MA Ermor strategies? Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

I played around with MA Ermor a bit last night. Here are a few thoughts/questions.

Is a bless strategy worthwhile? Here are some units that benefit:

* You automatically free-spawn sacred cavalry from every fort. Under strong dominion, it looks like you get something like 0.75 / turn / fort.
* Lictors are strong heavy infantry. Any H3 priest can summon one per turn for free. An H4 priest (usually achieved by turning an H3 into your prophet) can summon 2/turn for free. A D2 mage wearing a black laurel (10 D-gems) can summon 3/turn for 3 D-gems. High-level conj spells allow a single mage to summon more per turn, but not at the same efficient prices.
* Wailing ladies are very expensive D-summons, but potentially marginally worth it, especially with a good bless and some good combat buffs.
* You often free-spawn lictor-commanders (called "censors" or something like that) or can summon them for something like 3 gems. These make plausible thugs as long as someone else is there to bless them.
* Your dusk mages are not sacred, but are plausible candidates for shrouds. They all are ethereal and can cast invulnerability, soul vortex and fire shield. The ones with E picks are probably the best combatants, with iron skin and temper flesh available too. You also have access to all the usual D-summon thugs and combatants.
* There is a national event chain leading to a 200HP "divine mummy" which could easily benefit from a nice regenerative bless via a shroud -- even though it's "divine" it somehow isn't sacred.

To allow for reasonable bless/thug options, I went with an N9D6 serpent lady. N and D synergize nicely, and add significant staying power to lictors and cavalry without costing all that much. I was fairly happy with this, but am not sure it was the best option. E9 protection would be useful, but undead typically don't need the reinvigoration, so this probably isn't worth the expense. The minor blesses from W, F and S are decent, but not clearly worth the expense. Bumping all the way up to D9 death weapons also might be plausible, but lictors and equites hit really hard already and thugs won't really benefit, so it's not clear this will help all that much. Hence why I chose N9D6. But perhaps a rainbow or more combat-oriented pretender would have been better.

How many reanimators do you want, and what do you want to reanimate with them? Here are some plausible options.
* Extremely minimal reanimation -- spend your gems on mages and your money on castles+temples to freespawn better units.
* Incidental reanimation of lictors/riders -- you'll often want bishops to support your armies. When they're stationary, they can summon a single sacred lictor or a handful of half-decent long-dead cavalry. Not sure which is best?
* Dedicated reanimation of lictors -- over the long run, it's cheaper to summon bishops to summon lictors freely thereafter than it is to spend gems on each new lictor. You could dedicate some portion of your D-gem income to summoning more bishops, just to keep on summoning lictors for the rest of the game. Obviously this will cut into your ability to do other things, like summon research mages, but it's a lot easier to use indies for research than it is to use them for sacred heavy infantry.
* Dedicated reanimation of cavalry -- H2 and H3 priests can reanimate longdead riders, that are decent low-HP cavalry that are significantly better in many situations than much of your chaff. In theory it could be worthwhile to spend some gems summoning priests to amass more of these cavalry.
* MOAR CHAFF! You could summon a lot of indy priests to reanimate lower-level chaff, especially the corpses caused by your dominion's popkill effect. With Dom10, I didn't feel any real need for yet more chaff, but I guess they could occasionally help turn some battles.

How many temples do you want?

I thought for awhile that temples might increase the chance of getting sacred free-spawn, but I know sacred equites *can* come without a temple, so I'm not sure temples matter for this. (I think they do matter for soul gate, once you reach that point.)

The main thing temples matter for is dominion spread, and doing that is always a mixed blessing. Provinces with high dominion freespawn more units. That's really helpful for provinces with forts, as they produce high quality units. Provinces without forts I usually don't care so much about getting more of their units. And Ermor usually picks such trashy scales that you'd usually rather not send your dominion to a province that produces any money. So I usually end up leaving some regions temple free, until my strong dominion starts spoiling them anyway and I have extra money to spare. Then I'll build forts and a few temples. But I'm never sure quite when is the right time to make this transition?

Forts versus Mages?

Aside from temples, the main things I spend my limited gold on are just forts (for better quality free-spawn) and indy mages (for research and path-diversity). Your gold is very limited so it's tricky to decide which of these is most important.

