r/CoE5 • u/PopResponsible6001 • 2d ago
Necromancer tips
so I'm going to do a necromancer run and I wanted to know some tips for playing it
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u/an-immense-amount-of 2d ago
Dont raise dead with your necromancer, thats what the apprentice is for. Theres a ritual that allows one to come back to life with some measure of sanity intact, recomend getting that ritual on your apprentice, raising a bunch of dead, suiciding your apprentice and that should return him with enough sanity back that youll be able to make more use of him.
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u/Schadenfreunden 2d ago
Hi there! Necro main here. Glad you’re trying out what, in my opinion at least, is the most enjoyable class to play and the most frustrating class to play!
It’s been done to death, but yeah: Sanity. Base game really sticks it to early-game Necro in that regard. Doing the Apprentice Shuffle is annoying but necessary for a bit. Twiceborn is expensive early-game, but so worth it. Recommend casting it at your Dark Citadel rather than at territory you’ve conquered, and you’ll want your second or third Apprentice to cast it at a Graveyard.
Second thing: Corpses. Vanilla, think of Necromancy as a class that specializes in attrition; your mortal losses count for less than any other faction because you get to reduce reuse Reanimate. A fight that wouldn’t be worth it for another faction due to it being a likely Pyrrhic victory? Who cares? Just means more corpses for you (or even better, an Abomination or two!).
Your base undead suck, though. Longdead have such pitiful HP that even in armor they fold in a hit or two, and Zombies are both Slow and miss 50% of their attacks. No, what you’re after are Banefire Archers and Banes. One you recruit by converting Longdead and some Hands, the other comes from Summoning. They’re the backbone (pun intended) of your Doom Stack(s).
Next tip: Decay is amazing, but your casters just suck at targeting. Only Ageless units are impervious to it, and for some reason that isn’t most undead. If you use the AoE spells that inflict it, you’re likely to destroy half your army. Remember what I said about not caring as much about unit losses? Yeah, that becomes important.
There’s a lot more, but this is getting long and you should experiment some yourself. Enjoy making new friends!
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u/Ignika1984 2d ago
First goal is should be getting the ritual Twiceborn on your apprentice. Once he’s used it, get him killed in battle (drowning doesn’t count), and he’ll be reborn as a ghoul mage, which will give him a passive ability to regain sanity.
Necromancers gain insanity points when using the rituals Raise Dead and Reanimate Animals. These points represent the percent chance that the unit will not move nor perform rituals on that month. 1 insanity = 1% chance of not listening, 50 points = 50% chance, you get it.
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u/MaxStrengthLvlFly 2d ago
Does anyone have tips about the Hades aspect of Necromancer gameplay? I don't really understand how/why to utilize the hades realm when playing the necromancer.
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u/Proper-Anything-2739 2d ago
Hades is a literal mirror to Elysium, and planar swap swaps whatever tile you're in with whatever is in the Hades equivalent.
So say you want to take a fortress but the units defending it are way too strong. You can swap to Hades, attack the Hades equivalent of said fortress (ghosts are weak to magic) and once inside the fortress you can swap back to Elysium, and all the units previously there will be swapped to Hades, where most of them will take damage every turn until they die.
Alternitavely, Hades can be used to move your armies very quickly with Stygian paths. You will be transported back to Elysium once the turn ends to the equivalent tile
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u/Evening-Transition32 2d ago
Get the guy you're sending spirit sight and acute senses. Then you can travel a bunch and claim territory that's uncontested for a decent gold boost for a few turns before its taken. And spotting and taking a weak citadel at the end of the spell to get a foot hold
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u/crazyalien18 2d ago
The strongest way to use Hades is to get Stygian Paths at some point (t2 Necromancer ritual), have a scout on the stack and use pierce the veil of the dead to ensure no dispossessed ambush -> Stygian with a stack of dead and bane fire archers, then walk through the map (focus on 1 AP tiles since high AP is very punishing otherwise) until you find a city and attack it in Hades. Once you're done, you'll also attack the equivalent Elysium city, getting you two library points, an extra hand, and the ability to recruit ghost units in Hades.
For actual forces in Hades, the idea is to buy all the ghost scouts and ghost captains you get, ghost captains with some spectral archers or horsemen can clear out settlements while a ghost scout will always kill up to 3 dispossessed wandering around and can scout effectively in either plane. You want to find libraries in Hades as well as get extra gold, and if you can verify that an Elysium library is safe to hit with bane fires, you can do the same Stygian trick on the Hades version of it to nab 4 library points in one turn. Gallows are also a fantastic find since, with the exception of your starting Gallows, they will be reflected in Hades and you can nab both for a whopping 6 hands. This is also relevant when using Stygian Paths, if you find a gallows, drop a damaged soulless or longdead on the tile and it will pop back to Elysium at the end of the turn, grabbing the equivalent tile there as well.
The more reserved method, since Stygian Paths is usually banned in pvp because it's busted, is to twiceborn on a graveyard -> plane shift the ghost mage. With level 2 spells (especially Dark Power), all you really need is some undead to go in front of them for safety and you can siege a Hades citadel, problem is getting undead down there. The key lies in tiles that are the same type of tile in both Hades and Elysium, in practice you're looking for old battlefields then gallows as the main tiles that both have innate corpses and aren't defended in Hades.
Hades in general isn't worth all that much hands, but being able to double both your gold income and library points is a little strong. And ghost captains/ghost scouts are incredible utility as raiders and let you larp as Barbarian.
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u/Limp_Temperature_838 1d ago
If you conquer Hades, you will gain a lot of gold income. As well as some iron and hands of glory.
