Why I don't have soul issues, and necro is actually so good. (long tactics post)

[nabit42]

From my time playing so far, this is the most interesting, and most snowball-y build I've found, and it's a bit of a beast.

pre-game build:
Dark Culture - absolute necessity.
Fast Recuperation - really good, since I don't get many supports, and other reasons to be shown.
Overwhelming Tactics - good, but I could easily be swayed to, say, sneaky or something. Not build critical.
Adept Settlers - city cap is super important for this build, so this is a no-brainer.
Scion of Evil - you're going to be pure evil really fast, and imperium is tight here, so +15/turn here is really nice.
Tome of Souls as starting tome, of course. Your primary armies are skeletons for most of the game, so you need this.
Go Wizard King. Champion's stability bonus is wasted on dark culture, and the casting points are really nice.
Weapon start is a preference pick, I like the necro orb since it gives you raise undead as your signature ability, which helps prevent too many early losses with your limited healing access.

My game plan is to get out cities as fast as reasonably possible. This game doesn't have a penalty for cities that aren't beyond your cap (like in Civ making research costs scale with cities or something), so getting out more of them is an easy way to dramatically increase your gains early on, and scale harder.

Spend all your souls on skeletons, as long as doing so doesn't impact your mana gain too badly (yeah, I get enough souls that mana is the constraining factor, not souls). Early on, this basically just means don't let your mana gen go negative, and later doesn't go low enough you'll run out from casting spells all the time. By turn... 20-30? you want around 100/t probably. Just keep pumping out skellies to keep yourself from getting too flush with mana. You literally can't have too many armies in this game plan. There's always something for them to do, and if they aren't doing anything, you can make something for them to do.

Early game, focus your cities on ramping up mana/food/production. You can largely ignore research and draft. Only get enough gold to make sure you can pay for buildings as they finish. Skeletons are cheap enough on draft that I always have cities idling on unit production, so seriously, just ignore draft entirely. Your economy problems just go away once you hit t3 tomes anyway.

I get t2 towns fairly quickly, but ignore t3 until I need to build the overlord tower in the late-mid game. T2 gets you everything you really need - ignore stability, access to special provinces, and, most importantly, dark-specific crypt upgrade buildings.

Once you have the lay of the land, look for crappy territory you don't want, and is away from any ai. Best if it's also close to your border. Plonk down an outpost and move some solid armies towards it. The goal here is to found a city and vassalize it. This isn't a normal vassal, you're harvesting your population. As any necromancer should! The moment that's done, declare war on the vassal. It shouldn't be a walled city since you don't have any materium yet, and hopefully aren't dumb enough to get the first materium imperium upgrade here (normally it's great, it breaks this build though).

Without walls, you can just waltz in and take it. Killing the resident hero and army in the process. Just vassalize the city again, then every turn declare war again and re-vassalize. Even early game when the enemy hero is low level, you'll get ~25 souls and a bucket of research. If you set it up properly, you'll be able to move your army in, fight, and move back to your territory for the healing bonus every turn. There's no peace treaty, you can just do this every turn. This could probably be considered an exploit, frankly, but as it stands this is mechanics working as intended. The only real cost is the startup imperium for founding the city, which is partially refunded when releasing the city as a vassal, as well as the commitment in troops, which can just be 18 skeletons, though some other troops help. You will take losses attacking a hero and 6 dark knights every turn, but you earn back a fair number of souls to replenish yourself, and skeletons take little enough draft you should be able to still increase your net army size over time.

If that doesn't get your mind spinning with possibilities, you probably haven't considered the available synergies. First, is the shadow imperium upgrades, 50 research/lvl of hero is a lot when you're killing at least one a turn, and 200 flat mana/research from the city later lets you earn some bonus mana too. This is why you don't need research in your cities, this is stronger. More cities from adept settler means more crypt upgrades which means that by late mid game, you could be adding a few heroes to your crypt every turn (with multiple city farms). Each of them is adding 2 mana/turn to your income per city from your cultural crypt upgrade. In other words, one of these farms set up early-ish in the game can by end game have easily contributed over 100 mana/turn to your income, only counting what you'd get from 5 cities, no wonders.

A couple major points of gravy that help fix any gaps in the build are the transmute resources spell and soul gain wonders. Lost tombs and the like give 1 soul/turn for each hero in your crypt. You can have dozens of heroes in your crypt pretty trivially. Soulwells eat your hearts out! Additionally, the mana gain from your crypt isn't tied to a city's income, not even your throne city. This means that with enough heroes in your crypt, you can get ALL your mana needs from your crypt and still cast transmute resources on every city you have.

Transmute resources is usually a niche but powerful spell from a t3 materium tome that converts your city's mana gain into food/production/draft/gold at a rate of 75% EACH (the description is currently inaccurate, it only lists 3 of the 4, but gives all 4). That's basically tripling the value of mana income in your cities compared to other resources. Build a mages guild and conduit special improvements in every city, and laugh as every non-mana/research gain is sitting happily at over 300, easily. You get mana from crypt and research from constant conquest anyway.

