Overview
How to play Middle Age Ermor.
Intro
Some things to take into consideration are that you have no national units to recuit. That means you don’t need resources, gold, a heat scale, growth, or order. You could even turn all the scales for your dominion to -3 and do just fine because the only way you get units and commanders are through free spawn in your dominion ( as people die in your provinces, they turn into various undead creatures and serve you, also commanders will rise to help you bring those troops to the front lines ).
This nation also requires LOTS of micromanaging thats needed almost constantly to have a chance against simply having your place in the world.
EVERYONE automatically develops a caucus beli (reason for war) against you and will gang up on you since you are the cancer in the game. your very dominion and presence kills the population and eventually it will get to a point to where you will see your provinces will have a population of 0.
Introduction to MA Ermor
Censors will spawn across your provinces to help command your undead units and build temples for you which are very hard since you will probably have all your arch bishops leading troops and it’s just easier to send some free spawn commander to build a temple rather than conjuring a priest to build one. Spectators spawn other spectators and commanders and powerful units to support troops and do research.
ALL commanders and national units (besides freespawn undead and freespawn commanders) have to be spawned by your spectator that you started out with, or by your pretender or by something that was previously conjured that has death magic.
This means MA Ermor LOVES death gems and needs lots of death sites eary on to find and search for to give them a step up in the world since everyone hates MA Ermor since you know, you’re basically death and controlling the undead and kill everyone in populations, rendering lands useless to everyone but you.
Death gems are what are used in Ritual casting spells to create more commanders, cast spells and create units that benefit your nation. The more Death gems you have per turn, the more mages you can make to have research and support troops, which in turn makes you more powerfull overall in almost everyway.
You start out with a powerful magic site in your capital called “The Unholy Sepulchre” which gives you a stunning 15 death gems per turn. sounds like alot to have starting out right?
WRONG!
THIS IS NOTHING TO YOU * screams * IT WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH BECAUSE YOUR HUNGER IS UNFULLFILLING!!
You need as many death gems as possible since it’s what summons your national units.
National Units
These units are your starting out conjuration ritual spells for summoning your most important and starting out commanders in the game.
Undead units are generally weaker than your average unit with having very few HP and some to no protection and being slow. This seems like a huge disadvantage, but the big reason they can be so powerful is the fact that they do not rout and are not affected by fear or morale damage. This is why when a pretender that is based on fear to rout armies, dies because they get swarmed by the undead because honestly they don’t care what they are fighting or about dying again, because they are dead. If you are ever playing a nation that is using undead units, putting undead units in one of the last rows is not a bad idea since your armies can rout while having the undead hold the line. There are no archer like units that are free spawned, but you can conjure up skeleton archers that shoot green flamed arrows.
All undead priests can reanimate the dead to be lead.
Remember your units are undead, which can all be banished by priests. that means an army of priests can destroy you. There are times when you will find access to blood magic and blood items. There is nothing wrong with recruiting from independent provinces to help support your nation. Being fully dependent on one type of magic can make you vulnerable, you should try to take advantage of all magic paths you have access to so you can use all of your strengths.
Undead and mindless units without a commander automatically rout and the battle will be lost, be sure to keep your mound kings and other commanders in to back of the battles so you dont automatically lose.
Mind blasts (usually R’lyeh nation) don’t work on the mindless undead, so they will automatically attack your commanders and win the battle, killing your entire army of frozen, or routing units. This is why you must protect your commanders ESPECIALLY when leading undead and mindless units.
Priests are essential to battle victories because they can protect your units against enemy priest banishments, which can completely destroy your army before they can touch them.
Lictors are powerful warriors that can dish alot of attack that has a high protection too. they are also one of your nations holy warriors. They are surrounded by a wind of cold.
Censors are freespawn but can be summoned. They are a Lictor and can lead undead. These commanders should be building temples and leading your undead to battles.
Acolytes are priests and are surrounded by damaging cold. they are the most basic undead priest summon but they still are useful for the beginning of your empire. You should use them to reanimate undead and charm other undead units.
Bishops are priests and are surrounded by damaging cold. they are adequate priests and do pretty well at reanimation. These commanders can ferry around units and protect small amounts of undead from banishments by giving them some magic resistance.
