Carrion Woods Reanimations

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:
Sorry, I wasn't very clear.

There are only changes in the reanimation, but I wanted some general feedback as well.

Sorry, I missed that.

>Reanimations

Some are nice, some are really nice, but this is a very slow way to build an army (and expensive in nature gems, which could be used to summon things as Pangaea usually do, except CW can't), and conventionnal troops eat up your treasury fast.

>Dominion based reanimation

Seems weak with a low dominion, I haven't tried otherwise yet.

>Survivability of manikin

On par with your basic undead. Better than completely unarmored soulless or longdead though.

>Power of manikin

The stun damage is great vs heavies. Otherwise nothing to write home about.

>Power of unholy spells

I find the battlefield-wide prayers more than OK, and I like the fact that the small area regen prayer seems to target big critters first (hmmm, regenerating Carrion tramplers).

>Research - reanimate trade off

No real issue here since I use Dryads for research and Carrion leaders to reanimate and lead armies.

>Comparisons with Ermor

Much much weaker. Can't get wet on top of that.

Some more suggestions.

1) All nature gems are used to summon carrion priests, so death magic is in fact the main school of CW. I've never been able to cast Mother Oak or even Call of the Wild...

2) Curiously, death magic gives no "national" units to CW, unlike Ctis and Jotun.
IMHO Reanimation, Animate Skel. and Raise Skel. sould give manikins. Animate/Raise Dead should give mandragoras. Undead Horde should give both. Pale Riders sould give carrion cavalry. Carrion Reanimation should give mandragoras (yes that's powerful, but Ench 7 is a long term target for CW). Maybe 10% of stronger carrion beasts, like the undead giants of Jotunheim.

3) The price of carrion priests seems too high and should be slightly reduced IMHO. They are mostly used to reanimate and to cast unholy spells. Nature magic is thematic but practically useless and should not count in their price.
Or give indep priests unholy powers, instead of holy powers (like Ermor IIRC). But who will summon the expensive (in gems) carrion priests then ?
And I suggest to add some death magic to the carrion Lords. They are dead after all. What about, say, 3xUnholy + 2xDeath + 1xNature ? Still in the theme, and not higher than the Apostate.

4) Minor problem : other vine units (vine men/ogre and dark vines) should logically benefit from the special unholy spells.

5) Manikins are good when in large numbers. 3/1 seems a minimum against human HI, and archery fire can decimate them at long range. But autosummoning is very slow, even with a strong dominion. No problem if you control a large empire. Exemple : 20 provinces (including 5 forests) in a strong dominion can give you every turn about 20 manikins + 1 mandragora + 5 carrion beasts (including 1 powerful stuff every 4 turns or so). OTOH 5 Carrion Ladies can give you 2x less manikins but 4x more powerful beasts, even on a small map. So I always give priority to reanimation, over autosummoning.

Cheers

And I posted my guide for Carrion Woods here
http://www.freewebs.com/dominions2/cw.html

Thanks to Pocus and Mike for their comments.

Cheers

[Kristoffer O]

Several good points.

The lack of battle summoning is indeed a big difference compared to Ermor. Manikin Versions of raise dead might be the way to go.

The regenerating undead is an oversight. Not sure if it matters much (thematically). It is indeed useful on summoned undeads.

Has anyone tried quick roots to get carrion beasts into battles quickly. The horse carrion is incredibly quick when 'blessed' and can compensate for some of the problems with manikin dying before they reach the enemy.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:
Has anyone tried quick roots to get carrion beasts into battles quickly. The horse carrion is incredibly quick when 'blessed' and can compensate for some of the problems with manikin dying before they reach the enemy.

I've tried, and they're indeed blazingly quick. Too quick, sometimes I think I've seen 2 types of fast carrion critters. An issue with them is CW has no control on their production, while Ermor can reanimate longdead horsemen or animate some with Pale Riders. Being given the choice when reanimating is an advantage CW don't get (I don't beg for this to be changed, just stressing a difference).

The issue is not having a steady or regulated # in order to count on creating armies with Flanking Carrion Horses.

In fact I keep the Carrion Horses away from anything but my largest army because they *are* so fast and take the brunt of most melee which they are exceedingly poor at dealing with (superlow defense and protection).

Mandragora's on the other hand make a hard and solid flank while using the base manikins for fodder (because that is the only thing you have, not because you want to).

If the economy wasn't crippled so badly by the death of population then you could afford to keep up with research and create a least a partial army, but as it stands, you can't count on any sort of real income after turn 10, when you really start needing it and your dryads and/or sages start accumulating more and more upkeep.

