Necromancer Tips Thread - Conquest of Elysium 3

Please post your Necromancer related tips here!

Raise dead increases your insanity by six for every use. Thus you get the deal if you only raise dead in spots where you sense a strong presense of the dead. Raising dead where you sense a strong presense gets around 10-17 longdead and an equal number of souless. Raising the dead where you sense a presense will get around 6 longdead. Soulless are generally inferior as they are slow and limit your army to two moves per month.

Raise dead seems to be most useful for bolstering your army early in the game. It is probably better use use your apprentice to raise dead so that you can save your main Necromancer for more useful things like Major Summoning or transformation into a vampire or lich. Also, you can hire additional apprentices through special recruitment.

It doesn't seem possible to reverse insanity, so

I've been experimenting with Major Summoning lately and I've gotten these results so far. For 80 hands, it yields much better units than Minor Summoning which costs 20 hands.

Banshee: Very powerful unit that can use fear and death wail (save vs magic or die) against an entire rank of enemies. However it seems she needs to be in the front rank to use her attacks. The banshee is positioned at mid normally, so you will not be able to use normal meat-shields to block if you want to take advantage of the banshee's abilities.

Tartarian spirit: Commander unit, can cast two spells per turn, very powerful. It is positioned in the mid, but is strong enough to solo small groups. It can attack twice with Tartarian chains, which can enslave enemies that it hits (MR save negates this).

Ziz: Flying undead siege unit. Throws a siege boulder (1-60 damage). Cannot heal.

Undead dragon: Front rank melee tank. Not the best unit considering it cannot heal.

Abomination: It starts with about 130 HP, but raise it several points a month by by leaving it on a tile where the dead are present. Possibly useful for attacking small groups of NPCs since it can use it's incorporate attack to absorb enemies and gain health. The health boost is rather slow though, so it is not as useful as a troll or ent for tanking.

Death Knight: 33 HP level 2 Necromancy spellcaster positioned at mid. He can also raise dead, but he can't use the Necromancy ritual to increase his spellcasting power. He's also fast and can move four square when not encumbered by troops. Unfortunately, regular Necromancer recruitment doesn't include cavalry or other fast units so he'll have to travel alone unless you can summon some fast companions for him.

Edited by: spartacus7

Insanity can be reveresed by upgrading your Necro.

Those white soulless guys are slow (snail icon on the units display) so whenever I Raise Dead I leave those behind as guards.

On the other hand the others you get on Raise Dead have an added ability of being able to go into the water, so early in the game I hope for a Mound King so I can give them all to him to move around the coastline exploring. As an ocean raider he is very handy for moving behind the enemy and taking things so that they turn back to try and stop it. That gives me more time to expand before they reach me.

gp1628 wrote: Insanity can be reveresed by upgrading your Necro.

Thanks, this is good to know. How high do you allow insanity to go before upgrading? I am guessing that if you let it go to 96 or 100, the apprentice would almost be constantly insane, making it difficult to perform the upgrade ritual.

Actually I follow your other suggestion of using apprentices to raise the dead. When they get too high I just try and park them someplace useful and forget them.

But my main character does sometimes get tempted So its nice that as long as I dont let it get too far that I will be able to undo it on him later

Edited by: gp1628

One trick that i discovered about the necromancer is if you have your necromancer do a minor summon you should want to hope for ghouls a the start for the following reasons
-whenever a ghoul kills a humanoid creature you get another one
-they are ok in attack power for a cheap unit and make a really nice meat wall when you have alot of them
-you steal your foes army if they are humanoid replenishing your ranks as you fight them

There is a rumor that you are more likely to get mummy if you summon on certain sites (pyramids?). I find mummy to be very handy as a guard on important sites near the front lines. Or even just drop him near some other persons capital to keep an eye on it. If it gets killed you get it back.

If you have a temple nearby then it is definitely worth the effort to push thru a few upgrades to get a DemiLich. LOTS of fun!

Playing teams with Necro can be fun. Play with Baron or Senator and follow them around to gather up the undead from each of their kills. Play with High Priest even better because you can both use each others cities even if units are left there to maintain ownership. You can gather undead from his and e can gather slaves from yours

So would sacrifices generate dead people in this game

Good question. Kristoffer might like that idea, that using sacrifices to summon should increase the dead count.
I know that combat does. Also there is a starting amount at each location which seems to increase for some sites.

Edited by: gp1628

My strategy with necro is just to A) Use the apprentices very wisely, and B) Whenever you see a graveyard or old battlefield or anything like that, SUMMON THERE. (With your apprentice.)

Does anyone here dislike the demilich besides me?

So far, I like the demi-lich well enough. The one thing that bugs me is that he's immobile, which makes it hard to visit libraries and get more spells. Either I'll get used to it and just learn to leave some corpses in the library if I'm planning on making a demilich, or I'll mod it to normal movement. (After all, why can't you just order a zombie to pick up your skull and bones and move it for you?)

In any case, the combination of teleportation, immortality, and non-magical invulnerability is great fun.

-Max

Edited by: wilsonmax