Killing undead lords

[Mikethescared]

Why is it when my undead lord dies my army is gone in 30 seconds but when I kill an enemy undead lord their army keeps fighting for 10 minutes?

[Harmania]

What's your battle difficulty?

Also, which lords are you using, and which are the enemy using?

And what's the context of both lords dying?

[Aksolotli]

I have noticed this same problem with Easy to Very Hard battle difficulties. But it seems like Hammer and Anvil on ground units is best way to kill while Large units are to killed with Missiles is most efficent.

[Ashley]

Probably didn't do enough damage then in my experience heavy losses and a dead lord will make them crumble. Just killing the lord doesn't do it when they still have a huge army left.

[Kaaz]

its leadership based, so just like in a normal faction where your army will waver but hold at half/low leadership after a lord death (but be easy pickings afterwards) the undead have the potential for the same, though the penalty for being lord-less on undead is more severe iirc

[Cleftin Twain]

Leadership mostly and penalties that are applied to it. For instance I've had tons of success (won a few clutch battles) by eliminating a lot of the enemy undead armies units and then killing their lord off to seal the deal on the remaining troops.

I feel the closer the battle is the more crucial it is having a Lord on the field. Killing them at the start of the fight does damage moral pretty badly for undead but typically doesn't cause mass crumble.

[RCMidas]

There are two penalties for being without a Lord - of which "Recent" is the more damaging, naturally, at a -16 Leadership penalty rather than -10.

So killing a Lord at the start of a battle will not do much to damage the long-term morale of the army, since they will actually recover 6 points of lost Leadership over time and will have much higher starting morale to begin with. Killing a Lord later on though, when they are already struggling, can easily cause a chain rout among the weaker units.

[Dr. Uncredible]

This might be me being presumptious, but what I -think- is the case here is:

When you kill the enemy Vampire Lord, it´s early in the battle, one of the first things that die, since you´ll be hunting it down, as any competent hunter of the dead would.

The enemy army takes a big ol´ punch to the morale, but since they´re largely intact still and probably not losing their fights terribly, they can tank the morale damage and keep fighting.

--

When the enemy kills your lord, it´s towards the end of the battle, since you´ll be protecting your lord like any competent leader of the dead would, it´s one of the last things that dies.

Your army takes as big a punch to the morale as the enemy would, but since it´s near the end, they´ll be really damaged, and possibly in unfavorable positions, as they´ll have been fighting desperately to keep your lord alive.
Wounded and in a bad state, the morale damage is the breaking straw and they crumble immediatly.

Sound familiar?

[Shirome Artiste]

With so little actual information all of us can really only guess at the issue, but...

1: Killing a lord early won't cause chainrouts because very few(Even undead!) units have below 20 base leadership which is required to dip into broken/crumbling (Losing current combat + lord recently died netting IIRC -21 leadership, tipping them JUST into broken/crumbling).

2: Early on units tend to accumulate very few morale negatives. They usually won't be exhausted yet or have taken severe unit/army losses. Likewise, they generally won't be flanked or losing their current combat if they've yet to reach the enemy. Sure, being under missile/artillery fire will happen quickly, and specific -leadership traits/effects happen at the start of battle but generally speaking units are fairly confident at the start of a battle.

3: As the battle progresses and all those negatives stack up, units fighting near your lord may well only be held together because of the lord's AoE encouragement effect. While the actual strength of the effect varies because there's a thousand and one influencers on it, it's always a fair chunk of bonus morale.

So, if that lord suddenly drops dead, you get double whammied. Not only do you get slapped with -16 leadership because your lord dropped dead, you ALSO lose the encouragement effect, which for the sake of brevity we assume is 16 leadership as well. Which may well cause a chainrout/mass crumbling.


And with undead units generally having pretty crappy leadership it can easily tip into mass-crumbling and from there to mass-disintegrating in seconds.



Now, don't think killing a lord early is BAD. In fact, the earlier the opposing lord(Versus AI, in multiplayer you may well overcommit) dies the better. Not only do you slap their entire army with -10 leadership for the entire game, you also deny them their strongest encouraging unit as well as any spells and effect that lord may bring to the table.

It merely means that it is far more noticeable when a massive leadership shift happens when all units are only barely keeping things together due to the stresses of battle late in a fight compared to when it happens when all units are still confident and fresh.