Strategy advice wanted

[quantum_mechani]

Loren said:
... way more powerful than anything I can recruit or afford to empower.

First off, I get the feeling you are empowering way too much. Almost the only reason you will want to empower is to get at least one mage capable of doing high level forging/rituals in a given path. For instance, say you have ton of air gems, but only air 3 mages. In this case, spending the gems to empower a level in order to get booster items and air queens might be a viable choice.

Now, as for what your mages should be doing in battle, I advise phoenix power + fireballs, or raise skeletons. For troops, you can usually get by recruiting almost only lizard legionaries, and triari/alae when you need the gold for mages/mercs/buildings.

[Valandil]

Empowerment has a place in blood magic too, since it is easy to pick up a massive quantity of slaves (expecially via wish).

What type of pretender are you using?

[Loren]

quantum_mechani said:

First off, I get the feeling you are empowering way too much. Almost the only reason you will want to empower is to get at least one mage capable of doing high level forging/rituals in a given path. For instance, say you have ton of air gems, but only air 3 mages. In this case, spending the gems to empower a level in order to get booster items and air queens might be a viable choice.

Now, as for what your mages should be doing in battle, I advise phoenix power + fireballs, or raise skeletons. For troops, you can usually get by recruiting almost only lizard legionaries, and triari/alae when you need the gold for mages/mercs/buildings.

The only empowering I have done is to help with site searching. I'm saying that the levels I have observed with the enemy mages are higher than I see any way to obtain.

[quantum_mechani]

Loren said:

The only empowering I have done is to help with site searching. I'm saying that the levels I have observed with the enemy mages are higher than I see any way to obtain.

Empowering for site searching can be valid too, but you never have to go farther than level 2 (to use remote site search spells).

[HoneyBadger]

My advice is a little different-not much, but a little. First of all, Ermor has great troops for using strategy on the battlefield, so if you're willing to take the time and effort to script out, and think about, every troop on the battlefield, it can really pay off with Ermor. Second, Ermor has great sacred calvalry-they're fast, strong, and heal afflictions, which means you can have them around for a long, long time. I personally like to put a Nature bless and an Earth bless on them, atleast 4, but more is fine too, after all when you don't have to worry so much about getting afflicted, the longer you can have your troops on the field, the better. They're mainly good for taking out archers and flanking anyway, and I feel it's better to concentrate on blesses-like earth and nature-which will help your units survive longer, rather than fire and water, which will give you a combat machine that may help you a lot in the early and middle portions of the game, but will leave you with lots of levels in two of the weakest branches of magic. Don't use Ermor calvalry to try and slaughter the enemy, kill them with your footsoldiers and use the calvalry to grind the enemy soldiers, mages, and archers down, instead. You're going to have a lot more foot for the same price, and Ermor's soldiers are cheap and respectable. Lizard auxiliaries are fine, but the other troop types also have their place. Remember that Ermor is strong in priestly power, not so much in magic. You're going to want to spread your people around so you've got lots of researching "camps" and in the long term have lots of the younger mages rather than Auger Elders, because those Elders might be gone in a year from disease.

[Shovah32]

And, as already stated, remember that you only need lvl2(1 in the case of death and maybe astral) to preform a lvl9 search in that path(via remote searching) and if you can get an s3 mage you can do a lvl9 search from every path by casting acashic record.

[Valandil]

acashic is 25 gems (!), so unless frequency is very high it often won't pay for itself.

[Shovah32]

Yea, i tend to only cast it on forest or mountain provinces where i should be finding many sites(and it beats empowering mages to all the paths you dont have )

[Meglobob]

Valandil said:
acashic is 25 gems (!), so unless frequency is very high it often won't pay for itself.

Great for SP, rubbish for MP.

[PDF]

Valandil said:
acashic is 25 gems (!), so unless frequency is very high it often won't pay for itself.

Wrong !
In a rather normal setting (50%) you'll find 1-3 sites producing an average of 1.5 gems each, so you'll get 3 gems/turn, refunding you in 10 turns or so...