Rod of Death Broken?

[Hellboy]

Recently when doing some SP testing I was not able to get the Rod of Death wielder to cast Control Death at all. I tried with a couple of different commanders w/ no magic skill, and neither would cast Control Death, instead they behaved as if they were under Stay Behind Troops order. I tried Rod of Authority and O'l Khan's Sceptre w/ the same commanders and those worked fine, so I'm not sure what the problem was here.

Has anyone else gotten the Rod of Death to work on casting Control Death?

[lch]

Hm, is the commander that you gave the rod to able to command undead beings? Click on his Leadership ability to make sure...

[Evilhomer]

maybe a stupid question, but did your opponent have undead units ?

[mivayan]

A range issue? range 20 is about a third of the whole battlefield

edit:
This was just added to the bug shortlist (so ignore my suggestion):

ITEM ?? Rod of Death: Control the Dead not castable as item spell.

[RonD]

I made a test game and gave 59 to a 434. Positioned the 434 at the front of the battle formation, facing off against a group of 192 (and their related ilk).

The 434 used the 59 to cast Control the Dead just fine.

[Hellboy]

It might be a range thing. I certainly haven't tested this exhaustively, but once I found a leader robust enough to stand on the front of the battle screen for more than a round, he did in fact cast the spell.

I suspect that the problem I am having is that if the leader holding the item is not in range, he falls back to a default behavior of "Stay behind troops", he then moves behind my archers, which means (in this particular battle), he remains out of range for the entire battle. With a little further testing it looks like there's a reasonable workaround in that you can order the leader to "hold or cast spells". The downside of this would be that you can only do this for 5 rounds, and if you're not in range by then, your leader will likely start to back track again. But at least in my limited test, this was not a problem, and the caster did stay in position unil the enemy undead came within range.

If I am correct in the above analysis, this is probably not a big deal (especially as there seems to be an easy workaround), but I'm not sure this is the ideal behavior for leaders w/o magic but scripted to cast item magic.

[Gandalf Parker]

You can also use "attack" as the first command and try to position him so that he will reach the battle without getting killed. That basically says "run toward the battle"