Archbishops are great priests and are surrounded by damaging cold. These guys have a level three priest level, and are probably going to be the ones to claim thrones for you and reanimate the most dead and protecting your units. by mid to late game, these units are essential to support and protect your undead units from banishments. As you can see from the picture, this archbishop has a level four priest level. This is because when you make a level three priest a prohet, they have their priest level increased by one. All prophets have your pretender’s blessing and their stats are affecting by dominion just like your pretender.
Spectators are your basic mages that can do very little but do basic death spells (level 2) that are usually the spawner of your commanders, are researchers and doing some death searching through dark knowledge spell, which searches a distant province for magic sites in death. I often times empower one of my spectators or I give them a staff of death to be able to spawn Dusk Elders, which are much more powerful mages.
Dusk Elders are Great mages and are going to have a wider array of magic other than death magic. they start out with a couple random other magics like fire, air, astral and earth. These guys are much more powerful that spectators and are going to be your battle mages that raise armies of the dead with the lift of a hand, harrassing enemy units on the battlefield and the best thing is that spectators and Dusk Elders are Etheral. Being Etheral means the unit is protected against 75% of mundane attacks
Some of Your common Freespawn Units
The top sacred unit is one of the best units for Ermor since they are fast and hold many attacks, you can use these units to be blessed with undying and flank enemy archers to protect your slow undead units.
I do not like to put my undead legions or principes ( javelin guys ) in a skirmish formation. You will lose many units this way and this will halter you expansion and make you weak. put these units into line formations and do not worry over the squad morale because they will never rout since they are undead. They need to be in line formations or at least HAVE a line so that they can make best use of their javelins to soften the frontline up.
Your Chaff will usually be soulless and various undead skeletons. Do not use ghouls as chaff, they are very valuable in a sense of doing magic damage, so they can kill etheral units.
Chaff or fodder, is a name for weak units you put infront of your front line heavy units in order to soak up arrows and weaken the other commander’s front line so that when your front line connects to theirs, they are fatigued, weakened and easily broken. Many new players do not understand the use of chaff or incorrectly use the wrong units as chaff, like putting all soulless in the back since they have no protection. I would not do this unless they are your only undead units and every other unit you are controling is a living unit, and i would only do this for morale purposes since they do not rout.
Your Pretender
ALL pretenders of MA Ermor should have a very high dominion of 9 or 10 for lots of death for more freespawn units, turmoil 3, sloth 3, cold 3 and death 3 with varying luck and magic scales. I reccommend a magic scale and luck since often everyone will be dead and you will have very little income in late game and those extra gems and special generals really come in handy to boost you. I think high magic scales are great for MA Ermor but, it allows your units to be banished more easily since magic resistance lowers with high magic scales (Magic 2). Banishment is harder against higher magic resistance. When i play MA Ermor or LA R’lyeh i almost always have some positive scale of luck because eventually everyone in all of my provinces will be dead and i hate having my provinces being conquered randomly by independents, which slows your growth that you depend on and could cost you precious time that results in your own doom. Being 3 unlucky can also be extremely annoying early and mid game but in late game it very rarely affects you. when you have hundreds or thousands of undead in single provinces around your country, its very hard to take over. keep this in mind for when independents try and attack you but will never succeed for your overwhelming numbers of undead.
Do not EVER… be afraid to throw some of your research spectors out there to take some free spawn and conquer a province. You have very slow research if you picked drain scales and you should focus more on taking as much as you can before everyone in the game attacks you at the same time.
You should also take into consideration that temples and castles make better freespawn units that in lands without them, i believe having both helps even more. This can allow you to be very good at defending provinces since overwhelming numbers coming through a gate, ever spawning from mages can be quite difficult to conquer. it will simply end in a morale battle, which is something undead never lose in.
You are going to want your pretender to have death 9 in magic at least so you have the death weapons bless bonus and undying 10. i consider death 10 overkill because of the amount of points spent just to get that extra 1 point of undying bless isn’t worth it to me. You also will have points to spend on other areas of magic to suit your play style. Remember, you can always empower your pretender later with gems if you find the time to and have access to a lab.
Also remember the bless effects you have in your pretender stays with you for the rest of the game but if you have level 8 magic of something, you will not recieve an extra bless if you empower your pretender to 9.
