Guide: Tomb Kings: The Honorable Dead

[LoloMo]

Which game is this? Would be interesting to read the AAR on this one!

[Frozen Lama]

Where else would it be but one of Sombre's insane casual games! come to irc and ask about Spumbum! in fact, i can tell you all about this undead menace

[Baalz]

I didn’t want to take away from Truman’s nice guide, but I did want to go into a bit of detail on my experience with the Tomb Kings which differed from his suggestions.

First off is a fairly fundamental choice you need to make on how the nation is going to be played. The large number of good sacred units (recruit everywhere!) along with good sacred mages does hint strongly to go for a good blessing. The thing is, you’ve got some really good non-sacred choices as well once you consider your national spells, and your higher end stuff (tomb king thugs, bone scorpions, Ushabti avatars) don’t really get much scarier with a bless. A double or triple bless costs you an awake pretender and scales, and even a single bless will usually cost you some diversity as you pick something for the blessing rather than to supplement your nation - along with pumping your dominion higher than you otherwise need it. Lets see how the nation looks once we take the necessity of a bless out of the equation.

For this nation, you really don’t need a whole lot of diversity, but you do have a bunch of expensive and resource intensive units, so nice scales are very welcome. Your national buffs transform your tomb guards into very efficient indie clearers, who can actually be more effective in combat than dual blessed buried. Counterintuitive? Well, consider that tomb guards are almost half as expensive as buried. Sure, they’re non-sacred status means upkeep will cost you longer term but for the short term you’re fielding twice as many troops. Thing is, you’re actually fielding more than twice as many troops because you’re now free to take production-3 scales and are not constrained by your dominion score holy limit. The tomb guards swing with a nice falchion, and after your national buff are connecting with 22 points of damage on a 12 attack. Their extra 6 points of body armor (compared to the buried) is actually very noticeable once you start stacking your national protection buff along with legions of steel along with your national regen buff. If your good scales build lets you field 3 times as many tomb guards as you would double/triple bless buried its not hard at all to see them perform comparably and even superiorly in many situations. Having more (non eating) troops helps out in lots of situations from storming castles to just making it take a lot longer for enemies to make it through your lines. Endurance is one of your real strengths that I’ll get more into in a bit, more troops are much better from this consideration.

The thing about Nehekhara is they’re very different than other undead specialist nations because they don’t really do chaff (at least not the kind you don’t summon on the battlefield). You don’t have any easy way to reanimate hoards of free longdead, but you do have lots of tools to make the undead you get much better. This has a concentrating effect which can be very bad when undead counters come out because it concentrates their effectiveness too, but it also means that every undead creature in the game is much better for you than it is for any other nation. The Nehekhara buffs are much more effective for melee than any other nation’s undead buffs. Protection, strength, and regen…along with long range healing spells – heck even mild skellispam becomes a formidable force. What’s better than skellispam though is when you start doing things like heavily buffed ghosts and wights with very little research.

Be careful though, this is a double edged sword. Your undead are so much more effective than anything else that you won’t want to recruit anything else. This. Will. Bite. You. Once you face somebody with just 4-5 herald lances and boots of quickness you’re going to be appalled at how fast your forces are decimated (do the math – that’s about 90 guys incinerated before you can close to melee…and you don’t have Ermorian numbers of troops!). Once your opponent sets up even a modest little communion and starts spamming wither bones all your nice super undead are going to be wiped out before you can even start swearing. Its not gonna matter how many guys you field when it starts raining cleansing water from just one W9 pretender (or a dozen W2 ones). Even fairly early anybody with D1 mages they can spare for the battlefield in any numbers are going to make you wish you’d never heard of dust to dust, likewise with solar rays….10 fairly cheap mages can make battles prohibitively expensive. As I said before, you really shine in endurance but that advantage goes away pretty fast if the enemy just kills you too fast. This is another of the reasons I think excellent scales will serve you better than a big bless – it lets you pretty easily diversify into non-undead indies. Lizards, knights, amazons…just watch for the cream of the indies and put castles up there. With production-3 scales they can be a significant portion of your troops that you’re very happy to have when your enemy gets tired of your supercharged undead and does something about it. Don’t neglect more ordinary maneuvers – legions of steel and weapons of sharpness can bring plain old indie infantry up to a reasonably scary force.

That’s not to say you should ignore your very solid national advantages. Particularly in the early game/expansion phase leaning on your awesome undead is going to give you a phenomenal opening. If you’re not going for a bless, there’s one pretender in CBM that I think stands head and shoulders above everything else for Nekhara, and it doesn’t have pincers. The Lord of the Gates generates free shades and shade beasts – which just like all other undead get supercharged. You’ve got some wiggle room, but I like squeezing nature in on him to, which will eventually get you into llamia queens, which will get you into bone fiends, which will get you into nearly Ermorian levels of undead only buffed to real scariness. But that’s further down the road, it also diversifies us into N and by being awake gives us a pretty amazing initial expansion.

