Life after Death Blessing oddities

[Chris Byler]

A friend of mine is playing around with the Death 9 blessing, and got some odd results:

1. Sacred units killed while blessed return as mindless undead. (This isn't so odd but I'm pointing it out for people who don't know what Death 9 does.)

2. However, if you have no commanders with undead leadership present, they continue to fight normally. They don't dissolve like mindless undead should. (These and the following points discuss non-commander sacred troops.)

3. Afterward they appear in the organization screen in the same squad they were in when alive. However, they can't be assigned to a new squad under the same commander (because he can't command undead). You can assign all the living members of that squad to a new squad though...

4. In subsequent battles they still fight normally (even under a commander who can't command undead, and with no commanders who can command undead present).

Finally, and just for humor value: if you're doing this with Abysia, watch out, your heat auras can set your reanimated troops on fire. (Even that doesn't rout them, though - they're mindless.)


Frankly, the stats on the reanimated troops seem bad enough that I don't think Death 9 is particularly impressive compared to the other level 9s. It seems to me that you should at least get something reasonably powerful (about wight or lictor level) - although that would be pretty impressive if you started with flagellants, most sacred troops cost 30 and up each. Getting a soulless doesn't seem like much of a consolation for losing them.

[trebuchet]

Interesting. I guess the return-to-life bonus would be a bit problematic if it required a commander capable of leading undead to work.

As far as the relative power of the death bonus, I don't see it as too much of a problem. Obviously all the different types of bonuses aren't going to work equally well for all types of sacred troops. I'm curious, though... do the slain troops remain sacred when they return to life?

[Pocus]

I'm too under the impression that the feature is not polished. Transforming blessed troops into soulless (armored or not) if they are humanoids, and into nothing if they are not (hydras) is not satisfactory.

The perfect thing would be to have something like 10 sub categories, and assign each blessed troop into one of these categories. That would not be perfect, but at least it would allow more precision. Like vestals and valkyries transforming into a female ghost, flagellants as low level undead (but not mindless I think), and beasts into a quadrupedal ghostly animal.

[HJ]

Well, tomb wyrms are already there as one subCategory for the snake-like critters. And then there are longdead horsemen for riders, and several Versions of soulless (I just saw the Caelum Version recently). What else would be needed?

[MStavros]

Yes life after death sucks. I know that this wasn't a constructive post (lol), but this is the truth.

[Treebeard]

As I've posted in the bug thread, life after death just doesn't work for the holy serpents. It's a pity, if they transformed into tomb wyrms that would make the 200 point desert tomb theme a viable option.

Originally posted by HJ:
Well, tomb wyrms are already there as one subCategory for the snake-like critters. And then there are longdead horsemen for riders, and several Versions of soulless (I just saw the Caelum Version recently). What else would be needed?