Which Globals to cast?

* Burden of Time hurts living units all over the place, which is a big advantage for your undead, aside from whatever living mages you have for path diversity.
* Foul Air hurts everyone else more than you.
* Utterdark is a big boon for combat, and hurts other economies more than yours.
* Well of Misery gives you a lot of gems you can definitely use, but helps other players' economies.
* Soul gate provides a lot of ethereal freespawn, which can be a nice addition to your armies.

What's wrong D9? They get magic weapons.

I don't know if that changed in dom4, but in dom3 you could only have one effect in your weapon. So if you have D9/F9, you don't have the frostbrand effect

F9D9 does work together.

There is a national event chain leading to a 200HP "divine mummy" which could easily benefit from a nice regenerative bless via a shroud -- even though it's "divine" it somehow isn't sacred.

Wow i've never come across this(although i'm terrible and my late game ermor is mostly "shuffle the death blobs and cast cool stuff"). Anywhere i can read about this?

That event isn't common enough to build any kind of strategy around.

If you are going to use a bless, D9 is the way to go. I think MA Ermor needs a rainbow though,

Even D4, which is somewhere near the minimum MA Ermor needs, is a good boost to their sacred cavalry's effectiveness.

I don't know how common the divine-mummy event chain is. It happened for me right away in year two [edit: all three games I've played!], so I had guessed it couldn't be that rare of an event. Admittedly I did have turmoil-3, luck-3, but that's a pretty common scale-selection for Ermor. (Luck and Magic are the only two scales that effectively increase your income even if most of your population is dead, so these are the only two scales Ermor tends to maximize.) Anyway, for those who are interested, here's the spoiler: You get an event saying an ancient temple has been found and suggesting you send a mage to investigate. The temple is a site that generates 1 pearl per turn. For me at least, the first dusk mage I sent triggered a new event cursing a lot of units. I left him there a few turns and nothing happened. Immediately when I sent in another dusk-mage, the final mummy event happened.

Regarding blesses, N9 is tremendously more helpful than D9 is. Your sacreds already hit really hard, so the extra 2 damage will often be wasted, and as Triqui explained you won't get death-weapon effects on units that have other second-effects on their weapons (like the AoE effect on frostband, and probably also the AoE soul slay on your sacred banshees and the drain-life effects on dusk mages and other summons, though I haven't tested these).

Your primary sacreds are also very well armored, so the regeneration from N9 allows them to survive near-indefinitely, whereas undying without regeneration increases longevity a whole lot less. With N9, typically the only way a sacred dies is if it gets really unlucky taking a lot of damage in a brief window. With D9, even mild banish spam and occasional hits are enough to wear down your sacreds eventually. Remember that Ermor usually brings huge hordes of high-morale units to a battle, so battles tend to be really long, and your lictors often alternate between being on the front lines killing stuff quickly, to standing at least partially behind chaff that flowed into the holes, and these brief periods of protection provide perfect opportunities to regenerate back to full health before getting more exposed again.

I think (but have not checked this) that undead units also don't heal on their own after combat. N9 regeneration completely avoids that problem. I read somewhere that D9 also half-solves this problem too, by fully healing undead units that finish battle on negative-HP, but not those that finish on positive-HP. I think this was considered a bug, and may have been fixed. If someone has checked this, please chime in, but anyway I think this is another mark in favor of N9.

Edited by: TelosTelos

Yeah, I'll chip in on that.

Most undead units heal up just fine after combat. What D4+ leads to is a situation where never-healing sacred undead units (so basically Knights of the Unholy Sepulchre) completely regenerate at the end of a battle if they end up in negative HP.

I haven't checked the interaction of N9 on Never Heals on post-battle health, so I can't comment on that aspect of things.

My strategy is to go S6D9 and Just don't use bless on branded thugs I use 2 or 3 arch bishops to make a lictor/wailing lady mix for the main force, with Knights of the Unholy Sepulcher set to hold and attack rear/archers way in the back, on the flanks. Throw in some Longdead arrow decoys and souless up front to draw the banishments. and have my Dusk Elders using the nice new(ish) death evocations like soul blast. the astral bless boosts MR which we always need more of, plus once you get to high Thaum you get access to soul drain. S5D5, 5 death gems and 500 fatigue may sound crazy, but on any modest to large armie you god will slurp up so much life essence it will all be gone in a turn.