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:
Has anyone tried quick roots to get carrion beasts into battles quickly. The horse carrion is incredibly quick when 'blessed' and can compensate for some of the problems with manikin dying before they reach the enemy.

I've tried it, but haven't had much luck. Yes, the carrion beasts get into combat more quickly, but that just means they die even more quickly.

In fact, in the ... 4 (counting SP) CW games I have going now, I've only found two means of success with the carrion / manikins.

One is to use them as totally disposable chaff, allowing living creatures to do the job with fewer casualties. Unfortunately, given CW's death economy, you really can't afford to use living creatures as the backbone of the army.

The other is to wait for one big carrion creature - the carrion elephant in particular. If you only have that unit, plus a carrion lord, you can effectively cast Regrowth to give it regeneration,, and then repeatedly cast Mend the Dead to heal it.

This is an awfully ineffecient use of a Carrion Lord, but the Carrion Lady can't cast Mend the Dead and the Carrion Centaur can't even Regrowth. Making things worse is the way that, if you make a Carrion Lord your Prophet, you get a battlefield-wide spell, Carrion Growth, which is easily negated by magic resistance.

Just why your own minions would be trying to resist your beneficial magic is ... baffling. But as it's easily negated by MR, _most_ of your creatures aren't affected. Not even the low level manikins, despite the spell description stating that it "makes the animating vines of most Manikin on the battlefield regrow at incredible speed".

"Easily Negated" means a penetration value of 7; the basic Manikin has an MR of 12. Seems like that difference of 5 means that the spell only has approximately a 1 in 5 chance of affecting each particular manikin - hardly "most".

So, you kind of have to spam-cast the spell, with what is usual the only commander (if any) capable of casting it, thus making the spell rather less than useful.

Seems like even with the special CW unholy magics, the carrion critters are pretty horrible in combat, _and_ you can't / don't generate them fast enough to build them up - basically you need at least a Carrion Centaur for every province to round up carrion, because the Black Dryad and Pan's can't lead them.

If you adjusted the price of the Carrion Summons to be on par with Ermor it might be more fitting in terms of turns per summoning.

So a Ashen Empire Bishop or a Soul Gate Shadow Tribune each cost 10D to summon, which is one turns worth of base Gem income. While the Carrion Centaur costs 10N to summon, 2 turns of base Gem Income.

The way the theme works and the spells associated with it, even if you have a high Nature Gem income, you have to have enough Apostates to summon the units. If you lowered the time to summon based on base gem income it would lower the discrepency. Or at the very least change it to a 2/3's ratio.

7N = Carrion Centaur
10N = Carrion Lady
17N = Carrion Lord

Etc.

[ April 29, 2004, 20:05: Message edited by: Zen ]

[Cainehill]

Other things can be done to help CW, but I'd like to second Zen's suggestion that the Carrion summonses be less expensive.

One thing that hasn't been brought up is the long term magic research issues for CW. Because of the population dying, I've found that even sages are too expensive to really use many of for research. Likewise, Black Dryads have poor research, are almost useless for CW (they can't lead the carrion beasts, and save for the rare Sagitarian Beastie, can't bless them), and cost upkeep.

Panic Apostates are _very_ expensive, have very high upkeep, and the few CW can afford will have far better things to do than research - site searching, leading carrion beasties, and summoning more carrion lords/ladies/donkeys.

Near as I can tell, the only semi-viable long term researchers are the Carrion Ladies; bad research ability, but they don't cost upkeep. But given their expense (in nature gems), and the fact that they could and possibly should be summoning more carrion critters, they still aren't very feasible as is :

Do you spend 16 nature gems for a bad researcher, or 25 for a Carrion Lord to animate more vines and rotting bodies, given that those are the bulk of your army, and they're slow to create. Either choice is bad.

Things might be alleviated a bit if the Carrion Commanders were either cheaper, or a little better. Or if the Black Dryads could at least lead 5 or 10 carrion critters - after all, they've lost some holy ability because of their exposure to the Carrion Woods, shouldn't they be able to command a few beasts? (Not necessarily giving them blood or death, but a minor form of the Undead Commander ability.)

[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Sunray_be:
And I posted my guide for Carrion Woods here
http://www.freewebs.com/dominions2/cw.html

Thanks to Pocus and Mike for their comments.

Cheers

Wow! Nice write up. Thanks for the time and effort put into it.