Thoughts about the (severely underpowered?) Empire of the Dead

ah, the male skeletons are useless, while the female ones are kinda imba ^.^

Consulates, use them. Its heck alot better to build a consulate than have a level 1 village until the end of times.

As for skeletons, they're immune to poison! It angers alot of spiders. Once had an spider uprising event happen for the first time only for them to be screwed over by the fact I was running nothing but skeletons. xD

Don't ever underestimate consulates, slow growth is way better than zero growth even when there is many people who would love to disagree with me xD

One tip for the undead is that they have NO upkeep, so build-build-build armies and overwhelm the enemy.

How do those consulates work? "immigrate to an undead city today, get rid of excess flesh! the most effective dietary cure known to man!"

haha, made undying female pikemen at start, at midgame i got 3 more armor rating on them and killed epic strength stuff no problem my Pokey Girlies (yeah its the name i gave em) are invincible O_o the 50% physical resist is like having endgame plate early on

It could work as exactly as you said.

Or it could represent groups of skeletons going around in the badlands and digging up corpses and bring them to life.

After all if I read the lore correctly, there is currently alot of corpses laying around due to cataclysm that occured.

The AI does not yet build outpost upgrades.

That and the Consulates is a very overpowered upgrade imo.

Well Consulates is quite necessary. And plus its only +1 growth per consulate its not like it gives +2 growth

High level cities have a habit dropping down to only 1 growth when they're nearing the final level for the final upgrade. Conclaves. I didn't realize it until I noticed it was at 1 growth then I built like four or five consulates from towns' pioneers and finally got that final upgrade built.

You can have groups with 6 memebers (undying corps?) very early in the game, in my game this was very powerful.

Undying Curse. Amazingly powerful.

I can suggest to play Patchwork mod. Undead AI is one of the strongest and aggressive there, if not the most dangerous AI opponent.

i feel in terms of growth are they severely underpowered. there are far more monsters than bandits out there to harvest corpses. couldn't we at least  get 0.5 population out of monsters? at the end there only bones so kitting them together to a skeleton should be possible :p.

also it would be nice to give the undead a special spell that can turn every shard to a death shard, to promote further growth.

1. Undead's growth is static. That is, if growth of city is 2+, it's 2+ til it reaches the population limit unlike food. With that and morrigan's call, the population growth can get out of control very easily if you get a couple of death shards.

2. No unkeep on troops = you can rush projects more frequently.

3. 50% physical resistant female ghosts.

4. Spells like haunted army is quite strong for early-mid game if you have plenty of mana source. Very good way to kill strong-deadly monsters in early game if used correctly. Even better if you are sorcerer with skeleton summoning.

With no unkeep, very linear population growth and 50% physical resistance troops make Undead the strongest late game faction for being very weak in early game.

They have growth challenges, but if you are used to playing them you can overcome that challenge.

i know that 50% physical resistance is quite strong, but the early struggle is quite strong and makes for a chore of a game. being early game UP and lategame OP isn't really fun / balanced. also i just tried some short starts with the dead and haven't played against them yet, but it would suprise me if the enemy AI will do such a great job and not end up being swallowed quite easily. ladder would be a shame to have, especially because they are a dlc race.

Given undying curse, leather armor and a spear I don't see where the UP early in game lies... you can easily overwhelm anything that's not a 400 HP monster, and you don't need to build units stronger than 3-man size as long as there are still easy, or indeed, any sort of kills around. 

yeah but the main problem is with the AI, it can't handle the dead faction! last game i was first rank in terms of power rating over at least all the races i encountered (50% of them). the other undead race was at the button with around 15% of my rating (not kidding you, i was like 33 and the undead was 6, all other races were 26 - 31).

why add another faction, when the AI isn't teached how to handle the new gameplay.

and its really frustrating, i want challenging opponents to play against and now i paid extra dollar to have another interesting race and now everytime i have at least one race in the bucket which underperforms severely.

Uhu, they're incredible pushovers as an opponent faction. They never seem to last very long, and all they do is mope " Oh the Magnar/Umber/Cookiemonsters are killing us! Can you send us some aid..?" But people are suggesting they are an underpowered faction at start, and its not the faction itself thats the problem, its the handling of that faction that causes the problem. And the AI is very sucky at running them.

yeah, i am forcing myself to play them cause i bought them some days ago. to be honest i regret it to some degree, now if i want a game with some challenging opponents, i have to manually add them which to some degree dampers the exploration part because i know which races i will encounter.

the AI should just focus on recruiting a bunch of troops and play more agressively. also it wouldn't hurt to give the dead a spell to change every shard to a death shard (and teach the AI how to use it).

as it stands now, stardock published a dlc which the AI handle, very bad job.

Yeah Morrigan's Call will greatly increase the growth when combined with death shards... strangely enough, I play my undead as a custom faction, with life magic. Its funny how that works

i just hope that stardock will find the time to repair their dlc, i am sorry but if i pay for an extra faction then please let also the AI be able to handle the faction. this is a singleplayer only game!

I would consider this to be a reasonable request.

From the 1.6 changelog, we can clearly see that SD is not adverse to updating DLC content. Hopefully this means that they have someone working on the undead.

The way I see it, if they can't/won't fix the undead, I can't/won't trust the next DLC that includes another new faction.

C'mon, the next DLC will let you have a trophy wife. I mean, what could be better for gameplay than that?!?

some less bugs and working dlc's? maybe they make for the dead dlc another dlc. "dead world AI dlc", you have to purchase the AI for the dlc seperately .