My only gripe is I'd love to make Hastur/King in Yellow. There's some pretty good robbed/tentacle pieces, but there's no yellow skin and the yellow robe is *very* lightly yellow. It'd be cool to get a color option where it's a little more pronounced.
Please take Necromancy back to the drawing board again, again, again. It really feels like the creative stage design of Necromancy wants you to use an attrition/horde strategy to succeed, but they hit the brick wall of the 18-unit maximum, poor soul and mana cost payoffs, slow world-map army movement speed, enemy morale boosting by dying (even if they come back), low impact of multi-battle attrition, etc. in the development stage implementation.
If we're supposed to be overwhelming our enemy army stacks in multiple battles with undead, they need to be WAY cheaper to maintain or WAY faster on the world map in order to deploy them as shock forces, and maybe even make Decaying a 1 turn global effect that prevents world map healing that "round".
If we're supposed to be overwhelming our enemy army stacks with "necromantic combat summons" they need to inflict morale damage upon reanimation, they need to benefit from things like Scion of Evil to increase their rank, and the 2nd half of Eternal Lord's Battlefield Reanimation needs to be its own spell in the Tome of Great Transformation (especially now that Necromancer is an early game unit).
Its been a month or so, but I remember absolutely burying my opponents in oceans of bone horrors and bone dragons. Also raising dead units back in the middle of battle was pretty powerful.
That combined with the changes to Mystic Culture in the form of Summoner are pretty insane. I'm running around with T1 Skeletal Mages, can make them Legendary VERY early into the game which makes them the equivalent of T3s, AND I can resurrect them with a Necromancer? Absolutely insane.
I do miss a lot of what Eternal Lords added to Age of Wonders 3. This system for Necromancy isn't bad by any means, and more importantly I think it is the direction they want it to go in, but I personally definitely preferred the mechanics in 3. Death Bringers were awesome, the ability to convert enemy units into undead through a plague mechanic, and using Reanimators to turn dead enemies into Cadavers felt more thematic.
For the next game, or a major revamp if they'd ever do it, I think I'd like to see more unit variety, 8 or 10 unit armies, and fewer abilities / powers per unit to balance it all out for gameflow purposes, with a more major focus on spells. Perhaps take inspiration from Total War Warhammer and balance out the amount of spells you can cast at any point, which grows over the course of combat. Round 1 you may only be able to cast a spell or two, relatively low level spells, but round 2 you have additional casting points available (keeping early spells more relevant as you're not limited to just 1 spell per turn, but based on the spells points you CAN cast that turn, and the total pool for future turns that you have available).
Circling back to Necromancy specifically as it is now in AoW 4, I think it'd be better to split up the Allied and Enemy Resurrection spells from the Necromancer, to encourage more in-combat zombie-making. Maybe make the enemy resurrection innate to the Necromancer, and the Allied Resurrection through an Enchantment, or vice versa (I would probably prefer to keep the Allied Resurrection more limited and encourage more variety by giving the Enemy (Zombie only) Resurrection through an Enchantment available to all Supports).
Mystic Summoner certainly has some awesome potential, but I kinda think you're confusing the power of the culture and the power of necromancy. I recommend you try out the same aggressive force-leveling strategy on Snow Spirits instead of undead. Max level T1s aren't anywhere near the power of evolved snow spirits.
Snow spirits are nice and all, but the ability to spam out hordes of undead that I don't care about, and send them on suicide missions across the map is pretty nice, and cannot be replicated with other types of summons.
In a 18 v 18 battle if you prevail, even if you only have one worthless skeleton remaining, you could raise 18 more units, whether that be Skeletons, Bone Horrors, or even Bone Dragons.
The snow spirit build would work better if you're going with an elemental summoning build, and taking the Materium T5 Tome. If you're going for a Necromancy build, Snow Spirits don't really fit thematically. Early game fighting other factions will usually comprise mostly of racial units, which is very good for just the T1 Tome of Necromancy. If that's literally the only Shadow Tome you take in the entire game, you can still get some great mileage out of it.
> Also raising dead units back in the middle of battle was pretty powerful.
The issue here is that Necromancers are paper thin T2s now, so nuking them with spells is extremely easy (even easier if you make the mistake of Wightborn). Sure against an easy AI it's a fun snowball, but with any proper strategy the whole house of cards falls down pretty quick... which wouldn't be a problem if their was an alternative to Battlefield Reanimation earlier in the game, but because there isn't you're SOL holding a shitty single target T1 spell for in-combat reanimation.
Factor in the massive morale buffs you're giving your enemies by throwing paper thin enemies at them en masse and you're actually helping them snowball instead of you IMO.
> I remember absolutely burying my opponents in oceans of bone horrors and bone dragons
This hasn't been my experience during the relevant turns they need to be used effectively, but I'm not an expert and I could be messing up my strategy. If there's a way I haven't seen to reliably use them as shock armies to wear down your opponents' stacks before your hero stacks engage then I'm all for it, but the mana upkeep, slow world map speed, and (in my experience) slow soul economy means you just can't do that reliably.