As Truman points out, it’s easy to get one reanimator by prophetizing your initial scout. 1 free reanimator + freespawn from your pretender + production scales + national buffs = 1 indie clearing expansion party per turn. The shades do AN, MR-resist damage so they’re pretty darn effective against heavy cav and such. You’ve got great composite bow archers for clearing barbarians, lizards and such along with tower shields to catch unfriendly fire – you pretty much shouldn’t have any trouble expanding among the fastest nations. Your national spells will carry you a good long ways with no research – there’s no reason at all you can’t go through your first war quite successfully with no research at all (so long as you’re not facing heavy undead counters).

The best part about that explosive expansion is that about half of it is freespawns – you're just not dumping that much money out. Castle up (paying attention to the indies as I suggest) and those production scales will let you field impressively large armies very early – which are distressingly strong if your opponent is not well prepared for them. This is one of the keys in the early-ish game, a long slow cold war build up is a killer for Nehekhara. Ideally you don’t want your opponent pulling for good undead counters until after you’ve already poured over his border. Obviously that’s easier said than done when you’re expanding at the top of the pack, but still keep in mind that the longer they’re stockpiling herald lances and pushing for that nasty research the more painful it’s going to be for you. Time is not your friend.

That doesn’t mean that you’re weak as the game wears on, just that your gameplay has got to change significantly as the game goes on. It’s kind of like basing your early game on elephants – at certain point the counters are just too effective for your early “main” troops to carry the day. Indies – particularly the stronger ones are going to be nice supplements, but they’re really not going to beat down the best elites most nations are bringing to the fights. Let’s take a look at some of the tools in your toolchest (I’m repeating some of what Truman said in building an overall picture).

Tomb Kings. Well, duh, right? Well, this guy bears a bit of consideration. First off, he’s not undead. Yep, that’s right. Likely a design choice to keep them from reanimating but still this is an important strategic consideration as your opponent starts dropping anti-undead ordinance. The thing is, this guy does many things very well but thuggin’ aint one of them. First off, disabuse yourself of the idea that he’s immortal – he’s functionally not. An immortal is a guy you can use very aggressively because you don’t care if they die, but that’s certainly not the case for the tomb kings. Their second form (which they get when they die the first time) is drastically weaker, and while it’s truly immortal you’ll have a pretty tough time using it as a thug. Secondly, they just don’t have enough hitpoints to make it as a thug without mistform. To really be a reliable thug they need a lot of research and equipment which puts them as effective thugs about the time real SCs are coming out. Once you can give them starshine caps & coins, or air helms so they can jump around and they’re soul vortexing and phoenix pyring then they can be pretty nice raiders, but they just have to work a lot harder at it than first rate raiders like Eriu and will never be SCs like other 500 gold recruitables.

They are, though, army demolishers as long as you don’t ask them to do something they can’t. Instead of slapping a fire brand and golden shield on them, slap a skull staff and starshine helm, and once you get a couple rings of sorcery to pass around things get very, very interesting. Nehekhara PD is pretty good with lots of archers and morale 30 so consider some of the following with tomb kings doing the heavy lifting, buried sorcerers doing the grunt work and tomb priests lending the skellispam and buffs.

Wind guide + flaming arrows is not hard, adding in a few destructions is almost gratuitous…but too fun to skip.
Darkness is also easy, and all your archers have dark vision (while most of the enemy artillery probably doesn’t)
Soul vortex with some bodyguards = a lot of skellispam.
Corpse candles and willow wisps are great at tying up enemy artillery so your undead doesn’t get blasted as fast. You can buy yourself a surprising amount of time by stringing out and casting this a couple times each turn while you rotate your sorcerers through other spells. Corpse candles in particular are great as each casting gets you 5 of them, so for those big fights its not hard to have 10 showing up on the flanks each turn for the first few while spewing falling fires or whatever.
Rigor mortis stacks nicely with heat from hell in your heat dominion. Your undead don’t have heat resistance, but they’re immune to the rigor mortis so the bad guys pass out well ahead and none of their artillery mages can run away (spell casters pass out pretty quick). Summon earthpower and some reinvig items (your pretender got you into N) along with a skull staff and you can have darn near never ending skellispam while your casters are immune to the anti-undead stuff that’s raining down but the enemy is passing out. Note: your non undead casters by default are not immune to the fatigue, but they’ll be fine with that hefty reinvig. Oh, your troops are enc-0 as well, further tipping the fatigue rate as the enemy starts swinging at them.
Fire elementals fold brilliantly into this strategy, slap them with iron warriors as long as you’re at it. Bad guys will be scripted to blast undead while these guys burn merrily through their rapidly passing out ranks followed by more skellispam to help them mop up. Things get real nasty, real fast and most of the anti-undeadary is not going to be able to do much at long range in darkness (you’ve got everything you can set all the way back on your side) so the advancing enemy melee rapidly finds itself without much support.
Add penetration boosters (rune smashers are a great win if you can line them up)
Wind of death with penetration then retreat (no reason to use just one caster) = *NASTY*
D4-5 casters with penetration spamming shadow blast = *NASTY* (this spell scales well with mage power)
Soul drain + repeated bone grindings = *NASTY*
Eye of aiming + aim/wind guide + banefire = *NASTY* (for the big targets)