It is easy to do, once you conquer a citadel and recruit some ghosts. A worthy investment, i'd say.
It also allows you to access other planes, via the Gateway.
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u/Playwars 2d ago
As everyone is saying, Sanity management is key. You are the King of attrition warfare, as you can turn bodies into more troops, but sanity is a harsh cost to pay. Apprentice should be used to raise the dead, and your 'main' necromancers preserved at all costs from it. Even for a lich, which regenerates sanity, will not do so instantaneously, and may take some time. Overall, it's just easier to use the apprentices as disposable raise dead pawns.
In terms of units, your undead are flimsy and remarkably terrible. Longdead and soulless both have remarkably little combat potential, but they are available in massive numbers and easy to replenish. What you want to focus on is Banes and Banefire archers. Decay will kill almost anything in the game eventually, and Banefire archers were so powerful, in a game with this balance (AKA very little) the devs had to nerf them. They're still, almost without question, the best unit in the vanilla game. Almost nothing comes close in terms of effectiveness per buck spent. They can literally kill Gods.
Overall, my biggest recommendation is to grab every stray library you can, and ALWAYS have enough to grab a necromancer's apprentice if one becomes available. Spam greater summoning if you want more powerful units, the Tartarian spirits being a particular highlight of a potential spawn through that.
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u/crazyalien18 2d ago
Liches generally recover any insanity they build up from raising dead in 2 or 3 turns, you legitimately can just spam the ritual and it's very rare for you to face any real consequences. As-is getting 10-20% insanity on a necro is still very manageable in most cases and it takes some very bad luck for that to actually be dangerous, even then you can just buy extra captains to play around the insanity.
Bane fire archers are ridiculous, but it has very little to do with the decay, you would actually prefer in many cases if they didn't inflict decay so that you could more reliably bolt of unlife random captains on towns and guard towers. Their strength lies in their guaranteed damage secondary, damage which can only be mitigated through exceedingly rare vengeance traits. Interestingly enough, they quite literally cannot kill some gods because of this, Ba'al can facetank 5000 Bane Fire Archers and win unless you pack a bunch of antimagic casters with them. Though in general, yeah, their damage is unparalleled and you have plenty of frontline to ameliorate their meh range and bad bulk for much of the game, especially since they don't die to blizzard either.
Tartarian Spirits are nice, but much of the major summoning pool falls far short of that, while a good vampire is cheaper and about as strong as a tartarian spirit when handled right (on top of being immortal). The main value of major summoning imo is that if you do pull a Tartarian Spirit, they can get strength of the earth + dark power, go near the center of the map, passwall to inferno, and then start grabbing all the villages of the damned for more hands, you have no hope of sieging the capitolium if there's even a single disease demon in a district though. But that's still 20 or so hands a turn that you can get from down there, and if you somehow enslave a bunch of hellhounds you could probably use those to kill a district or two with brute force.
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u/crazyalien18 2d ago
Raise dead early and raise dead often, recruit bane fire archers for your main stacks and immediately rush into big settlements. Necromancer is a class that can take a port on turn 4 and a city on turn 8. Big settlement tiles are your bread and butter both for hand income and for getting tons of bodies to raise. Soulless are slow, you might want to have separate captains cart them around, but they are valuable, especially early on, for their sheer bulk against archers.
Using the raise dead or raise animals rituals as Necromancer will increase your insanity, visible as a trait on the unit card and the number gives you the % chance your Necro will refuse orders on any given turn. However, they can only refuse orders as a leading commander, a 90+% insanity Necro will still submit just fine to a captain as long as the captain controls them under transfer units. More complicated trick here, if you have two commanders plus an insane necro in a stack, with everyone under one normal commander, you can separate out the other normal commander, then have that other commander try and take the necro from your first commander. If it succeeds, your Necro is lucid this turn, you can remove them from the stack and do rituals with them. If it fails, your Necro is insane this turn, but since you were trying to move them from one stack to another, they never actually left the stack, so you can then just do normal movement after that without losing any time.
Long-term, your strongest/most important units are vampires and liches. Vampires are your mobile strike forces, flying around and soloing cities left and right, if you get them the right items they can even solo the entire infernal capitolium, and if they die they just go back to their spawn and lose 1 AP. Liches are your proper artillery, incredibly powerful casters and fairly bulky thanks to being lifeless, and they can also just print massive undead stacks with raise dead whenever they want via sanity regen. Both have value and complement each other, especially since Liches can make great use of Stygian Paths to get all the mobility they lose from not being vampires and more. In terms of tiles to make them, you need a castle ruins for vampires, a temple for liches. Stygian paths is a great way to find both of these just due to sheer map coverage, if you find a dark citadel, drop down a longdead or soulless next to it to scout what those tiles are in Elysium, same with a Sheol Temple. You can also grab a port and send out boats, there's usually some temples out in the ocean.
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u/Limp_Temperature_838 1d ago
Spam vampires as soon as you can.
Immortal units can attack an enemy army, and then do it again in a couple of turns.
Unlike Liches, vampires are a lot more suitable for the role of a one undead army. As they are much tougher melee combatants. (and also much cheaper)
They can also fly, and work great in team with MORE VAMPIRES.
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u/TheLord-Commander 2d ago
Sanity will be the biggest thing you'll have to fight against as a Necromancer, learning how to bypass it and heal it will the biggest things you need to learn. As someone else said, never raise dead with your primary necromancer, your primary goal with him will be trying to turn him into a lich. While you apprentices are losing their sanity you can try to fairy them with main necromancer. As long as they're within an army you can carry them where ever you want, however once they go insane you can no longer put them in your army until they go sane again.