You should choose a pretender and make them the way you want to that fits your playing style so that it benefits you the most.
Also having an awake pretender is very important for MA Ermor since early expansion is crucial for survival in its early stages since there is no way of buying national commanders.
sometimes, there are cases to where you can have dormant pretenders as MA Ermor but it isn’t recommended for anything other than single player or a specific strategy that works.
DO NO HAVE IMPRISONED PRETENDER. You will be weak the whole game and not able to recover like other nations could.
Here are what MA Ermor’s pretender options are.
These pretenders seem to be the most common and most played to me, here are their stats.
Here is an example of what your master lich pretender can look like. I would not try to copy off of this example but chose something that fits your playstyle.
The Master Lich
The master lich is one of the most interesting pretenders to play in dominions 4 that often goes hand in hand with MA Ermors play style. There is also a lich queen, she is often undermined in most games because she has less stats than the master lich but is cheaper.
This pretender is immortal, meaning that when he dies in his own dominion, he simply reforms and comes back to his capital to serve you again. IF he DOES die in an enemy dominion hes actually dead. He also is undead and can be banished by priests. He has many pros and cons.
pros
-immortal
-undead
-heals afflictions
-cold resistant (15)
-amphibious
-Poison resistant
-Pierce resistant (50)
-need not eat
-hard to hit with regular weapons
-can spam tons and tons of undead summonings in battle
-can, if given proper equipment be a SC
-Fear 4 from starting death magic
cons
-very vulnerable to fire, if on fire high chance of dying
-very weak in enemy dominions because of low health
-low health
-one simple spell called dust to dust can make him very weak or instantly kill him. Any death one mage can cast this.
To use this pretender you must be very careful when fighting priests since they can have a prophet or a couple of priests to banish your pretender and kill him. He may have to stand behind enemy lines at times to make this relentless and never ending wave of skeletons to kill every living thing in the world so you reign supreme. I suggest giving him a wraith crown so that he is etheral, an amulet of magic resistance to protect against banishment and either boots that give fire resistance or a ring of fire resistance to protect your weaknesses.
The Master Lich can be used as a SC for rapid expansion, sometimes as a rainbow pretender since he can have alot of extra pretender creation points from negative scales, and as a bless pretender. As MA Ermor your entire population is going to die, but this is okay because you never need to buy units in the game since all your units are summons and freespawn.
Some players like to give their master lich Nature 9 and a Death 9 for the lictors and holy horsemen to be extremely hard to kill. The idea is for whatever sacred is blessed to have undying +10, death weapons, +8 max HP, and regeneration. What alot of people don’t realize is that undead don’t benefit from regeneration, so it is somewhat usless to MA Ermor since every single unit Ermor has is undead. This however is my opinion, but certainly something to take note of. I have heard that it works and also that it doesn’t. I will leave that up to the player to decide.
Send your Lich anywhere you have your dominion spread, research Enchantment to have great death spells to unleash hordes of the undead to surround and rout your enemies.
Important Spells
There are many unique spells that are mostly conjuration, with some that are absolutely essential for any successful game playing as MA Ermor.
MA Ermor uses their Conjuration level 0 spells during the entire game to spawn units and commanders.
Conjuration research is going to give you more access to more powerful spells for summoning more powerful commanders. Enchantment research is very important for reanimating the dead in combat and the skeleton horde spell is exetremely useful for spamming the battlefiield with hundreds of undead creatures.
Spells that will be need to considered later in the game are
(conjuration) well of misery – creates lots of death gems per turn while draining the life out of everything in the world and causing the tax increase in all countries to rise (global enchantment)
Summon wraith lord- immortal horseman with death magic
(thaumaturgy) Burden of Time – time accelerates at a tremendous rate and units start to age fast and die. it is technically possible to wait until everyone is dead with this spell. (global enchantment)
(enchantment) Horde of skeletons- raises a whole bunch of longdeads to spam and is very useful and hard to beat.
(alteration) Utter dark- all provinces have their income reduced by 90% and uring the perpetual night shades and monsters kill people and attack provinces. undead, demons and blind are unaffected. Some units become more powerful during this event. (global enchantment)
Darkness- makes the battlefield pitch black and all units that do not have darkvision take stat penalties, you units can see in the dark.