So, as your research ramps up, attacking into your stout PD becomes very, very painful. By the time the anti-undead artillery is done chewing up your PD your skellispam is shuffling forward all the while your mages are wreaking havoc. Your one-two punch with the fatigue damage means enemy casualties are high when the route. You’ll want to stockpile some winged boots and just have squads ready to jump in and support the PD you pump up in the face of enemy aggression…they will get very frustrated. Thugs/SCs get bane fired or drain lifed, big armies get groin kicked by one of many different angles and all those fancy anti undead muscle can’t even clear out your (mage supported) PD.

On the offense, you’re going to have a bit more trouble in the face of bad anti-undeadery. Depending on what you’re facing buffed tomb scorpions may be fairly resistant and smushify people fast enough to keep from being toppled – particularly if you use some diversion tactics and buff the scorpions well. Ethereal & luck along with a gift of flight and the national regen spell will make your scorpions go a lot further.

The scorpions are good, but I don’t find them near as awesome as many people seem to on first glance. Sure they’re good if you use them in their niche, but they’re too easy to counter and pretty expensive when you do. Crushers won’t hurt them, but they will do an excellent job of holding them still while lighting or just man’s cross or piercers or visions foe or thunder bows tear them up pretty quick. Holy scourges/flambeauxs will pop them on any light thug. Their MR is fairly low compared to thugs, so a couple guys spamming control the dead will turn them back on you. Also, their protection and regen isn’t *that* good, any top line infantry will tear them apart relatively easily. Use them conservatively as special forces and they’ll do well enough, but if you lean on them too heavily they’ll let you down. Actually, what I prefer is to use behemoths. For the cost of a mage to cast iron warriors you can get 3 times as many behemoths for the gems, with 3 times as many hitpoints, 3 times as much regen and 3 times as fast smushifying.

Servants of Horus are pretty nasty if you’re fighting most of the non national SCs (demons/undead), but otherwise they’ll mostly be pulling linebacker duty so your mages can blow apart the guys set to demolish undead (which your indie heavy support can do just as well).

Anubites are not bad, but I’ve yet to be in a game where I’m wondering what to spend my E gems on. In a pinch you can use them but you’ll probably have better leverage using your E gems elsewhere.

Ushabti pretty much the same.

Ushabti Avatars though, these are some nice SCs. Not undead so they can trounce in and shove some herald lances back…um, well you get the idea. In my game I got a couple W/N combo avatars which added a nice foul vapors addition to my undead armies.

As you pull into late game, assuming you’ve leveraged into a bit of blood via llamia queens I already suggested bone fiends but don’t neglect some other nice support that opens up. Blood rain stacks with wailing winds very nicely with morale-30 troops and there’s not really any reason not to take death-3/heat-3 scales to give a pretty good chance of starving enemies. My real goto for your blood economy though is Lifelong Protections. You shouldn’t have too much trouble getting to the point to crank out one or two per turn and they work *great* in combination with iron bane and a bunch of archers – the imps knock off the armor and keep the enemy from advancing very quickly to the archers while the archers rain down death on their naked pink bodies. Seems expensive, but just try a couple battles with a half dozen lifelong protections in play and you start seeing how overwhelming they are – its just like skellispam, it’s all about critical mass. Even better, they complement skellispam very well and do a great job of adding to your screening attempts for your undead – particularly as you’re leveraging darkness. 4-5 lifelong protections on 4-5 skellispamers is a pretty considerable flow of darkvisioned troops, and if you bring 10 for a big battle it generally doesn’t matter what undead counters they brought. (hint, all your troops are immune to half of your rigor mortis/heat from hell combo as well as freshly streaming in at 0 fatigue). They can blast all the cleansing water they want, once they pass out your guys are still piling up to tear the flesh from their bones. Quagmire will help you with this effort to, supplied by those same llamia queens.

Fighting imps off in the darkness, passing out from the one-two (three) fatigue punch, corpse candles constantly streaming in on their flanks with winds of death, soul drain and bone grindings blowing away their armies and banefire uncannily sniping their SCs. Shadow blasts carving chunks out of their lines and neverending skellispam overwhelming the stoutest troops and most heinous undead counters. While time isn’t on your side strategically, it certainly is tactically - your tireless troops will be marching right over the smoldering and stiffening corpses of their enemies pretty much regardless of what they’re fielding.