[Amorphous]

I must be missing something huge, because however I look at this, it just does not add up.

The pretender costs too many points. If you exchange one of the non-earth magic paths with fire, it does work, but then your reasoning about elemental staffs seems rather strange. And however you choose to spend your points, the forge lord will always have at least one level of fire as he starts with it.

Also, the pretender part of your strategy changes a lot in vanilla. The 50 additional points the forge lord costs here is not so much the problem as that it uses double the amount of gems for forging in comparison to the cbm forge lord. That difference is rather significant.


400 resources seems much too high with sloth 1 - I practically never get that much. Some number-crunching tells me that my not getting it is very far from a fluke. With sloth 1, Ermor's capital province generates 68 resources and consequently needs to collect another 332 resources from neighbouring provinces with its 60 admin great city. This translates to needing surrounding provinces with a total of roughly 550 resources. That is a lot. A very good start with 6 neighbours would require the average province to have about 92 resources (46 visible on the map).


Now, I happen to agree with you that Ermor does not need to fear rushes more than anyone else - especially retiarii are great, quickly recruitable problems for a lot of would be rushers. However, I have trouble following some of your reasoning, here.
If we are talking about a rush around turn 6 or 7, you will not have researched more than 1 level of magic and to get even that, you have to forgo recruiting more than maybe 2 pontifex. It is also questionable that you will know what you are facing this early. Neither will you have many mages casting whatever it is you have researched.

I also wonder how you manage to conquer territory faster than practically anyone else. Probably I am just misunderstanding something, but from your explanation above it seems to me like your rate this early in the game is about equal to any nation with reasonably bad troops and an awake SC pretender. Obviously, it gets more effective with a rising number of neighbours, but as soon as your neighbours are conquered the one fight limit of the gladiator and the retiarius will complicate the logistics.

Suppose you start in a province with 6 neighbours and that you buy a pontifex and some levees in addition to a number of gladiators/retiarii each turn.

Turn 1: Prophetize, 0 additional provinces.

Turn 2: 2 armies attack, 0 additional provinces.

Turn 3: 1 army attacks, 2 returns for troops, 2 additional provinces.

Turn 4: 3 armies attack, 1 returns for troops, 3 additional provinces.

Turn 5: You have now conquered your six neighbours and maybe one of your old armies have enough ordinary troops to attack another this turn. Your freshly built army in the capital cannot reach any unconquered territory till next turn. On the plus side, you can use independent commanders to ferry troops, so most commanders will only have to wait a turn for reinforcements.

Looking ahead, you have 6 additional provinces, next turn you will get another one and the turn after that probably 4 more, netting a total of 11 additional provinces turn 7. This is about the same as the above nation with an awake combat pretender that funnels reinforcements into its one original army. Starting turn 2 it will in all probability conquer two provinces a turn, so it ends up with 10 additional provinces turn 7.

That difference certainly does not mean much. From now on you should move further ahead about every other turn and a second castle should come on line. Reasonably speaking the difference will appear significant around turn 10 or 11.

What am I missing?