Beating Necrophages late game

[Hauptmann]

Close to a conquest victory, but I just cant beat the Necros on their home turf. Their cities are massive, the sieges are taking too long, and my men get worn down by that damn disease abiility in combat. It seems like most of their units on average have over 300 hp while my Broken lords units have maybe 150 average.

[LeaderEnemyBoss]

Some hints:
- If you have all 3 Urkans, you get a ranged siege Ability
- Artillery ships have a naval Siege ability
- If you are fare ahead, you should be able to get the era 6 "serum of iteru" tech, it gives you a considerable edge in battles
- There are late game accesories that give disease immunity
- sisters of Mercy can heal disease and are immune
- Silics are immune
- The AoE Guardians (Neros and Gios) deal well with late game masses

[Hauptmann]

Thanks , I squeaked out an expansion win by killing off the other faction and ignoring the necrophages...whatever works :-)

[Gilmoy]

To conquer Necrophages' continent, bring strong tactical healing and overwhelm with 8+8 reinforcing. Disease is always a problem, but a Regeneration accessory mitigates it, and tactical healing can usually keep pace. Necrodrone's Sweep Strike Back 4 for +125% damage is a serious deterrent, especially if it can one-shot any of your attackers.

Why did your BL units have "only" 150 hp each? It sounds like you were behind in gear and accessories. Did you have equally good dust-tier gear as the AI? Did your generals have Army Health Boost and the +army hp skills? At high levels, this can add +100 hp or more to each unit in your army, which bridges your entire gap.

Some factions can beat Necrophages more easily than others. I did it once with Ardent Mages vs. 7 Endless (no ELCP). I needed to win the race to a 30-pop city for the Beloved of the People deed. Necrophages was #1, alone on its continent, with a 25-pop city. I was #3 or #4, with only a 16-pop city, clearly losing that race. So I invaded Necrophages, conquered everything, and within about 20 turns I owned its entire continent. Eventually I captured all of its cities intact, killing it.

Ardent Mages with arcana level 5 or less gets 1-turn Spell of Enervation, which stuns a hex ring (1+6 tiles) for 1 turn out of 2, including Guardians, Urkans, and Tempest ships in a sea fight. Stunned units do not counterattack, so that hard-counters Sweep Strike Back. The old AI doesn't know how to defend vs. AoE stun, and still bunches up its city defenders in tight formations. That let me reliably hit Necrophages city defenders with impunity on rounds 1, 3, and 5. (At arcana level 7, Enervation stuns for 2 full rounds, so you can pay to stun-lock a hex ring for the entire combat if you need it, but I won this war before I reached level 7.)

More generally, when Necrophages is alone on its continent, it tends to coast aimlessly for long stretches: it was #1 for about 60 turns, and did basically nothing with that advantage. When you do start invading, you'll see that its entire "defense" (for ~10 cities) is maybe 8 singleton armies (of size 8 each) roaming aimlessly on patrol, and maybe 2-4 lone Guardians walking around. They don't stay close together in reinforcing-pairs, so you can pick them off one at a time. Each city has a garrison of 4-6 units + full militia. The garrisons almost never sortie. So your task is to win about 8 lone fights, and it sounds like you accomplished that. Then you siege its cities.

To beat 1 army of 8, bring 2 armies of 8, with heroes + full accessories, and reinforce. Your attacking army should probably have an Infantry general with +2 reinforcement flags, so you get 4 reinforcements per turn. The 2nd army's hero could be Ranged for +1 range, and she brings mostly ranged units to concentrate firepower.

Within each combat, the AI basically throws its units away just to maximize the damage they inflict, without any look-ahead to avoid taking losses. Soak that damage and heal it, and inflict losses. That works throughout EL. Necrophages AI adds a few twists:

- Necrodrones paradrop themselves into any empty hole in your formation. (Think 'eyes' in go.) To beat that, count hexes and dense-pack your entire formation to give them zero landing spaces within range, and then they'll just attack your perimeter. Never leave a hole open where a Necrodrone can hit your weaker interior units.

- Bring Longbows, for Flying Slayer 4 vs. Necrodrones. Always prefer to shoot them with ranged, so that they never counterattack with Sweep Strike Back. Play as Necrophages, and you'll learn to live in constant fear of the other side's longbows. You might need to assimilate Hurnas or Jotus just to get a Longbow-capable unit, since your native Dust Bishop doesn't use bows.

- If you must melee-attack any Sweep Strike Back (including Urkan Lice), use a tanky attacker with enough HP to survive, make sure no other friendlies get caught in the blast radius, then promptly swarm that one target when it can't counterattack again. Rotate the injured guy back for healing.

- Disease is always annoying, but it's only -10% x 6 rounds, so by itself it won't kill you.
+ Regeneration 1/2/3 from the Era IV-VI dust accessory mitigates a couple rounds' worth of Disease damage.
+ Use tactical healing to mitigate the rest. As Broken Lords, you have Dust Bishop, which has Caecator-like adjacency-heal. You can assimilate another healer, such as Drider for its high damage/healing stat. Rotate dying units back and focus healing to keep everybody just-alive. If you take zero casualties, you won't spread Disease yourself. Inevitably, you'll receive some spreading from the Necrophages' own minor faction units, who aren't immune and do die from their own side's Disease.

- Hire the Sisters of Mercy hero Valete Sapiri Kugua, and pump her Benediction/Blessing skill to level 2 for the AoE (hex + ring) Disease-immunity. Start her on the perimeter of a ring of front-liners (herself + 6 others), target her ability on the guy in the middle, and the entire ring gets Disease immunity for 2 turns. You could repeat this in round 3, or just accept 3-4 turns of Disease damage and kill things to win the fight sooner. She's like any other Infantry hero: at high levels she's a skills goddess and combat stud, and you might prefer to have her duel Feeds on Bones and kill him 1-v-1.

Finally, you can beat Necrophage's cities 1 at a time by partial-sieging to lower their fortification, then attack when it's low enough. Reinforce with +4 ranged units each on rounds 1 and 2, and you can land ~10 hits per round, not including the injured guys who step back for healing. Against a garrison of 6 + 4 militia, that's about 6 hits each. If you need 3 hits to kill their hp, then the other 3 hits can beat down that much fortification bonus. My ranged could hit for about 250 each, so my fortification attack-threshold was about 600 per city. Most Necrophage cities aren't even that high, so I usually needed only 1-2 turns of sieging. The limitation was actually that I didn't even want to capture its cities too quickly (because my limited number of Roving Clans governors couldn't cool off their locked status any faster), so I let some sieges sit for several turns just to stall, not because I particularly needed the siege help.

Similar tactics work for every invasion, by any faction vs. any other faction. I've beaten Endless Necrophages (not ELCP) with Cultist using Nameless Guard longbows, and Vaulters using Marines. Any other faction would probably play out similarly. Your HP gap looks like the main problem in that game. A small gap in stats is tolerable, but the AI shouldn't be 2x your stat in any stat, not even if it's ranked #1 on Endless.

[Drowsy Louis]

I might have been very lucky, but this is what I got on my first game, realizing there was an encroaching necro threat, I had already assimilated sisters of mercy and Eyeless Ones, my vaulter compositions had been mostly replaced by disease immune sisters with sword and board(infantry slayer) and Eyeless healers with their max damage longstaff.
Stick to forest tiles and have the higher ground for maxing advantage. Necros are good source of XP for leveling up. Never had a significant problem fighting them.