Soul vortex- allows mage to be reinvigorated and drain life of living beings around them, whether they are friendly or enemies. Undead are unaffected.
and many more. Not all global enchanments benefit your allies if you have any. In some cases they can benefit your enemies. What if they have a pretender that becomes stronger during this event and is a Super Combatant that all of a sudden becomes a huge problem by ripping your armies apart like they are silly string, all angry and spitting it out. You should not always dive right into making a global enchantment as fast as possible when you do not know who can benefit from it. Sometimes creating a black servant through conjuration ritual spells can help you scout out the lands around you and see who you are fighting.
There are a wide array of spells that i haven’t gone over and in the next section are explained what each unit summon does briefly.
Strategies and Global Enchantments
There is no single way to win as MA Ermor, but i will tell you a few ways you can make your own grand strategies you can use to win. Many death global enchantments can allow you to be very passive aggressive by affecting everyone else in the world except for you. This puts alot of attention towards you and can make you a target, but thats okay because usually all of your money is going to go torwards building temples and castles.
Game Ending and World War Causing Global Enchantments.
Utterdark (Alt 9) is an extremely powerful alteration spell that makes the entire world go into darkness while having random attacks in provinces around the world. Why is this useful? because undead have darkvision! So every time you attack someone or you get attacked, the enemy will stumble around and try to find your units while your undead run arond the map and kill those blind units! Some units can see in the dark that aren’t dead. Some units become more powerful in darkness like the chaos serpent and some other units.
Also since there is no light, income in all provinces is reduced by 90% ….holy crap
So if you cast this spell, be sure to invest alot of death gems into it because MANY people will stop everything they are doing to try and dispell it. i reccommend adding 30 or 40 extra death gems into the spell so that
Burden of Time (Th 5) makes time speed up at an accelerated rate and everyone starts to die rapidly. Unless this global enchantment is dispelled, everyone in the world will eventually become old and die. This includes armies, short lived pretender gods and populations. All that will be left are your undead units. Some undead units are also affected by this but it is a nominal loss. usually just soulless.
MA Emor is not a very nice nation. They actually hate everything that lives. This means you are going to have a very hard time making friends with other nations.
As Ermor and any other nation, rapid expansion will lead you to victory secure your power and place in the world…but there is a catch for MA Ermor. Eventually everything in your entire dominion will be dead. This means no income or recruiting units. But the great thing about being undead is that they don’t have upkeep and this does not matter to you at all!
Rapidly expand as soon and as much as possible. Do not be nice. when you stop expanding, and go on the defensive, expect to be defensive for the rest of the game since everyone will attack you for your useless dead lands. If they do aquire some of your lands in your dominion, their troops will starve to death and soon die unless they have nature mages or items that give a supply bonus.
Its good to buy province defence, just at least one point in each province so that if it is attacked, all your units do not rout since no commander is present on the battlefield. So if they attack a province that has 425 soulless and 213 ghouls with no province defence or commander, it doesn’t matter how big your army or their army is, all those units you had just died. Makes province defence a little important don’t you agree?
Use you Master Lich to attack everything where you have dominion, search provinces for death gem sites so you have a steady inflow of gems. You can use all extra gems you have for converting into astral pearls and death gems for more summonings.
Its important to note that having a skill level of 4 in a magic path will find all sites for that magic path since they do not rise above that level. So Death 4 search can find all death sites in a province.
After expanding far and wide while taking advantage of ANYONE THAT SHOWS A SIGN OF WEAKNESS ( unless playing MP because the AI all hate you ) you should use your mound kings to create castles at certain strategetic points to secure your provinces and make priests create temples to spread your dominion. Temples and Castles create better freespawn. In order to create freespawn for any nation you must at least have a dominion of 3 in that province you own.
WHEN the time is right…. consider your global enchantment options for burden of time and utter dark. Everyone will always hate you, because you are MA Ermor im sorry you are just the evil bad guy that kills all life on earth, but poping out one of these babies make you look like i dunno… a master lich? If you do not have an undead pretender burden of time can really hurt you since you might not live very long.
After casting one or both of these spells, the entire world is basically in turmoil and creatures of the night are attacking everyone, only 10% of income is made in the world for everyone and everyone is aging at an accelerated rate, you can either kill each person off one at a time or you can go straight for the thrones to rush them. It is also a passive aggressive way to stay in your castle and wait for everyone to die and THEN take over the world.
