Overall, playing a Necromancer seems to be a largely winning prospect. Undead units also ignore morale, which means you can easily avoid any morale issued with a fully-undead army (and there’s a research option that makes every unit become undead if they stay in a hero’s unit for one turn, except for a few types). Most of these things are critical to using the undead, and are only really available if your leader’s undead.

They cannot heal naturally or benefit from healing spells, except for those specifically geared to the undead – which Necromancers can possess in abundance due to the Reanimator units and a research upgrade that gives every support-class unit this power. Undead or ‘Ghoul’ units are normal units with an undead marker. One thing I noticed, though, is how the Necromancers don’t especially mesh well with other units. This leads to some interesting changes – map-based resources that increase population and happiness aren’t particularly useful to a nation of ghouls, though spells do exist that allow you to corrupt farms and springs of life to produce undead population rather than people. You can build a whole new selection of structures that increase population production, such as embalmers and necropoli, but corpses are also gathered by killing other units in battle, giving a population increase to the nearest city to the fight.

Ghoul cities don’t accrue population – rather their resources come from dead bodies. Necromancer nations no longer concern themselves with morale of either units or people for the most part – they don’t even concern themselves with population at all. Necromancers can be recruited as hero units, just as other named characters can in previous AoWII instalments, and are mostly on-par with other heroes, though they are most distinct when you play a necromancer as a leader.

However, one must consider how this new edition fits in with the gameplay. Already, I’m willing to give this a shot.

Age of wonders 3 collection review