A Town Guide

Necropolis

Overview: The necropolis is a strange town. It has some great troops, but also some terrible ones as well. This town's strong magic and the necromancy ability save it during the early to mid game when it is weakest. Then at the very late game, you need to supplement your armies with a better seventh-level creature. The unfortunate aspect of undead troops is that their armies don't benefit from high morale, and because they bring down the morale of the living, it's not a good idea to mix undead and living creatures unless you have high morale boosting artifacts. All things considered, this town type is average in ability.

Pros: Strong, prolific first-level troop; black knight is overwhelmingly best sixth-level creature; upgrades are significant; three flying creatures.
Cons: Weak mid level troops; seventh-level troop only average; only one ranged unit.

Creatures
The creature tree of the necropolis town is a roller coaster of weak and strong units. The first-level unit, the skeleton is relatively powerful, and the upgraded skeleton warrior gains a much needed boost in speed. The walking dead and wights, however, are probably the weakest creatures of their respective levels. Even their upgrades are nearly useless, although you might want to keep a small stack of wraiths in your army to siphon away spell points from your enemies.

The unupgraded vampire is a weak creature in speed, damage, and other statistics. However, once you upgrade it, it becomes very powerful, especially in numbers. The ability to resurrect fallen creatures from its stack by siphoning hit points from enemies is a valuable ability. In fact, this resurrection ability is permanent and allows necropolis players to cause serious damage in conjunction with the power lich. You can send vampire lords into the enemy's midst, where the vampire lord can draw all the enemy opponents around it. Then the power lich can lob his corrosive cloud toward the vampire and harm only the adjacent enemy units, since undead are immune to the lich's splash damage attack. And if the vampire lords maintain their numbers by drawing life from the enemy by attacking and counterattacking, the strategy can continue. Cast a counterstrike spell on the vampire lord and they can last even longer, drawing life and resurrecting their numbers after each enemy attack. Large groups of vampire lords are practically invulnerable, except to ranged attacks and magic.

The lich is powerful, and the upgraded lich is even better, with more hit points and better speed. As mentioned above, the lich and vampire lord can work together for a lethal combo. But don't try it with regular vampires because without the resurrection ability, they fall too quickly for the strategy to work. The black knight is unequivocally the strongest sixth-level creature, and the extremely powerful, upgraded dread knight is almost as strong as the seventh-level hydra and behemoth. The bone dragon is a weak seventh-level unit, but the upgraded version, the ghost dragon, has a very useful skill: aging. While the ghost dragon is still weak relative to all other seventh-level creatures, its aging ability cuts the hit points of all the creatures in a target stack by half. A stack of 20 black dragons goes from 6000 hit points to 3000 hit points! A force of power liches, vampire lords, ghost dragons, and dread knights, backed by the magic from the necropolis mage guild is a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Buildings
The necropolis town has cheap low level buildings, but the higher level ones and their upgrades are expensive in precious resources. You'll need gems and sulfur. The building dependencies are not exorbitant for the initial dwellings, but get more involved for the upgrades to these dwellings (the vampire dwelling for example requires two extraneous buildings). You don't ever need to build the tomb of souls (the wight dwelling), so don't build it. You can apply the savings towards other dwellings. Unfortunately, the fifth-level buildings and beyond require a mage guild before they can be built. You need both the vampire and lich dwellings for the hall of darkness (black knight dwelling).

The special buildings for the necropolis are very powerful and further the necromancers' special powers. The cover of darkness is a great weapon of subterfuge and covers back up a huge area around the necropolis town with fog of war. The skeleton transformer allows you to convert any troops into skeletons. It is a good idea to use it to convert your walking dead to skeletons or skeleton warriors. The necromancy amplifier goes one step further and boosts all your heroes' necromancy skills by 10 percent. The effect is cumulative, meaning the more necropolis towns with amplifiers you own, the greater each hero's necromancy ability will be. The necropolis is one of three towns that can build a shipyard.

In a lapse of common sense, the designers have made the blacksmith produce the first aid tent. The resource silo produces +1 wood and +1 ore.

The necropolis grail building is the Soul Prison, which adds 5000 additional gold to your reserves each day, boosts creature growth by +50 percent, and increases your heroes' necromancy skill by +20 percent.

Magic
The necropolis is fairly strong in magic, and its heroes are more likely to advance in power than knowledge. The mage guild is more likely to dispense powerful spells of destruction such as implosion and chain lightening rather than subtle beneficial spells like prayer