I think w9d9 works great for MA Ermor. Knights of the Unholy Sepulcher benifit a lot from w9, they can get through castle gates much more easier with w9d9 which you have problem with otherwise. And it's good for the other sacred too.

If not going for a dual bless then i prefer d9 plus a minor bless in astral or fire.

My favorite, as in blast to play, MA Ermor build is imprisoned titan of rivers with dominion 10, w9/n9/s4 and turmoil3/sloth3/cold3/death3/luck3/magic1 (0 points left over). Water bless is awesome on undead sacreds since you don't care even one bit about the potential encumberance drawback of the quickness. Nature major bless is overpowered in general imo and makes dusk elder a nice thug with shrouds of battle saint. Minor astral bless because I can and it helps little bit against banishment (also gives you a possible chalice forger to heal your tartarians or something). To top it off dominion strength 10 maximizes amount and quality of troops you get for free.

What is the price of this outrageous bless and glorious luck scales? 45 death gems, that you spend sometime year one to empower your starting mage to access the rest of death magic you ever need. With capitol alone producing 15/turn, one empower is drop in the ocean even when you can't buy mages/troops.

Zenzei, this sounds like a really fun strategy. I'd be tempted to go with magic over luck -- when most of your mages are cheap indy mages with low research, every extra point of magic is a significant %-boost to the effectiveness of your limited money. I'm also not sure whether the splash of astral is worth the cost, especially when you'll eventually get an S3 dusk mage which serves most of your astral needs anyway. I'd been tempted to try a sleeping/imprisoned pretender, and your pointing out that the cost of getting to your death summons without a D3 pretender is really just 3 turns of capital gem production has convinced me that may be worth a try... I also worry about the (lack of) synergy between hyper-fast W9-quickened sacreds and hordes of slow-moving chaff, who I imagine as waddling after the receding bus waving their arms helplessly... Do you split into elite teams of sacreds and separate armies of chaff? Or does mixing these together work alright?

zenzei wrote: My favorite, as in blast to play, MA Ermor build is imprisoned titan of rivers with dominion 10, w9/n9/s4 and turmoil3/sloth3/cold3/death3/luck3/magic1 (0 points left over). Water bless is awesome on undead sacreds since you don't care even one bit about the potential encumberance drawback of the quickness. Nature major bless is overpowered in general imo and makes dusk elder a nice thug with shrouds of battle saint. Minor astral bless because I can and it helps little bit against banishment (also gives you a possible chalice forger to heal your tartarians or something). To top it off dominion strength 10 maximizes amount and quality of troops you get for free.

What is the price of this outrageous bless and glorious luck scales? 45 death gems, that you spend sometime year one to empower your starting mage to access the rest of death magic you ever need. With capitol alone producing 15/turn, one empower is drop in the ocean even when you can't buy mages/troops.

That DOES sound like fun. Good points about W9 bless and empowerment. I may finally give MA Ermor a try.

TelosTelos wrote: Zenzei, this sounds like a really fun strategy. I'd be tempted to go with magic over luck -- when most of your mages are cheap indy mages with low research, every extra point of magic is a significant %-boost to the effectiveness of your limited money. I'm also not sure whether the splash of astral is worth the cost, especially when you'll eventually get an S3 dusk mage which serves most of your astral needs anyway. I'd been tempted to try a sleeping/imprisoned pretender, and your pointing out that the cost of getting to your death summons without a D3 pretender is really just 3 turns of capital gem production has convinced me that may be worth a try... I also worry about the (lack of) synergy between hyper-fast W9-quickened sacreds and hordes of slow-moving chaff, who I imagine as waddling after the receding bus waving their arms helplessly... Do you split into elite teams of sacreds and separate armies of chaff? Or does mixing these together work alright?

You can certainly tune the bless to your tastes or drop the minor bless completely in favor of additional magic scales for example, but I wouldn't lower the luck scale. Luck becomes major source of your income pretty fast because it won't take long for your dominion and its effects to catch up with your lands after initial expansion is over and nation borders are drawn. Luck also brings significant amount of extra gems and generally makes the game more fun due to all the exciting events.