A research strategy like this can be very effective but also very hard to organize since you need TH5 and ALT9 and while not researching other spells, it can hurt you in the long run unless you are researching other branches first.
Your first 5 turns
Your first ten turns are your most important and can determine your success throughout the entire game.
1.Your first turn you are going to want to make your pretender attack a province with your dominion in it blindly as a master lich or research enchantment and or conjuration because they are going to be the most important spell groups for now, and your spectator summoning another spectator. Your censor will be idle since you should not risk losing a commander your first turn.
2.Your second turn you will use your censor and his units to attack a province and have your pretender take units gathered in your capital and attack another province. your new spectator should begin to research while your first spectator should either research, or create another spectator. You should now control three provinces. You should continue to use your censor to attack and take over as many provinces as possible and be reinforced by free spawn commanders that come in a few turns. Your pretender will come back to your capital.
Your spectators are only level two in death magic and cannot summon greater summons since they often require three or more death magic.
Something you may have noticed or not, is that i have not chosen a prophet yet. This is because i always make my priest level three arch bishops prophets since they are much more powerful and since they are level three, become level four priests which can make your undead troops extremely powerful, move faster and have protection from banishments than a regular priest.
3.Turn three your pretender will reinforce his units, or if there is a freespawn commander, give all his units to that free spawn commander to go conquer other provinces. Make your pretender will cast the ritual spell to reanimate a dusk elder, so that the dusk elder can create other dusk elders and can create your arch bishops to create your prophet. You should continue expanding and when given a freespawn commander, using them to reinforce your commanders. if you have a censor low on troops, make him create a temple to spread your dominion and freespawn more troops instead of just standing there.
4.Turn four your dusk elder will research and if you have enough gems or stumbled upon a death gem giving cite, you should summon your arch bishop by this turn or the next turn. your pretender should now take all remaining troops regardless if there are freespawn commanders there and go conquer provinces.
5.Turn five you should be close to, or have your arch bishop by now and declaring them your prophet.
Your prophet and your pretender will most likely contain the largest armies based since they will be your most powerful leaders. Your mages will most likely be performing research for you in the early game and when you research conjuration 3 you will recieve dark knowlege. Dark knowlege allows your death mages to search distant provinces for death magic cites to help you gather more death gems each turn, and the more gems you have, the more summonings you create, which leads to higher research and bigger armies and so on.
You will feel a little overwhlemed from the amount of free spawn commanders you will get in late game but thats okay, because you may not even need to use all of them.
Be sure to buy province defense in provinces you need to keep a hold on it because without a leader or commander in that province, you will lose that province to the enemy since undead cannot fight battles without commanders.
Your play style is going to be all up to you. i use my mages more for support than leading armies, and i use my arch bishops as my main commanders since they can hold hundreds of undead under their command. Be sure to use whats right for you and go by a simple rule.
If you don’t have at least 10 provinces by turn 10, you are doing it wrong for this nation.
You are death, you are scourge of life itself, everyone fears your very existence and will do whatever is possible, even allying yourself with your worst enemies just to see everyone’s complete annihilation.
This nation is hard and can be confusing to play and has a ton of micro managing and if you can’t do that, you may not be very good at playing this nation.
OH and by the way you are going to fail. ALOT. especially if you are new to this game. Many people have put strategies out there to try and help players find a play style for a nation, but the truth is to experiment and play what is right for you, for the way you are going to play. Some players are too cautious with their master lich because they are afraid he is going to die in enemy dominion so they make him only a defensive SC, which is a mistake. Others become complacent with their master lich and soon realize that immortal means only immortal where you have white candles.
FAQ and Advice
If I am playing a disciple game and im playing MA Ermor, will my dominion kill the population still as a disciple?
– no, your dominion will not kill the population but also since there is no death, there will be no free spawn for you. As a disciple you will share the dominion and bless as your leader, not your own.
When should I start magic site searching during a game playing MA Ermor?
-whenever you have a spare spectator floating around but i would reccomend that you do when you have access to conjuration 3 spell dark knowledge, which allows you to search for death magic cites in far away provinces. Early cite searching leads to a more powerful MA Ermor, as long as you are able to keep those death cites from enemies.
