul Gate Ermor, while the Broken Empire, Desert Tombs C'tis, and pretty much all death nations save Carrion Woods Pangaea gain relatively little.
D) Fishy power!

I'm hardly convinced of these claims myself, they're what you might call first impressions, but complaints have been made by others, so let's hear them out.
On that note, anyone think CW Pangaea and Mictlan AREN'T underpowered? Also, 'ello 'ello 'ello, what's all this about Pythium?

Feel the burn, people. I'll just see if I can edit the poll end date, why don't I? If I'm lucky, I might just get my computer running within the week, and be able to keep tabs on this without sneaking into people's houses and stealing their 'net time.

[Vicious Love]

Which reminds me: Desert Tombs. How do y'all feel about Desert Tombs?

*passes out*

Someone's been to SA too often.

I don't think Mictlan is underpowered at all. But you only really have 2 options to play them. Blessing or Blood.

Carrion Woods on the other hand I feel needs to be changed. They have heavy morale problems if you try to go living/dead. If you go pure dead, then you are slow to start. They have no randoms availiable so they can't even use some of the possible good combinations with their picks (Foul Vapors for example). Manikins and Carrion Beasts are slower to make and more vulnerable than normal undead.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Vicious Love:
A) AA Ermor can afford the best Pretenders

True. And you're going to need it, because hiring living units at the beginning of the game is hard, and your starting legionnaires are woefully inadequate to overcome most independent resistance, and it will be awhile before you can amass enough units. That means a pretender-led push.

B) The killer Dominion provides a splendiferous defense against non-nature armies and can rather easily do irrevocable economic damage to which the AA itself is immune

Not entirely true. AE itself is not inherently immune to the economic damage that your killer dominion causes: If you don't keep up your own expansion, your dominion will have profitlessly killed all of the people you needed to pillage. Also, you DO get income from the people while they're alive, albeit not for long.

C) Utterdark and Burden of Time are practically game winners for AA/Soul Gate Ermor, while the Broken Empire, Desert Tombs C'tis, and pretty much all death nations save Carrion Woods Pangaea gain relatively little.

BoT is surprisingly hard for Ermor to cast: You're gulping down Death Gems at a furious rate just to maintain parity in research, and probably cannot afford the gems needed to ram up a BoT such that it will not be dispelled. In SP, for instance, it's often Tien Chi or Jotunheim which casts it, not Ermor! If you're hoarding death gems in quantities that would ALLOW you to ram a 300+ point GE up, you're also probably behind in research by a lot

Utterdark is L9 and not on the horizon in the near immediate future, and will likely suffer from the same death-gem-crampage that BoT does.

[Taqwus]

Ermor also still needs gold for those labs, temples and castles (unless it wants to be casting the Wizard Tower ritual, and that's not all that cheap if memory serves), yet will rapidly lack the taxpayers.

The sacred units are also either expensive (Wailing Ladies cost 15 death gems each and there's no multiple-Lady summons even if you could afford it; Soul Gate can get them free, but this seems VERY rare) or not that great (KoTUS, which are fragile and never heal, and can only be gained through auto-reanimation by Ashen Empire at a fortress).

The mages aren't that versatile either; until Conj 6 or so is available (spectres) it's basically Dusk Elder only for a random, and a single point at that, for 20 death gems -- two turn's worth (at normal richness) of gem income from the Unholy Sepulchre.

Death eventually has some great spells (Tartarian Gate comes to mind, albeit for best effect GoR is needed and that requires Nature-4 plus 20 gems; Ghost Riders is also a good backfield temple-smashing spell; Well of Misery might be second only to Astral Nexus in gem-producing spells) but still, it takes work and a Solar Brilliance or use of the Ark or Wrathful Skies could really ruin the day of even a rather large undead horde.

[Teraswaerto]

Originally posted by Zen:
Someone's been to SA too often.

I don't think Mictlan is underpowered at all. But you only really have 2 options to play them. Blessing or Blood.

There's only one option really: Blessing and Blood. Without Blessing you're toast early, and without Blood you wont hold up past the mid-game.