For mixed armies of both sacreds and normal troops, I generally put the stone worthless chaff (ghouls/soulless/regular longdead) on the very front to absorb the first hit from enemy troops and undead legionaires behind them in orderly line formations in descending order of action points. For the sacreds, I place them in their own squads on the both flanks of the battle area, hold & attack rear orders, and make sure they have enough of a freeway to move into battle (= don't make individual squads of legionaires on the middle too big so that they don't block the way for flankers). It works decently enough.
Here's an image to clarify (army size was 300 something units):

Of course I also use smaller elite armies of sacreds only and huge armies of garbage units in a blob.

Edited by: zenzei

Not many people have weighed in on my original question about which priests are worth summoning/purchasing for reanimation, and which units are worth reanimating.

I'm such a nerd that I set up a spreadsheet to compare using D2-spectators-with-black-laurels versus H3 arch bishops to summon lictors. Both have similar start-up costs (22 D-gems versus 23). The main difference is that a D2 with laurel summons three lictors per turn at the cost of 1 gem each, whereas an H3 bishop summons only 1 per turn, but for free. (It can summon 2 for free per turn if you make it prophet, or give it one of the unique holy-boosters). Obviously, over the long run, bishops are the better deal, but if you want to amass lictors quickly, laurel-summons are the better deal.

I compared what happens if you dedicate a fixed number of gems per turn to getting more lictors using the D2-with-laurel strategy versus the bishop strategy. Obviously this comparison isn't perfectly realistic. I don't factor in the fact that the laurels approach requires research in Conj and Const, whereas the bishops approach doesn't require any research at all, nor do I factor in the fact that you need a D3 to summon bishops (via a pretender or empowering your starting spectator), whereas your starting D2 spectator is enough to summon more spectators and forge laurels. Furthermore, in any real game, you won't invest a fixed amount on lictor-production each turn. Instead you'll also sometimes want to invest more or less gems depending on what other things you need gems for that turn. This variability favors the bishops approach, which can flexibly increase or decrease its spending on demand, whereas the spectators-with-laurels can speed up production only by paying the 22-gem startup cost of another spectator+laurel, which will thereafter often need to be idle (researching rather than making lictors, for lack of gems); otherwise, any time you pause production to lend gems to another purpose, you'll never be able to make up the lost production of lictors, even if you have surplus gems the next turn. Also, the bishops approach has the benefit of always having a spare bishop available when you need it to go divine-bless another party of sacreds, so it never finds itself needing to cut-back lictor production by a lot to summon an emergency-bishop. With those caveats in mind, here are the numbers.

Dedicating 15 gems per turn. (This is the entirety of your initial D-gem income, so you may not be ready for this sustained level of investment until after you'd already invested in some other infrastructure, especially a few site-searchers.)

If you dedicate 15 gems per turn to this, the D2-with-laurels approach takes 19 turns to build up to 5 spectators with laurels, while also churning out the max of 117 lictors (almost twice the mere 61 that bishops would have produced). From that point on, this approach then spends all 15 of its gems/turn summoning 15 more lictors each turn.

The bishops approach doesn't match that rate of lictor production until 7 turns later (summoning the 15th bishop on turn 26). At that point, it will have reanimated only 140 free lictors, compared to the 219 expensive ones the D2's will have summoned. However, from that point on, the bishop approach can use all the gems it doesn't have to spend on lictors to summon even more bishops, hence getting more and more free lictors each turn. At turn 41, both approaches will have produced 489 lictors, but at that point the bishops are skyrocketing ahead at 26 free lictors per turn (and climbing), whereas the D2's with laurels are still plodding along at the fixed rate of 15/turn. After turn 49, the bishops are producing lictors at twice the rate of the D2s, and still climbing.

Dedicating 12 gems per turn. (This is feasible from very early on, but doesn't allow for very much other summoning, until you find more gem-sites.)

With only 12 gems per turn, it takes 18 turns to reach max production with four D2's with laurels producing 12 lictors per turn. At that point they will have produced the max possible 81 lictors, almost twice the mere 42 the bishops will have produced.

