Seeking input on an exclusively Undead army
 

Thanks for reading.

So I'm about to finish the game with a Paladin, and I'm considering next time through playing as a Mage and using a fully undead army as soon as I get the chance. I'm relying pretty hard on Resurrection in my current game, but I figure if I can load up on Cursed Ghosts and Ancient Vampires and Sacrifice them, it'll make up for it and I'll even be able to replenish troops that died in previous battles--impossible with Resurrection.

My concern is that with the games randomization system, I may not be able to find the troops I need, or they may be very limited. In this current game (my first), I only found Ancient Vampires at the Dwarven Necromancer in Kordar and Necromancers didn't show up until Demonis (!).

Anyway, the idea is I would be able to dual-cast each turn, and I could hypnotize / sacrifice or just blast away or whatever. I'd have the zombie wife for the bonus speed and initiative which would come in handy for the entire game.

So the problems I'm foreseeing are a limited availability of the [I]good[I] undead units and the fact that a fully undead army would limit me to pretty low level units, given that Bone Dragons just suck. *I posted a question earlier about the mechanics of Necromancy and Necro Call, as I'm not sure exactly how these work. If someone could help me out here or on that post, I'd really appreciate it and it may change my whole position on this idea.

Anyway, just wanted some input on what people thought, if anyone had tried this before, etc.

Thanks a lot for reading this whole rant! :neutral:

curious if the Necromancers' raise dead ability is permanent or if the raised troops vanish after the battle.

I tried it, and gave up fairly quickly (around level 10 or so).

Availability of undead troops is kinda limited, but worse, variety is as well.

They're just ... boring to use. Now you can put animals in your army and their morale won't suffer, so for a while I was using Royal Snakes, Ghosts, Skeletal Archers (gads are these guys brittle), and Vampires off and on. Throw in Ancient Bears when I could find them, and it's a decent army I suppose. Get that skill (can't remember name) that gives nice bonuses to undead, and I suppose it could be effective.

But the lack of variety and availability convinced me early on to give up the ghost, so to speak.

sadly i haven't encountered Cursed Ghosts, otherwise i'd give them a try...

The normal ones are kinda unimpressive.

I've been keeping track of all the different vendors in my games. Thus far, between Darion, Kordar, and Isles, there are a total of 8 places where you can buy undead creatures. None of them had any vampires or necros for sale, just your basic units. So I would say getting an undead only army would be tough. Too bad though because the undead in HOMM were brutal.

Well, it depends from game to game, since recruit roster is random in every game.

Best strategy is to plan what to use based on what is available in your current game, instead of planning before you ever start playing.

Bone Dragons - They don't suck, they are just different than the other Dragons. The skill that the Bone Dragons have is still an excellent skill. Poison damage to all surrounding cells i great. I agree they are not quite as good the others, but they are still decent units.

As far as Vampires go - in the Marshan Swamp you can pick up the casket's. Don't they spawn vampires? Can't remember which variety though. Probably not the ancient ones.

The undead recruiting is not that random. Sure you may get Cursed Ghosts from one vendor rather than regular Ghosts. But the point I was trying to make is that they just aren't very many places to buy undead troops. If I were to start a third game, I was thinking about going all undead just to be different. But looking at the available troop vendors, I don't think it will be possible.

i dont really see why they choose to make undead units so sparse yet still they have skills that work exclusively for undead only

I really want to make a paladin controlling only undeads but after reading that the undead are hard to come by i might not be possible.

If you really wanted maybe it can be possible on hard or so. ghosts and cursed ghosts are really good because they only increase but im having big troubles with the increasing amounts since i must kill them off myself (any solutions to this one?) so does vampires but they are rare as hell : /

Any more input on undead army?

BTW Great game

Devmoon: I'm not sure how much this will help due to the randomness of the game, but if you can find the spell Sacrifice, then the ghost problem will be solved and will become a boon; you can use Sacrifice to destroy your own units and give a number of units to another troop based on hit points (obviously the the spell level, the higher the damage done and percentage raised). This doesn't work like Resurrection in that you can raise units with Sacrifice beyond the number that you started a battle with.
I just discovered the usefullness of this spell at the end of the game (I use it with Hypnotize where I can find low level units), and I find it very handy in that while there is nowhere around to hire Knights, I can Hypnotize a stack for 500 or 600 spiders, Sacrifice them and then spawn mre Knights without having to trek back to a castle.
Good deal. Hope this helps.

its just that sacrifice seems by reading this forum abit OP and i really dont want to relay on that, but if i want an army mainly made up of undeads there might be no other choice : /

Sacrifice is abusing the games mechanics.

Iknow the game intended you to switch units but hey there are alot of undeads, and they even made some spells only for the undeads so why make them so weak and few in numbers?

there must be some kind of workaround to getting the undead skille to use and have an undead army.

I was thinking high lvl plague for example.

I disagree that it abuses the game mechanics. I mean, you're permanently losing units, so why not permanently gain other units, with penalties in lowered percentages of raised HP plus the cost of mana and a turn in combat (spell use)?

I feel like since the Mage has lower Leadership and combat attributes, it makes sense that he would rely on clever use of magic to maintain an effective army.

Im just tired of having to be so utterly careful about my army to not run out of troops and stuff.

The better units are so sparse its insane. Because of this im using houndreds of a bit lower level units. This is the reason i thought about undeads, they are good in numbers :-P

So anyone have any experience with undead armies and the undead spells?

I think undead would be a viable and pleasant option if there was some sort of resurection of the fallen skill that not only works on your own losses but on the enemy's losses as well.

Say if you killed an enemy army of mages and you lost x necromancers that the necromancers would be replenished out of your own losses but also out of the destroyed forces. This would be a very welcome strategy for the warrior who has limited acces to sacrifice and resurection and money making the skills. I think there is a certain reason why the dark commander is a might skill. I think warriors are supposed to be using undead with maybe a mix of black & red dragons in between them for later game.

