undead question
 

Are undead units immune to death magic? Like drain life,bane fire,hand of death,disintigrate,cloud of death?

Re: undead question
 

Not to this spell.

Re: undead question
 

they still get decay, I don't know if it manages to kill them.

generally, a spell will say if it affects or doesn't affect lifeless, etc.

ghouls may well be subject to drain life, for example, because they aren't lifeless. idk. someone who knows more will come along soon enough

Re: undead question
 

Also, do any of those spells work on lifeless or mindless targets?

Re: undead question
 

mindless, yes. lifeless, no.

Re: undead question
 

Cloud of Death, Disintegrate, and Banefire are quite indiscriminate in terms of what units they can hurt.

Re: undead question
 

I ran some tests and, as mentioned, disintegrate and banefire seem to kill everything. Undead, lifeless - doesn't seem to matter. Same for hand of death (tough to use though because it requires such close proximity to the target).

However, I couldn't get cloud of death to cast against undead units and when I mixed normal units into the formation the undead units weren't effected so I don't believe cloud of death has any effect on undead. Actually, I think this spell is not infrequently used *with* undead troops since they won't be hit by friendly fire.

As mentioned, drain life will work on many undead - but not lifeless ones.

Dust to dust is a nice single target anti-undead spell. Wither bones does less damage but has a large AOE and can be devastating.

And of course if it's late game you could try undead mastery...

PS - Don't forget banishment, especially against undead that have low/average MR.

Re: undead question
 

Hmm. Might be right on CoD; I'm not very heavy on death casters in my current game so I haven't seen it used for a while.

On a related note, undead will also ignore the disease effects from certain death magic (leprosy bombardment, say), generally can ignore decay (since they tend to have high maximum ages) and tend to be pretty resistant to fear effects (most being either mindless and completely immune, or good morale/good MR... ghouls might be an exception), and also perform perfectly fine under Darkness and Rigor Mortis. Poison is also an obvious complement, since undead tend to be completely immune.

Re: undead question
 

speaking of decay, how does that work with the boots of youth, or the elixir of life?

Re: undead question
 

While Cloud of Death doesn't work on undead, a variant of it does. Leeching darkness.

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Leeching_Darkness

The spells look rather identical, so I think that is where the confusion came from.