Wiping out the Undead

[Ice_Sickle]

I'm looking to wipe out huge armies of undead. I've got some pretty good forces, reasonable gem income, most types of mages, and research at 6-9 in all areas but blood.

The undead I'm facing are longdead legionaires and longdead horsemen mainly (armored anyway). I'm still an newbie at this so it would help me immensely in your responses if you didn't use too much shorthand.

Thanks!

[Cheezeninja]

Look at forging some Herald Lances (a one handed astral weapon i cant remember the exact specs for)

Mass build priests, also the fire spell holy pyre works quite well.

Set death mages to casting the thaumaturgy spells dust to dust and wither bones.

[ July 17, 2004, 00:03: Message edited by: Cheezeninja ]

[Taqwus]

Flaming arrows also help. A front line of high-prot, 0-enc, unbreakable troops (e.g. Living Statues, Mechanical Men, Crushers) can help a lot; most undead will have trouble hurting them, except for the lance attacks from the longdead horse.

Killing commanders will help more than usually; kill all the enemy commanders with undead leadership and the mindless hordes will dissolve.

Spells that scale well (battlefield-bLasters, orb lighting, others) will help.

[Norfleet]

Undead of that sort have several weaknesses: They are flammable, conduct electricity, are highly susceptible to priesting, and are weak against point-blank annihilation. Just nuke 'em like they were anything else. Wrathful Skies or Firestorm are good options for annihilating them en-masse.

[alexti]

Flames from the sky work nicely. Triple-casting it will reduce the army to about 1/8 of its original size. If they're hiding behind domes, flamestorm works nice too. Mass-wither-bones is another good strategy.

[Cainehill]

But are any of those suggestions better than D3 mages casting Wither Bones? I mean - big area of effect; decent damage; unresisted by armor or MR.

Sure, it's a high research spell - but within the ... 6-9 range he has researched in everything but blood.

Not that hard to get D3 mages either with that research - obviously death magic will do the trick, but so will nature. (Lamia Queens start with D2 I think, and easily get D3. And the first LQ can create staff of skulls to get to D3.) Then there's national / thematic mages, in addition to death / nature.

Although ... It does eventually start to seem like _every_ nation needs nature magic, given that the Chalice and GoH are the only things that heal wounds on all pretenders, and both require nature.

Anything other than Nature and Death give decent death mages as a summonable?

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by alexti:
Flames from the sky work nicely. Triple-casting it will reduce the army to about 1/8 of its original size. If they're hiding behind domes, flamestorm works nice too. Mass-wither-bones is another good strategy.

In my experience, triple or quadruple casting flames from the sky will only kill 1/2 of the troops at most, since the half that are outside of the camp are outside of the camp for every casting of the army killing rituals.

[spirokeat]

50 gold priests, drag their old carcasses out of the priory and away from the port, cheese and choir boys. Send squadrons of them with high prot protection in front of them.

And archers, they tear up the longdead.

Spiro

[Boron]

Originally posted by Cainehill:



Although ... It does eventually start to seem like _every_ nation needs nature magic, given that the Chalice and GoH are the only things that heal wounds on all pretenders, and both require nature.

Anything other than Nature and Death give decent death mages as a summonable?

vampire lords are decent death mages but you need death 4 blood 3 to summon them so for the first one you most likely will have to take this on your pretender.
fortunately the vampire lords are death 3 blood 3 and +1 death via items is an easy task so once the first is summoned via pretender they can summon themselves with only 1 +1death item .

edit : finally ether lords have death 2 + 1 random sorcery , so 1/4 chance for death 3

[ July 17, 2004, 11:48: Message edited by: Boron ]

[alexti]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

quote:

---

Originally posted by alexti:
Flames from the sky work nicely. Triple-casting it will reduce the army to about 1/8 of its original size. If they're hiding behind domes, flamestorm works nice too. Mass-wither-bones is another good strategy.

In my experience, triple or quadruple casting flames from the sky will only kill 1/2 of the troops at most, since the half that are outside of the camp are outside of the camp for every casting of the army killing rituals.

---

I'm pretty sure, the affected half is taken from whatever is in the province when the casting is resolved. I had somewhat long war with Ermor and every time I was able to kill most of his army with multiple castings. With majority of Ermor's hordes being low on HP, flames from the sky tend to kill most of the targeted half. It was very encouraging to see those huge 2000+ armies to go down to 300 in one turn