Spec some of your tomes into order as early as possible (I take tome of the beacon). This lets you get eventual access to the order imperium perk that reduces the time to vassalize a city by 1 turn. It only takes 1 turn at base. You instantly vassalize. There's no cooldown to declare war on vassals. At this point, your restraining factor is how healthy your army is and movement points to attack. If you've got 3-4 farms set up by this point, you can research multiple tomes/turn just from conquest bonii.

For non-skeleton troops, I like lightbringers. Baneful curse is probably going to be your best combat spell early on and into the mid-game. Incidentally, it stacks both sundered resistance and defense, and both of those reduce status immunity, so with that and maybe a warlock sundering resistances on top, you can fairly reliably mind control nasty t4/5's the enemy has. Then you have an excellent disposable meat shield while effectively killing the enemy's most important units. This works great against op ai armies, though a player will probably spec into some status cleansing after they see your army comp.

Mostly just spam skeletons. With all the enchants you'll be able to afford, (and t1 pikes get an unusually large number available to them) your skellies will actually be reasonably good troops, though not incredible. While your army quality will be lower, you'll be able to spam literal stacks of them every turn by late mid-game. And with all the mana you'll have, you can send them in one skellie at a time and kite around the edge of the map to cast combat spells to soften targets before going in with your best stacks. (at least, against ai, if they have an overwhelming advantage they never seem to cast spells, though against a player you can still do this if you dramatically outperform them on mana gen and troop numbers, which you should)

The only way I can see to make this method stronger would be in team play. If you have a human ally, you can take a high culture with chosen destroyers (and maybe scion of evil, but that one is up for trading around). The ally can found and release cities for you to raze, and you instead get 40 gold and 20 mana/research a turn from each city, rather than a bit of mana. Each cycle will take multiple turns this way, though, and tie up an allied hero. On the other hand, it should net them imperium. Re-founding on ruins takes 75 imperium, and releasing as a vassal gives 100 if you already own the city, afaik, so it's to their benefit as well.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk XD

TL;DR: you can vassalize and re-declare war on free cities to kill their heroes and free armies for souls/research/mana-per-turn, snowballing to a crushing victory.

[blackhand_lost]

You forgot to mention that the most preferable Form for this build is Ratkin, 'cause they're best at dealing with such amounts of cheese.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Btw, is it normal that Reapers have a soul upkeep of 5? I haven't seen it mentioned in their upkeep cost, but I suddenly ran into a soul deficit and after desperately cancling all suspicious spells, it turned out to be the Reapers. One even defected because of it.

[nabit42]

Originally posted by blackhand_lost:

You forgot to mention that the most preferable Form for this build is Ratkin, 'cause they're best at dealing with such amounts of cheese.

true, true. I like cheese, that's for sure.

Originally posted by ArkhanTheBlack:

Btw, is it normal that Reapers have a soul upkeep of 5? I haven't seen it mentioned in their upkeep cost, but I suddenly ran into a soul deficit and after desperately cancling all suspicious spells, it turned out to be the Reapers. One even defected because of it.

yep, reapers have soul upkeep. They suck. Mediocre damage on their basic attack for such a high tier unit, and their finger of death ability is pretty lame as well. Just take a unit with mind control or insanity inducement instead. Then you aren't just denying them damage and hp, you're giving it to yourself.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Originally posted by nabit42:

yep, reapers have soul upkeep. They suck. Mediocre damage on their basic attack for such a high tier unit, and their finger of death ability is pretty lame as well. Just take a unit with mind control or insanity inducement instead. Then you aren't just denying them damage and hp, you're giving it to yourself.

That was also my impression. Though I didn't have much success with Living Fogs either. Somehow I expected better summons from Shadow...

[ACS36]

No, necro is terrible compared to alternatives.

[nabit42]

Originally posted by ACS36:

No, necro is terrible compared to alternatives.

Compared to what, exactly? You don't even have an argument, just a statement with no observations to back it up. This is a discussion board, not a twitter feed >.>

If you have concrete arguments why this build is bad, I'd like to hear them, then they might be fixable, but as far as I'm aware, anything anyone else can do will be swept under a tide of undead and combat spells. Any tome combo you can think of, I can research sooner. A few vassal farms, and I can get thousands of research/turn from them, not including whatever I'm getting from my cities just like you.

Somehow got better troops than me anyway? No problem. I send one skeleton to attack them. Don't kill it with a spell? Fine, I'll kill one or two of your much more expensive troops with my own spells. Kill it with a spell? Fine, there's dozens more where that came from, you'll run out of mana before I run out of troops. Once your doomstacks are softened, mine will beat yours, easily.

Shadow troops are mostly mediocre, besides skeletons. I just take order and materium tomes, with splashes elsewhere mostly for affinity. Shadow tomes are mostly backfill once I've gotten a couple t3 tomes. It's still a necro build since I'm spamming undead. I'm just smart about it.