There is few ways to handle ghosts multiplying too fast..
-Reserve skills. Keep only about 80% of max leadership of ghosts. And put extras in reserve. Of course if you lose control in battle this won't help.
-Healing. Cast heal on ghost stack if you lose control. It will kill some.
-Sacrifice. Use ssacrife spell on ghosts to make other units.

Do you loose controll of a unit mid combat if their numbers are too big? Or does this only happen when you start the combat with too big of numbers?


If it is the latter, you could always just garrison the excess post combat.

Could be both. If some friendly units join you that take you over the leadership cap, then you go into a battle those units will be out of control at the onset.

It could happen in combat (especially on hard and impossible), after using sacrifice or ghost killing some enemies. Not so great ;)

If you are lucky and get sacrifice very early in the game, you could have an army of:

Ghosts
Cursed Ghosts
Vampires
Ancient Vampires
Skeleton Archers

by the time you are ready to go to Freedom Isles. There are two shipwrecks, one in Greenwort and one in Arlania. Hopefully that will grant you at least Cursed Ghosts, but better if you get both. Vampires and Ancient Vampires can be obtained in small numbers in the graveyard via coffins lying on the map (already mentioned earlier). You would have to use sacrifice to bolster their numbers. Skeleton Archers should be available via shipwreck or one of the vendors in the graveyard. You also have a very high chance of getting a small stack of friendlies from a sarcophagus. Personally I would stay away from skeletons and zombies because they're not my style, but you'll get small stacks of friendlies in the graveyard and in the Freedom Isles graveyard on the Western Islands.

I think this would work, using hypnotize/sacrifice plus the soul draining ability of your ghost stacks to top off your vampire and skeleton archer stacks. Also, vampires life steal up to their original number plus they have the no retaliation ability, so they are fairly durable. Skeleton Archers would die in droves, but they'd be easy to replace. With a mage's intelligence, you could restore 100+ skeleton archers per casting of sacrifice.

Now, the problem is that your only upgrades from that initial army are Bone Dragons and Necromancers. You can get a Bone Dragon egg in the Gremlin Castle, but Necromancers are not available until late in the game.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I don't think Necromancy gives you extra units. It just minimizes your losses by giving you back a % of dead units at the end of battle. Necro Call gives you extra undead in combat, but they only last for the duration of that combat, so that's not terribly useful either. But again, I haven't used either of these skills extensively so don't quote me on it. :)

Honestly, I agree with the other posters that it would probably get boring playing with the same army for most of the game. But the only way to know for sure is to go for it. :-P

Why keep the same army ?

You can always just switch some of the units into dragons ...
As far as i know "neutral animals" do not get negative morale from undead.
At least the black dragons didn't so you can replace whatever u want ( probably the lesser ghosts & vampires by black and red dragons) Zombies are also very durable and you can get their speed up with a mass haste
(since movement is problem for all undead) Still getting your army back after the battle to full should be the undeads primary force.

This would allow a pure warrior to be balanced vs mages / paladins concerning expenditures on troops imo ... Thats the whole idea of undead no ?

I assumed the goal was to use an undead army through the whole game. If not, there's definitely room to upgrade to better units...somewhere around level 1 there are better units available. :-P

I am playing with part undead army. It really seems to me only units worth using are ghosts/cursed ghosts and skeleton archers.

Ghosts are great when you have sacrifice. They keep multiplying and replacing other troops.

Skeleton archers have great damage but they die very very easily and enemy ranged really likes to target them. So you need to keep replacing them all the time. Only way for that is sacrife. It is impossible to find enough of them.

Vampires I found very unimpressive. It is much better to use royal snakes or griffins which are animals and don't mind undeads. Ancient vampires I have never seen for sale.

To play whole undead army you need sacrifice. It is a MUST!
Once you reach dwarves land you can sneak into demonis for black knights and necromancers (awesome unit, i nearly lost battle because of them when fighting againt this undead boy on swamps, 60n raising 40n? OMG!)
Both vampires suck as much as werewolf sadly but you can get them easily from coffins.
Cursed ghost are great.
Zombie are tought and hard hitting but no interesting abilities.
Skeletons archers can pump tons of damage but die easly.

note: You will miss animate dead spell from homm3 :), using sacrifice all the time can get boring. I know because once i reached dwarves land i rushed to demonis to get demon wife (impossible fight, thx god for Armageddon) and demon army and now in elves land i am using sacrifice a lot.

Interesting idea try it and post progress :).

I'm using the Sacrificial_knife mod that let's me transform some of the units to undeads. Having a lot of fun with it and contrary to others, I find vampires quite strong when you start to get decent sized stacks. In bat form, I'd have to try hard to lose some in a battle vs living ennemies. You just send them into ennemies (magic spring, stoneskin, etc if you wanna be SURE not to loose any) and wait them just in front so on ennemy turn they get attacked, vamp retaliates, leech/revive, vamp attack before end of round kill/revive more. New round vamp start first (high init with rina zombie), kill remaining ranged/block them, etc etc etc. Ennemies rarely attack anything else when vamps are in close range too. I hope i'll find the vampire specific set (+20% hp +5 att/def other stuff).

They were really awesome for boss fights too. In normal form they really have a high crit rate and (always) no retal so attack boss with vamp, kill summoned stacks with everything else. If vamp gets attacked by boss, change in bat form and revive by attacking the boss (yep, it works.) I've never had an easier spider boss fight.

The only problems right now are huge stack of skeleton archers and other undead armies (not looking forward to Undead land.. NO leeching.), plants (not really, too weak) and cyclops.

Playing on hard, paladin.