well there might be a bug with my version then, i've had battles where i've lost only, a bunch of dragonflies, but didn't recieve any of them back afterwards, unless it's only supposed to work on humanoid troops. which is very annoying.

I like diplomacy. It is nice when you have some common units like pirates on islands. You are bound to lose some every now and then and diplomacy gets your army filled in next fight. It is also nice when you use some hard to replace units that are quite common foes like evil beholders or inquisitors. For more efficiency you can use maxed scouting, check how many of same unit enemy has and split 5% of that to reserve.

But it is fairly expensive skill so I don't see much use to take more than 1 point.

I had griffins in my army most of the time on my first playthrough and I can say for a fact that altho their class is 'neutral' (same as dragonflies) they do indeed get resurrected after the battle. Perhaps you are bugged.

Is it automatic?

Yes. After the battle ends and you're back to world map, a little window just pops up saying X of creature Y were resurrected.

it doesn't occur for me, so i'm guessing the GG DD version is bugged, both the 1.6.4 and 1.6.5 versions. and going through the skills files it doesn't have any scripts designated to the skill which means it's hardcoded, so GG users are curently SOL.

It worked for me. I have the atari version...

Yep, I played my first game with the Necro skill tagged, and I never saw this popup at all. And I downloaded from Gamersgate. :confused:

does it only work if your entire troop dies? that's the way the skill reads. I've not invested points in it to check b/c it doesn't seem very useful if your troop has to die completely.

Well, if that's the case then it's not worth having, bman. There are much better skills to invest in.

In terms of the three spell classes, I am thinking now that Distortion is the best discipline of them all. It has very useful spells like Haste, Slow, Trap, Phantom and perhaps Pain Mirror too. By contrast I am finding Order to be less important. Chaos is poor early (except for level 1 fireball which owns everything at the beginning of the game as a Mage). However, Chaos becomes very important in the endgame. Therefore I would put the order of priority for upgrading, when playing as a Mage, as this:

1. Distortion

2. Chaos (hard to get to in the early game)

3. Order

Thoughts on the above? Am I selling Order short?