If someone who's a better player than I wants to give this a shot, I'd like to hear how it goes for you. I'm good at theorycrafting games like this, but my execution often leaves a bit to be desired. I've tried it a few times, and it functions as advertised, but I'm sure a better player could do it faster.


Oh, something I didn't mention in the OP, this build is better on large, high threat maps. More space for you to fill in with vassal farms and more distant neighbors that makes early wars less of a snowball staller, and more marauders in stacks to give early souls to get running. If you're on a smaller map, you can just zerg rush with skellies instead, that works just fine too.

[votadc]

"All enchants you are able to afford"
Wait....that means pure necro is a bad idea? T1 can become very powerful with those low level enchantments +4 fire/blight/frost/lightning -2 physical.

What about minimal investment in necro? Reaper are bad and you use only a part of their tome, so how they fare tome of souls alone as your first tome but after that you get non shadow tomes (or shadow but frost themed tomes)?

[nabit42]

Yeah, pure necro is pretty bad. It's not that it's weak in absolute terms, but compared to all the really strong combos available... it's bad. Pretty hard to compete with the raw numbers of a chaos/nature build, or a shadow/chaos debuff squad capped off by a chaos eater.

If you're mostly taking materium and order tomes to buff your econ and skeletons, respectively, you'll perform better. Better units available, better transformations, better synergy, everything. Shadow tomes do have useful things in them, but they're better as backfill than your mainline stuff.

Necro seems to be built around making all you units undead, then when you take losses in fights, raise them with necromancers. That's just planning on failure though, and the pace of this game require boldness instead. Shadow tomes have their focus too diluted between necromancy, cryomancy, and information warfare to be more than dip picks for all but the most dedicated. Even then, the rp isn't that great since the focus is diluted and it's hard to get 'purity'.

[OfGreyHairWaifu]

"Here's how to make necro good:" proceeds to list a broken strat that will probably get fixed in the first patch. Could as well try cheating to make necro good, would be just as viable as this.
Also no, Reapers are not supposed to have a soul upkeep by the devs, it's a bug of some sorts.

[nabit42]

Originally posted by OfHreyHairWaifu:

"Here's how to make necro good:" proceeds to list a broken strat that will probably get fixed in the first patch. Could as well try cheating to make necro good, would be just as viable as this.
Also no, Reapers are not supposed to have a soul upkeep by the devs, it's a bug of some sorts.

eh... if you think it's too exploit-y (I tend to agree, but it's fun to do once or twice, if nothing else), you can instead just be at war with everyone all the time. AFAIK, there's no stability penalty for long wars, and it's not like Dark culture would care anyway, so you can just knock someone down to just their throne city, then back off of ruins to let them continuously re-colonize so you can keep razing. Much more 'fair'. Then you just need to leave some dedicated troops managing them, that'll pay for themselves over time, and provide emergency reserves. Then once everyone is neutered, just finish them all off in one fell swoop. Or win an expansion victory just cuz that's kinda the hardest victory *shrug*

[KellyR]

Originally posted by votadc:

"All enchants you are able to afford"
Wait....that means pure necro is a bad idea? T1 can become very powerful with those low level enchantments +4 fire/blight/frost/lightning -2 physical.

What about minimal investment in necro? Reaper are bad and you use only a part of their tome, so how they fare tome of souls alone as your first tome but after that you get non shadow tomes (or shadow but frost themed tomes)?

Pure Necro isn't even possible. Only half of the Shadow tomes are actually necromancy-related. So even if you go pure Shadow, you're not pure Necro. And it's almost always best to pick just one of the two paths in any Affinity and stick to that, while mixing a path from a separate affinity.

[lopschi93]

Aggreed. Hoped to hear a real strat. Got clickbaited. Now I am sad.

[BigJ]

It's a real strat, just not one you may like.

[Саныч]

Sometimes, after an auto-battle, a skeleton from the enemy army appears on the map. How does it appear? Later, instead of skeletons, golems and units of my culture appear (after I activate Wights on my race). I don't understand how these units appear

[Саныч]

The strength of the shadow is in the mages, and his melee units are just meat to bind the enemy and hang debuffs.
Most of the shadow transformations give boosts to mages, so you need to take books that also enhance mages. For example, arcanic volumes (or chaos, or nature, or both).
Here we have a lot of mana and strong magicians, what can we do? Spam banshees. They are strong, they get mage buffs.
We start with the dark witches, as the backbone of the army. Spearmen - meat shield. Next, we move on to banshees. Any of our losses are replenished by calling a banshee anywhere on the map. Darkness has a lot of mana generation. We won't need souls here (except for turning the race into wights to resurrect our meat shields).
Maybe shadow mages don't do massive direct damage, but they have a lot of debuffs, a lot of debuffs. Under the books of the nature of chaos and the arcana, enemies simply melt away from DOT effects and cannot stop it - weak, lethargic, with broken armor, panicking, randomly wandering around the field.