good races for/against newbies.

[Hiro_Antagonist]

magnate said:
Anyway, I wonder what the OP made of all this - did you stick with Neifelheim in the end, and if so with what pretender setup?

Well, I haven't decided yet. The game doesn't actually start for another month or so (yeah, that's a while,) but there's a big prize on the line so I'm 'studying' hard-core.

From my dealings against the AI, I still seem to be doing better with Jotun/Neifel than any other race, but I think they might expect that from me since I've played them in the past. So I might just pick another arce to maintain anonyminity as a player (it's an anonymous game) so that I can avoid peoples' attention. Thankfully, I still have a while to consider your guys' feedback and experiment/practice on my own.

As I posted in another thread, I tend to have problems against 5 Difficult AI's on Desert Eye after about turn 20-25 or so. (Before that, I'm usually at or very close to top player according to stats graphs.) Does that speak poorly of my skill?

-Hiro_Antagonist

[sushiboat]

Ermor Ashen Empire has some nice advantages for novices. You don't have to worry about buying troops; you get them for free. In fact, you do very little with money besides constructing buildings. You can take very bad scales (Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, Cold 3, Death 3) and get design points to buy up a lot of magic on your Pretender and high dominion. Other nations have difficulty invading your dominion because their troops starve.

With Ermor AE, the two challenges are research and diversifying your troops. Your mages have to be summoned, and your gem income won't grow as quickly as others' gold income. You can forge Skull Mentors to help your researchers. Your Pretender should start searching for gems early as your empire expands.

Diversification is an issue because having armies with only undead is a weakness. Priests can destroy large numbers of undead, and there are many anti-undead spells and items. Also, most of the AE undead are mindless, so mages with Astral mind attack spells ignore them and target the commanders. Ivy Kings can summon Vine Ogres cheaply, and some of the Elemental Queens and Kings can summon elementals for free. For the parts of your empire that have adequate supply to support some living troops, Call of the Wild summons a Werewolf and wolves. The Werewolf can summon more wolves for free.

One thing about playing Ermor AE (or Shadow Gate) is that it is very different from playing any living nation. There are fewer techniques that you can transfer from Ermor to another nation. However, since you can afford to put a lot of magic on your Pretender, you will get to play around with most, if not all, of the available spells and items in Dom 2.