The bishops will match this rate of 12 lictors/turn 8 turns later (summoning the 12th bishop on turn 26). At that point they're 64 lictors behind: 110 to 174. But every turn after that, the D2's have to pay all their gems for more lictors, whereas the bishops spend more gems on more bishops, which yield more and more free lictors. The break-even point is again turn 41 (390 total lictors summoned), though at that point the bishops will be outproducing the spectators 21 to 12; and they'll again reach double the production rate on turn 49, by summoning their 24th bishop. At that point, they're ahead 495-450 and growing twice as fast.

Dedicating 9 gems per turn (this leaves plenty of gems for other purposes, especially once you find more sites)

The D2's lictor production rate plateaus at 9 lictors/turn at turn 16, having produced the max possible 45 lictors, compared to a mere 20 by the bishops.

The bishops catch up to that rate of production on turn 26, though they're behind on the lictor count 80-versus-132 at that point. From then on the bishops summon even more bishops, roughly matching the total lictor production of the D2's on turn 42 (301 lictors), and doubling their rate of production on turn 49, at which point they're ahead 366 to 339, and growing twice as fast.

General observations.

In all these trials, we see that it takes around a year and a half to build the infrastructure for dedicated lictor summoning via D2's with black laurels, while also summoning the maximum possible lictors, which is what you'll often want to aid early expansion. Since you also need a fair amount of early game research to get this production going, it's probably not feasible to rush this too much more anyway. If you could produce lictors that whole time (which you usually *can't* due to research restrictions), this would yield roughly twice as many lictors at that point as the bishops would. However, research restrictions will likely make this gap much smaller, depending e.g., upon your magic scales, and upon whether your pretender is helping speed your research. At about the two-year mark, bishops match the rate of production of D2's with laurels, but are still behind in total lictors by a ratio of about 3:2, though importantly the bishops get that amount of lictors for free each turn, whereas the D2's still have to pay 1 gem apiece. Around the 3-and-a-half year mark, the bishops' extra production brings their total # of lictors to match the D2's, and by the fourth year, the bishops are out-producing the D2's at twice the rate.

Bishops do have one other advantage, though it's a small one. They don't need a lab. That's why I prefer multiple Arch-Bishops, so that the turn my Dusk Elder spends searching for magic sites, they spend reanimating more lictors/Longdead cav/ chaff. Of course, Arch-Bishops and Dusk Elders costing roughly the same means that heavy priest support = light mage support, thus I rely on holy buffs and focus my mages on damage and debuffs But that's my strategy, other people might play it differently.

Burden of Time can be cast super early and it's pretty much a game ender.
Awake Neteret of Many names D9S4 Dom10 T3S3C3D3L3M1
I cast BoT on turn 18 with this setup while also getting a few arch bishops, black laurel and summoning 3 lictors every turn.
Turn 18 is ridiculously early. There is basically no chance that somebody will have dispel researched by then.
You can cast it on like turn 15 if you take magic 3 and focus on research even more.

That's a very early BoT indeed! The point is that ermor would have reached enough critical mass to handle the obvious following gang up?

Well, at turn 15, it can even not have neighbor yet. And he just need to put all his freespawn on his cap and wait for other player's army to die.

Yeah. Enemy needs to get through barren 0 supply land to siege you. Getting supply for huge army this early is super hard. You'd need cauldrons of broth but they require N3 and construction 4 so it's not easy.
Lictors aren't mindless and have 16 strength and you can spam like 20 of them per turn. Enemy will need 300+ unit army to break the walls.
I don't see how it would be possible to siege Ermor effectively at all.

Edited by: Gzar

BoT is indeed far too easily researched. This was something I would expect balance mods to tackle, like they did for dom3. Particularly given BoT doesn't wreck every nation equally. In fact it does virtually nothing to some of them while essentially removing others from the game entirely (like poor abysia).

