What to do about Ermor ....

[magnate]

Are his Undead units etheral or not?
If they arent, then he must be ashen empire Ermor, which means he can reanimate with no need for corpses OR population.
Sieging him might work, but he still gets his hordes of freespawns.
He does get less if his dominion is weaker, and even less if he has no castle.
If you intend to sieg his capital, you'll need to constantly increase security as he will constantly recieve new units and (probably) will use them to break the siege.
Also, supplies arent a problem for him, so his castle army can grow without worry.
For income you can wish or use "Gift of nature's bounty" if you are capable of casting any of these spells (the Gift is an excellent income spell, especially with all the provinces I assume you have.
Another good idea would be researching all the mass undead destruction spells, Grind Bones iirc is very useful against undead (if you can find someone to cast it).
Oh, and taking his capital will weaken him alot because it will take away his Sepulcher, his best death gem income site (and we all know that AE and SG Ermor live and die by death gems, not sure about BE though).

Damn, that's what I was worried about - he is indeed playing AE (the undead are not ethereal). So there's no real point laying siege to the castle unless I can actually take it - he will eventually break the siege. (Laying siege doesn't deprive him of the death gems, does it?)

My only ways to reduce his free troops are to take his provinces and lower his dominion (which are essentially the same thing), right? So that means a slow grind, while Tien Chi get ever stronger.

I don't think I can take the Ermor castle - the entrance is quite narrow (only 4-5 giants wide) and the towers fire deadly ballista bolts or something, 4 or 8 at a time. My priests didn't seem to be nearly as effective as on an open battlefield (does Banishment require LoS??). He has a LOT of commanders in there - about 15, all of whom cast Raise Skeletons EVERY ROUND. Bastards. I went in with 18 priests, just after he had sent out over 100 undead (which I annihilated on open ground without loss), and he had ANOTHER 140 in there with the 15 commanders ....

Thanks for the tip about nature's bounty - I have a lvl5 nature mage somewhere so I'll look into that.

I've not come across Grind Bones - did you mean Wither Bones? I'm researching that now (Thaum 6), but I only have one Death-3 mage to cast it ...

This game is going to be hard to win. I think I'm going to have to leave Ermor where he is, hope that he doesn't take too many more provinces, and conquer the rest of the world first, before taking him on. I may already have wasted too much time, with Caelum's mages and Tien Chi's massive army to deal with ....

Hats off to the devs - I've not lost so much sleep over a game since MoM.

CC

[Boron]

for jotunheim iron woods ae ermor is evil .
ways to kill ermorian hordes really fast :
- preach
- dust to dust / wither bones
- holy pyre
- mass damage spells : especially storm / wrathful skies combo
- lighning spells ( e.g. orb lighning ) and fire spells . they in general target either a area or have a number of effects >1
- blade wind is an excellent anti ermorhordes spell too

in your current game i would do the following :
leave ermor alone , on your borders with ermor castle all + build temples and have pd + indy priests guarding the border + 1 emergency squad .

kill all other ais first . then you should have a bigger empire and lots of indy mages which have good magics against ermor .

then build some special semiscs and enjoy

example : airqueens , with staff of storm , cast wrathful skies , take some lighning immune troops with ( the air queens summons , spring hawks , storm demons ) and script the airqueens to e.g. massive orb lighnings .

or you can lategame do 2-3 flames from the sky on the ermor legions with 1000+ undeads and they will be reduced too 300 or so and easy to kill

the easiest way to kill the undead hordes are vampires / vampire lords .
when you leave ermor alone now lategame you can wish for blood and build a pack of them . they will wreak havoc on ermor . you can wish for dominion then too to ensure that your vampires always fight in positive dominion
finally you can wish for armaggedon it kills 20% of ermors troops but your jotuns and other tough troops survive because it most likely kills only weak troops .
so you will lose per armaggedon about 1-10 units while ermor loses about 20% so some thousand .
finally there is a global i think it is called purgatory which kills undeads in all provinces where you have positive dominion . since ermor can't preach and you have more territory in the long run you will outdominion ermor .