MA Ermor advice please

[Sensori]

Lord_Bob said:
Yes, I did miss them. It's not obvious from the spell description so I never summoned one.

Sorry.

You are forgivennnn!111

[Evilhomer]

Sloth may be a bad idea.

We are all entitled to our own opinion I suppose. But ethereal sacreds are very potent, and shadow vestals are very good for early expansion as well as early conflict with neighboring nations. In my opinion you should pump out the maximum number of vestals each turn (determined by how high dom you picked, so you want high dominion). They cost 40 gold 3 resources (thats a gold/resource ratio of 13, which is really high). This clearly suggest that you can get away with alot of sloth if you need the extra points.

When you pick a bless you look at the stats of your units and try to either cover a weakness and/or build on a specific strenght:
Why astral-9/water-9?. Vestals have no armor and low hp, twist fate basically gives them another life. Also the extra mr will make them very hard to use banish on (cover a weakness). They also have very good starting defence so adding more will be very potent, thats why I would go with water-9 as well. Also you can pick this bless with an imprissoned oracle rather cheap (compared to a fire-9/water-9 bless).

As for scale order is critical, you want more gold simply. rest is probably up for personal preference.

You can of course go with some high production build and not build vestals, but it seems like a weaker and less effective build for me (but try some builds out for sure, and pick what you find most fun).

[Shovah32]

Aren't vestals just 20 gold and 3 resources until the patch when they become 35 gold each? Or are you talking about in CB?

[Lord_Bob]

Well, I like the idea of having high grade non-undead armies to kill legions of priests.

W9-S9 bless seems very, very nice, BUT everyone should remember that MA-Ermor has similiar troops to MA-Pythium.

And that means very tough.

[Evilhomer]

Ah sorry, had the balance mod enabled when I checked . Still 20 gold and 3 resources seems to work with sloth as well.

[Lord_Bob]

Taking Death-9 is almost certainly never better than taking Astral-9

A WEAK Death bless like D4 or D6 can be usefull.

But if you are going all out for bless, by all means take

W9/S9 and Sloth-3

That is a strong bless strategy.

[Shovah32]

From someone currently playing MA Ermor in a multiplayer game sloth 3 isn't too bad - you can still afford nice amounts of legionaires.
I took a F9S9 bless in this game and it served me very well - allowing my vestals to run through my neighbours when I fought them without too much trouble.
The reasons for S9 have already been listed. The F9 was there for a number of reasons including diversifying my magic and giving the vestals some real hitting power - allowing them to punch through enemy lines before priests and mages could pick them off.
My bless was already made known in the forum thread a long time ago and anyone who can see my dominion knows I have sloth 3.

[Meglobob]

Shadow Vestals are excellent for early expansion, MA Ermor can easily grab a huge empire in the first 12-20 turns with Dom 10, S9/W9 bless. A thermaturg with 20 shadow vestals will slice through ANY lvl 5 indie. Like a knife through butter. Pump as many of those armies out and conquer indies like you have never conquered indies before.

However, when you start running into other players, your invincible shadow vestals will then run into serious problems. They have huge problems with any fire nation such as Marignon and Abysia. Vestals hate fire! There are also many other undead counters. So I advise, using them in a stealth, raiding capacity after that.

Switch to your human troops then, backed by your strong astral/death magic.

Shadow blast, later nether darts are great offensive spells. Remember, communion/communion slave. Banes/Banelords/Tartarians. Well of misery for extra death gems, other players normally will not try to dispel this global.

There are lots of other stuff to play with but I will leave that for you to discover.

[Shovah32]

Meglo, I havn't used W9S9 too much but 8 F9S9 Vestals led by a thaumaturg(dump any spare resources from that turns recruitment into a legionaire meatshield) is more than enough to challenge most indies level 7 or lower although avoiding knights would probably be a good idea.

[Serenity]

I dont get it, why ask stuff like that? I've tried every nation atleast a few times, and I think you should go play instead of asking how to play.