Battling Ermoria

[Agrajag]

The different kinds of crap are actually quite different, as said before, soulless aren't [censored], they are lower than [censored], they are what little micro organizms [censored] when they eat [censored].
On the other hand, you have the longdeads which are just ordinary [censored] (hence, much better than soulless), and if you take an arch-bishop (AE) and reanimate longdead horsemen, they are quite good.
They are easy to mass (~5-7 a turn in a good dominion), they are big and (relatively) strong units, but you can't kill them by massing troops on them because they come in huge numbers.
Also, using indies for research is not recommended imo because it keeps draining your funds, which are tiny anyway...
Your bucks are better spent on (cheap) castles protecting temples.
The best province you can get is one with a gold-producing mine, if you get one, castle and temple it for freespawn masses of protection (and if that province is deep in your territory, you can use them in the front lines).
Just my take on AE - Arch-Bishops are your friends.
They mass units easily, are great Undead leaders and are vital for your army's survival (increasing MR through blessings to avoid unwanted anti-Undead spells).
Also, if you want a strong elite mass (much smaller mass though) you can prophetize one and he can reanimate Lictors (even though it says something else, Ghouls IIRC).
One other awesome (yet super cheasy) tactic to take light fortifications is to take your huge mass of Longdead Horsemen and put it all on one Arch-Bishop:
What you do is you take a whole lot (the max his leadership allowes), give him only 1 horseman, put that horseman in the front and then put all the other horsemen (again, to the top of his leadership) in the 1 horseman stack.
Because they are so big (size 3 iirc) and in the front outside the lines of ordinary battle placement and in such a huge stack, they tend to start the battle INSIDE the enemy fortification.
The ones with wide walls and trenches are probably more "immune" to this "cheese" but its a nice tactic to pull against and AI (in MP - now that's just LAME).

Did anyone understand everything?

[Sheap]

Agrajag said:
Also, if you want a strong elite mass (much smaller mass though) you can prophetize one and he can reanimate Lictors (even though it says something else, Ghouls IIRC).

It says wight. A lictor isn't really that different from a wight, they have similar abilities and statistics, but you can get extra lictors with the Black Laurel item.

in the front outside the lines of ordinary battle placement and in such a huge stack, they tend to start the battle INSIDE the enemy fortification.

Wow, that's got to be considered a bug. In MP I would consider this cheating.

[deccan]

Yeah, thanks for the advice. I'd figured out the 1 PD thing.

Also, I discovered that Ermorian priests can't preach but can reanimate. Any idea of the mechanics behind reanimate?

And oh yeah, thanks for reminding me about pillaging. I completely forgot about that.

[Karacan]

For the reanimation mechanics, check your manual. There's some tables what level of unholy priest reanimates how much stuff.

And don't tell us you bought the game second-hand and it came without the manual.

[deccan]

Karacan said:
For the reanimation mechanics, check your manual. There's some tables what level of unholy priest reanimates how much stuff.

And don't tell us you bought the game second-hand and it came without the manual.

Heh. Got the manual, but left it at home in Malaysia while I'm in the Solomon Islands. I had to call my mom internationally to get the CD key too.

One other thing I noticed: it is definitely better to attack province you have dominion in since you only get freespawns. Every turn that a province under your dominion that is not under your control is a turn that you lose out on freespawns.