[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Kristoffer O:
Has anyone tried quick roots to get carrion beasts into battles quickly. The horse carrion is incredibly quick when 'blessed' and can compensate for some of the problems with manikin dying before they reach the enemy.

I've tried it, but haven't had much luck. Yes, the carrion beasts get into combat more quickly, but that just means they die even more quickly.

In fact, in the ... 4 (counting SP) CW games I have going now, I've only found two means of success with the carrion / manikins.

One is to use them as totally disposable chaff, allowing living creatures to do the job with fewer casualties. Unfortunately, given CW's death economy, you really can't afford to use living creatures as the backbone of the army.

The other is to wait for one big carrion creature - the carrion elephant in particular. If you only have that unit, plus a carrion lord, you can effectively cast Regrowth to give it regeneration,, and then repeatedly cast Mend the Dead to heal it.

This is an awfully ineffecient use of a Carrion Lord, but the Carrion Lady can't cast Mend the Dead and the Carrion Centaur can't even Regrowth. Making things worse is the way that, if you make a Carrion Lord your Prophet, you get a battlefield-wide spell, Carrion Growth, which is easily negated by magic resistance.

Just why your own minions would be trying to resist your beneficial magic is ... baffling. But as it's easily negated by MR, _most_ of your creatures aren't affected. Not even the low level manikins, despite the spell description stating that it "makes the animating vines of most Manikin on the battlefield regrow at incredible speed".

"Easily Negated" means a penetration value of 7; the basic Manikin has an MR of 12. Seems like that difference of 5 means that the spell only has approximately a 1 in 5 chance of affecting each particular manikin - hardly "most".

So, you kind of have to spam-cast the spell, with what is usual the only commander (if any) capable of casting it, thus making the spell rather less than useful.

Seems like even with the special CW unholy magics, the carrion critters are pretty horrible in combat, _and_ you can't / don't generate them fast enough to build them up - basically you need at least a Carrion Centaur for every province to round up carrion, because the Black Dryad and Pan's can't lead them.