Soul Gate vs. Ashen Empire & Ermor Setup

[Edi]

Actually, SG Ermor does have an unholy troop: The Wailing Lady. Granted, they are expensive to summon and not worth the gems it costs, but you get them as freespawns in temple provinces. Not very often, but then, you don't need a lot of them at any given time. If you manage to slap a squad of ten to fifteen together, they make a very formidable core to build a battle group of ghosts and secondary fodder around. They have an area death attack (Wail, dmg death, aoe 1) which has a secondary Fear effect with an aoe of 5. They will simply scythe through low to mid-level summons and mundane troops of almost any stripe.

Granted, they are not plentiful enough to actually justify a blessing strategy, but even with a partial blessing (no lv 9 effects), they are a nice bonus.

Edi

[Peter Ebbesen]

Edi said:
Actually, SG Ermor does have an unholy troop: The Wailing Lady. Granted, they are expensive to summon and not worth the gems it costs, but you get them as freespawns in temple provinces. Not very often, but then, you don't need a lot of them at any given time. If you manage to slap a squad of ten to fifteen together, they make a very formidable core to build a battle group of ghosts and secondary fodder around. They have an area death attack (Wail, dmg death, aoe 1) which has a secondary Fear effect with an aoe of 5. They will simply scythe through low to mid-level summons and mundane troops of almost any stripe.

Granted, they are not plentiful enough to actually justify a blessing strategy, but even with a partial blessing (no lv 9 effects), they are a nice bonus.

Edi

True. Wailing Ladies are available for summoning for both Ermor themes and can turn up by themselves. However, as you note, they seldom do so in numbers that justify a blessing strategy in the long run, and you are not going to have any in the short run, so they can conveniently be ignored when discussing unholy troops for the Ermor themes.

Personally, I like to gather Ghost and Wailing Lady freespawn in my capital until I have enough of them to unleash an entire army of these dreaded beings.

I must admit that I would use Wailing Ladies more if they had a different colour. Ghosts are nice because, being white, they stand out in the garrison list at a glance: You can see immediately whether there are any ghosts to collect and can easily doubleclick on one of them to select the whole bunch. Since Wailing Ladies are black, I find them much harder to select when there are a hundred garrison freespawn or so. It would be much easier if they were, say, green, red, or white.

Dont forget the Broken Empire (base) theme. Actually my favorite. SG and AE have both a terrible Achille's heel in MP games : all other players will hate you. And your economy is so weak that you simply cannot pay good indep mages or troops (pillage is a short term solution).

Ermor Broken Empire is an excellent nation that combines very good troops with some astral and death magic.

Weaknesses:
- expensive mages (but 1/2 upkeep),
- all mages and priests, apart from the cultist, are vulnerable to Magic Duels.

Strengths:
- excellent infantry,
- Body Ethereal, the best starting spell of the game IMHO, and death gems to raise hordes of Behemoths (Enchantment 4) or Wights (Conj 3) which are very good with etherealness,
- Leave a few thaumaturgs where your armies just fought to get free armoured soulless (against strong indep, I often raise 30 undead after one battle).
- The Vestals lack punch and are slow to gather in numbers, but they're free and with battlefield-wide power of the sepulchre (+4 ATT and AP, better than fire-8 blessing!) they're quite good units. And since they're from site, you can keep getting them even under seige.
- Nether Darts.

AND you can still be friends with your neighbours and have a flourishing economy.

Cheers

[quantum_mechani]

Sunray_be said:


Weaknesses:
- expensive mages (but 1/2 upkeep),

They are not sacred or unholy, so I don't think so.

[archaeolept]

yah i didn't think they were, but zen also felt that they got half upkeep. it should be easy to check

[Boron]

hm so nowhere detailed info on freespawns ?

Like 2x dominionstrength freespawns and 10% chance on stronger freespawns etc. ?

[Nagot Gick Fel]

quantum_mechani said:
They are not sacred or unholy, so I don't think so.

Actually they are sacred and have halved upkeep, but for some mysterious reason the 'sacred' icon doesn't appear on them (although strangely, it's back again when they lose their leader status).

[alexti]

Sunray_be said:
Dont forget the Broken Empire (base) theme. Actually my favorite. SG and AE have both a terrible Achille's heel in MP games : all other players will hate you.

Yep, and they will keep hating Ermor by reflex. After destroying Ermor, they may realize it was Broken Empire though

[Taqwus]

Top-level SG unholies get to reanimate Apparitions, IIRC, at the added cost of population. The Apparitions are ghostly fellers with a disease-causing aura.

Hm, regarding theme confusion... it bothers me that for provinces of enemy dominion, even if you're occupying them or have a spy there it won't tell you the theme, or even which is the worshipped pretender. Sometimes this is fairly odd, e.g. you'd think that Miasma would be self-evident, as would Carrion Woods, and that the dead Ermor themes would also be readily clear (although not necessarily distinguishable).