So I was inspired by Zenzei to try going for a W9N9 bless, and empowering a spectator to get up to D3. I ended up opting for a splash of E4 on an imprisoned statue pretender, as that let me get "perfect" scales (Dom-10, luck-3, magic-3, screw the rest...), a bit better scales than splashing S4 on a river-goddess gives. The first big thing I noticed about this is that your start is seriously slowed, partly due to lacking the dominion spread an awake pretender gives, and partly by sending 45 gems to empowerment. In that play-through, I also tried the max-bishops strategy, to amass as many free lictors as I could to enjoy that bless. Paying 45 gems for empowerment basically means you lose 2 bishops you could have had, which means missing out on 2 additional lictors per turn, every turn throughout the entire game, which is a pretty big deal, especially for early expansion. Also, spending most of your D-gems on bishops/lictors really hurts your research, and Ermor really doesn't have enough money to rely on buying indy mages, even cheap sacred ones in Magic-3. On the bright side, the blessing is really powerful, and your sacreds keep piling up and wrecking house. By the time my pretender broke out of prison, I was getting 20 free lictors per turn, and was free to spend my gems on whatever I wanted (which, for me was mostly more bishops)... It worked out fine, but felt sluggish and underpowered compared to other ways of playing Ermor. (It didn't help that all the impossible AI's around me declared war on me, and I suppose it speaks well for Ermor that it could hold off a 4-front war without even really breaking a sweat...)

I also tried out W9D9 on a sleeping Surfer Dude Titan of the Sea, with Dom8 and "perfect scales". My theory was to rush to shrouded Dust Elder thugs, who regenerate HP via drain-life and soul vortex, so don't need N9 or Ex, nor do I need to waste any D-gems on lictors or bishops (aside from a few to lead armies). D9W9 works really well on equites of the sacred shroud. Equites have multiple attacks to start with, and even more with W9, so that provides a lot of triggers for death weapons. Also, as noted up-thread, D9 cancels the equites "do not heal" tag -- if they finish battle on negative HP they fully reheal themselves. Equites with 10 undying can rip through most opponents before running out of undying points, so you don't lose many.

Through the first 9 months, I constantly recruited spectators for research, then hoarded gems for my surfer dude to start casting dusk elders once he woke up. (Lazy surfers take a year to wake up -- I'm jealous!) My research certainly was much livelier, dedicating almost all my gems to it, with the thought that I can easily turn all the dusk elders into thugs when I need them. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the game that makes shrouded soul-vortexed dusk elders prone to randomly losing their blessing, which is really annoying. I haven't yet been able to confirm whether the drain life attack on a Dusk Elder stacks with D9 death weapons or not, because my stupid dusk elder's keep losing their blessing, which prevents the test, and also makes them prone to getting killed when they shouldn't -- grrr...

Anyway, giving them cheap dancing tridents makes up for their lack of repel ability on the life-drain attack, though I think the trident may have some penalty to repel? Anyway, it seems to get awfully low repel rolls, but it does help. If life-drain turns out not to work with death weapons, it might be tempting to try the 10W quickened sword with two attacks. With W9, that will average three swings per round, each of which does a ton of base damage, plus should trigger 2AN from death-weapons too. I'm not sure that's actually any better than a frost brand, and it costs a lot more, but it's interesting to have an occasion where you're even tempted to switch away from the mighty frost-brand.

Anyway, that game went really smoothly (aided a lot by having a fair-sized ocean uncontested), but got really frustrating due to the randomly self-un-blessing dusk elders. I may sit down at some point and try to figure out how exactly they're managing to un-bless themselves, and whether their life-drain attack can trigger death-weapons, but it was frustrating enough that I'd rather give it a break...

I did find that censors with fire bolas are pretty fun, largely due to their base strength of 17. A fun silly build might be A9X9, pouring D-gems into spectators and censors, F-gems into fire bolas, and A-gems into bows of war. Indy priests also make good bow-holders with an A9 bless, and they can also bless your censors and reanimate long-dead meat-shields whenever they aren't moving. It doesn't seem like W9 lets guys fire bows or bolas 1.5 times as quickly -- if it did, A9W9 could be fun. Otherwise, there's A9N9 for survivability, A9E9 for max usage of your battle mages (with shrouds), A9B9 for strength bonuses to really max out the bola usage, or A9D9 for a mix of survivability and really brutal bows of war. Unfortunately fire bolas don't enjoy any benefit from D9 or F9... If anybody tries one of these variants, let me know how it works?

It's worth knowing that D9 does not syngergize at all with Soul Vortex, while N9 does. D9 doesn't increase your max possible HP under Soul Vortex, in fact it decreases it.

Edited by: wilsonmax