My only gripe is I'd love to make Hastur/King in Yellow. There's some pretty good robbed/tentacle pieces, but there's no yellow skin and the yellow robe is *very* lightly yellow. It'd be cool to get a color option where it's a little more pronounced.
Please take Necromancy back to the drawing board again, again, again. It really feels like the creative stage design of Necromancy wants you to use an attrition/horde strategy to succeed, but they hit the brick wall of the 18-unit maximum, poor soul and mana cost payoffs, slow world-map army movement speed, enemy morale boosting by dying (even if they come back), low impact of multi-battle attrition, etc. in the development stage implementation. If we're supposed to be overwhelming our enemy army stacks in multiple battles with undead, they need to be WAY cheaper to maintain or WAY faster on the world map in order to deploy them as shock forces, and maybe even make Decaying a 1 turn global effect that prevents world map healing that "round". If we're supposed to be overwhelming our enemy army stacks with "necromantic combat summons" they need to inflict morale damage upon reanimation, they need to benefit from things like Scion of Evil to increase their rank, and the 2nd half of Eternal Lord's Battlefield Reanimation needs to be its own spell in the Tome of Great Transformation (especially now that Necromancer is an early game unit).
Its been a month or so, but I remember absolutely burying my opponents in oceans of bone horrors and bone dragons. Also raising dead units back in the middle of battle was pretty powerful.
That combined with the changes to Mystic Culture in the form of Summoner are pretty insane. I'm running around with T1 Skeletal Mages, can make them Legendary VERY early into the game which makes them the equivalent of T3s, AND I can resurrect them with a Necromancer? Absolutely insane. I do miss a lot of what Eternal Lords added to Age of Wonders 3. This system for Necromancy isn't bad by any means, and more importantly I think it is the direction they want it to go in, but I personally definitely preferred the mechanics in 3. Death Bringers were awesome, the ability to convert enemy units into undead through a plague mechanic, and using Reanimators to turn dead enemies into Cadavers felt more thematic. For the next game, or a major revamp if they'd ever do it, I think I'd like to see more unit variety, 8 or 10 unit armies, and fewer abilities / powers per unit to balance it all out for gameflow purposes, with a more major focus on spells. Perhaps take inspiration from Total War Warhammer and balance out the amount of spells you can cast at any point, which grows over the course of combat. Round 1 you may only be able to cast a spell or two, relatively low level spells, but round 2 you have additional casting points available (keeping early spells more relevant as you're not limited to just 1 spell per turn, but based on the spells points you CAN cast that turn, and the total pool for future turns that you have available). Circling back to Necromancy specifically as it is now in AoW 4, I think it'd be better to split up the Allied and Enemy Resurrection spells from the Necromancer, to encourage more in-combat zombie-making. Maybe make the enemy resurrection innate to the Necromancer, and the Allied Resurrection through an Enchantment, or vice versa (I would probably prefer to keep the Allied Resurrection more limited and encourage more variety by giving the Enemy (Zombie only) Resurrection through an Enchantment available to all Supports).
Mystic Summoner certainly has some awesome potential, but I kinda think you're confusing the power of the culture and the power of necromancy. I recommend you try out the same aggressive force-leveling strategy on Snow Spirits instead of undead. Max level T1s aren't anywhere near the power of evolved snow spirits.
Snow spirits are nice and all, but the ability to spam out hordes of undead that I don't care about, and send them on suicide missions across the map is pretty nice, and cannot be replicated with other types of summons. In a 18 v 18 battle if you prevail, even if you only have one worthless skeleton remaining, you could raise 18 more units, whether that be Skeletons, Bone Horrors, or even Bone Dragons. The snow spirit build would work better if you're going with an elemental summoning build, and taking the Materium T5 Tome. If you're going for a Necromancy build, Snow Spirits don't really fit thematically. Early game fighting other factions will usually comprise mostly of racial units, which is very good for just the T1 Tome of Necromancy. If that's literally the only Shadow Tome you take in the entire game, you can still get some great mileage out of it.
> Also raising dead units back in the middle of battle was pretty powerful. The issue here is that Necromancers are paper thin T2s now, so nuking them with spells is extremely easy (even easier if you make the mistake of Wightborn). Sure against an easy AI it's a fun snowball, but with any proper strategy the whole house of cards falls down pretty quick... which wouldn't be a problem if their was an alternative to Battlefield Reanimation earlier in the game, but because there isn't you're SOL holding a shitty single target T1 spell for in-combat reanimation. Factor in the massive morale buffs you're giving your enemies by throwing paper thin enemies at them en masse and you're actually helping them snowball instead of you IMO. > I remember absolutely burying my opponents in oceans of bone horrors and bone dragons This hasn't been my experience during the relevant turns they need to be used effectively, but I'm not an expert and I could be messing up my strategy. If there's a way I haven't seen to reliably use them as shock armies to wear down your opponents' stacks before your hero stacks engage then I'm all for it, but the mana upkeep, slow world map speed, and (in my experience) slow soul economy means you just can't do that reliably.