Why does my dominion have to be so high as MA Ermor?
-your dominion is what kills people, which is what gives you freespawn units. without a strong dominion you will have very little free spawn and death and will be very weak. you don’t want someone placing a temple nearby and take your dominion over in your own provinces because your dominion is so weak. High dominion also gives you awe. 9 gives you 1, 10 gives you 3 awe. Awe is similar to fear, units have to make checks to be able to attempt to hit you or run away.
Who could I team up with as MA Ermor?
-very few nations do okay with MA Ermor. MA Ermor can basically never really have friends except for MA Asphodel, since they both kill everything. Sometimes it’s possible to play as MA R’lyeh with them and work together, but there must be a way for MA Ermor to kill its population and spread its dominion or else they will be very weak. Maybe the splinter kingdom from Ermor with the ghosts could, the ones that fight with undead and men.
What nation can counter MA Ermor?
-any nation or anyone with strong priests and lots of priests. R’lyeh can sometimes take you on and destroy you by blinking near your pretender and using a spell that literally kills your pretender instantly, which makes your whole army rout and you loose the entire battle. so those 6000 long dead just died. all of them. if you have a pretender that can sleep or is not undead, R’lyeh will gladly take advantage of you if and when they can. The good news is, not everyone knows how to play R’lyeh and it’s very rare for in single player for them to do this.
How do I counter those priests banishing the crap out of my armies?
-an arch bishop or any your priests can generally protect your undead a little from thier banishments.The arch bishop is the best at doing this, a prophet arch bishop is EXCELLENT as doing this. Remember, magical protection is what protects against banishments.
My pretender freaking died, what do i do?
-You gather your priests and select and action for them to do called ” call God ” and they will try and summon your pretender again. it takes many turns and the more priests and powerful the priests are, determine how fast your pretender arises again. when they do come back, they will take a -1 pentalty in each magic tree. if they have only one level in it, they will lose it completely. IF your pretender was immortal and died in your own dominion, he will be in your capital. don’t freak out if they die, there are always ways to work around it. you could even eventually get enough magic research to wish a dragon or some kind of creature SC to replace your pretender. maybe not magic-wise but hey its better than nothing. Also no matter how many times you pretender dies or if they are dead, their bless will always be the same.
Should I worry about this morale pentalty when putting units in squads?
-no often not unless they are a specialized unit like banes that has low morale compared to freespawn which is usually something you have summoned with gems. free spawn usually do not rout until thier commander has died or until their commander routs or an ENOURMOUS amount of them have died that made them drop 50 morale points.
I’m having hundreds of over gems but im really lacking in death gems, is there a way i can convert these gems i will probably never use except for rare cases forging, into death gems?
-yes! you can. All you need is to make one of your mages that has access to a lab do alchemy and break down gems into astral pearls, then those pearls into death gems. This can be an enourmous help for you. This being said, all magic gems are useful to all nations regardless of a specific gem they are wanting since gem conversion is possible. Having luck scales can give you that extra boost of having just enough gems to spawn that dusk elder and 30 turns down the road of research racks up a whopping 600 points alone. This can give you huge advantages in the mid to late game, especially if you are never going to use some of those gems. So why not have more death gems which the sacrifice of other gems you won’t need or use? 🙂
Independents attacked my province? Why am i losing land?
-Independents will attack your province if you are unlucky or have a province that is unlucky, have lots of turmoil or have lots of death which all lead to unrest in your provinces. This is because unrest can cause revolts and if you do not buy province defence, they will be easily taken over by simple independants. or if you are really unlucky in scales, a huge army will take over a province and keep it for a while. Thats the consequence from being anti-life on the earth and killing everything in your lands, the world will literally fight back against you. In forests there will be occasional vine men and giants that will attack you, always buy province defence when its needed. Good places to buy it are nearby or on thrones, when you are moving all of your troops to attack another province ( buy defence where they are leaving unprotected ) or a place that will be attacked soon or sometime in the future. Buying province defense will help you tremendously since stealing your lands and having you pull your thousands of undead back into your own provinces buys everyone time to build back up and destroy you. Burden of time usually helps to counter this. You could also just raid the land until the province turns to a population of 0 while getting some gold out of it.