Mass-produced Reanimating Priests: Exploit?

[Meglobob]

Life after death is just doing what it says on the box, giving a unit wether it be militia or mage or priest a extended unnatural life.

By the time players can pull it off, the battlefield is ruled by SC's, thugs, battlefield wide damage spells and large area effect evocation and master enslave etc, etc anyway. So 50-100 per turn longdead is no big deal. If you could pull it off in the early to midgame it would be a exploit but not as a lvl 7 spell.

Doesn't it also reduce MR to 5 or something low as well? Which destroys the mages/priests usefulness on a battlefield.

I don't think its an exploit and not even unthematic as you can play a evil god with any nation.

[Chris_Byler]

Any nation can be evil with the right God. (Speaking of which, how were your non-death-using nations planning to get a LaD caster in the first place?)

Anyway, even once you do this, it's vulnerable to assassins with anti-undead items, or dominion push with Purgatory since their priests are busy (which will also zap the undead they've already gotten), or just spamming anti-undead spells/items in general to wipe out the freespawn (or the undead commanders; send over a flying thug with Flambeau and watch the soulless dissolve after their leader goes down) after they reach the battlefield. It's not like soulless are some kind of unstoppable killing machines - without something like Storm or Darkness practically any nation can butcher them easily.

As an exploit, it seems to have a long way to go to catch up to clams, and they've been around forever.

[Ironhawk]

Well, the prevailing attitude definitely seems to be that this is not an exploit. Or perhaps better said that it may be an exploit but occurs to late in the game to unbalance things. I can't say that I agree with these positions but if its not an exploit you can be sure I will be using this in my next game.

You may wish you had changed your vote when I overrun your nation with my unstoppable undead hordes in the next game!!

[Aezeal]

for the costs, does the spell cost any thing?

[PvK]

Yeah, I'd agree it's not so much an exploit as playing a wicked necromantic strategy.

[lch]

Ironhawk said:
You may wish you had changed your vote when I overrun your nation with my unstoppable undead hordes in the next game!!

Personally I'd much rather see your undead death mage machinery than the usual Tartarian SC / Abomination stuff.

[NTJedi]

lch said:

Personally I'd much rather see your undead death mage machinery than the usual Tartarian SC / Abomination stuff.

Well Tartarians and Abominations are research level_9 and definitely late game where the massive undead chaff are level_7, so there will be a time window difference.
It won't stop the usual strategies we see... it means we'll only see this added into existing strategies. Minimal effort, small cost, for massive amounts of free undead chaff... oh yeah it's coming.

[kasnavada]

Tartarian are getting changed too. So the chaff armies will be even more problematic.

The thing is that thematically you can justify anything, so dropping this "argument" sounds like a good idea.

From a term of balance, armies of chaff are rather useless at lvl 7. Well, if it were not for the turn limit that guarantee you a victory. However, a 100% reduction in cost of mages and priest for minimal effort ? Doesn't that sound a bit unbalancing ?

I mean, the MR argument is a joke. You can just buy again the same amount of mages and priests in a few turns. Even if half of your low MR resurrected units get killed, you doubled your capacity for buying new fresh mages !

[Agrajag]

kasnavada said:
The fact that they don't cost upkeep anymore sounds like the exploit to me...

They cost no upkeep because they are lame undeads. Even Dusk Elders or Tartarians don't cost any upkeep. WAD.
You might say that this makes this spell too good/overpowered/unbalanced, but that's not the same as an exploit.

kasnavada said:
I mean, the MR argument is a joke. You can just buy again the same amount of mages and priests in a few turns. Even if half of your low MR resurrected units get killed, you doubled your capacity for buying new fresh mages !

1) Doubled? Upkeep is just 1/15 of unit cost, so zombifying all of your mages will increase your mage money by 6.67%. 3.33% for priests.
2) Losing half of your mages is serious business! And it is going to take some time to recruit them back, not just gold.

[kasnavada]

The fact that most summons don't cost any money or upkeep seemed dumb to me in the first place, but that's the way the game works. It's be great if that changed too, something like spending 1 gem every 15 or 30 turns to keep your summons alive would make summons more "balanced" toward regular units.

1) Doubled? Upkeep is just 1/15 of unit cost, so zombifying all of your mages will increase your mage money by 6.67%. 3.33% for priests.

Now, that's a perfect example of a strawman argument.

If you transform your mages and priest, your mage & priest for those upkeep becomes zero. That's a 100% reduction. That means for the next turns (not only one) you can buy again 1/15 of what you just killed FOR THE REST OF THE GAME. Note in capital letter the part that you missed. It seemed so obvious to me that I didn't even write it.

The rest of the game is more than one turn. I'm assuming 15 turns for the sake of putting up a number, so I said doubled. It could be 30 or 45, that means triple or more...

EDIT : the counterargument I see coming is that the upkeep for the new mages will cost money. I will already answer that argument : the combo can be done more than once.

2) Losing half of your mages is serious business! And it is going to take some time to recruit them back, not just gold.

From the thread, it would seem like I overstated this part. It would seem that only a few mages and priests don't get reanimated...