Warriors of the North Unit Analysis Part 7: Undead

To save some space, here's what the Undead Ability does:

Undead
50% Poison resistance, 10% Ice resistance. +50% to Attack at night and underground. +1 Morale in 'cemetery' battlefields. Immunity to Mind spells, among other immunities. +2 Morale from Plague. (Functionally +1, since it's still a negative effect and so there's a -1)

It's picked up Ice resistance. A little bit of it. Which is nice, but largely ignorable.

That addition is also new to Ice and Fire. In the base game the Undead Ability is the same as ever.

But wait, there's more!

Necro Energy
Every time the unit deals damage, it gains some Necro Energy. When its Necro Energy reaches 100, the Necro Energy is drained, 15% of the stack's starting numbers are resurrected, all their Talents are recharged/reloaded, and they gain +2 to Attack and Defense for the rest of the battle. Additionally, for every unit with Necro Energy on the battlefield, the chance of a slain stack generating a Zlogn rises. Zlogn are more effective the more Necro Energy the slain stack had at death, and their effectiveness is also scaled to relative stack size.

The actual mechanical details are fairly complicated, in part because there's a certain amount of arbitrariness to it.

At the broadest level, the baseline mechanic is that a unit gains 10-15 Necro Energy when it makes an attack. This is halved if the target is inorganic, Undead, or a Plant, while Objects, Phantoms (As in, a unit made by the Phantom Spell), and Angelic Guard give no Necro Energy at all. Ranged attacks also shave off 10% of Necro Energy generation. (In all cases, multipliers are chained multiplicatively; a ranged attack on a Thorn Warrior is 45% of the usual Necro Energy generation, for example) Also note that, like experience, Necro Energy is generated per attack, not per target; if a unit hits two enemies at once, this doesn't double the Necro Energy generated, and in fact won't increase it at all. (When units of different categories are simultaneously struck, I've gotten inconsistent results; sometimes it picks the better number, sometimes the worse. I'm unsure the exact logic underlying it)

Unfortunately, Necro Energy is largely irrelevant. It builds very slowly and frequently when it does kick in it's way, way too late. (When crushing enemy Undead, I mean) The primary significant mechanic here is that Undead being present means Zlogn can happen when things die (Zlogn are Eviln from the previous two games, just the name left untranslated for whatever reason), generally speaking.

This does potentially encourage the player to be a little more reckless with their own Undead, though less for the full charge effect and more because odds are decent a dead enemy will generate a Zlogn, providing an opportunity for free resurrections. Something to keep in mind: while walking even an Undead into a Zlogn will end its turn, Teleporting it onto the Zlogn will trigger the Zlogn without ending its turn. This is especially useful with Necromancers and Skeleton Archers, but can help anytime you want to heal an Undead unit but also want it to take advantage of its turn, particularly if you want to do so right away.

One mechanical oddity of Zlogn generation is that some generated units can technically generate a Zlogn on death, but the Zlogn will immediately trigger on nothing at all. The main way to see this in action is via Phantoms, but it's not the only possibility. I've yet to see it actually do anything other than waste a bit of player time, but since Zlogn can overwrite Traps I've wondered if eg a Soaring Phantom dying atop a Trap could result in the Zlogn appearing, removing the Trap, and then vanishing, thus leading to a clear path.

Notably, Necro Energy is actually lifted very directly from Red Sands. It's too bad it wasn't tweaked to make it more relevant. It charges horribly slowly in Red Sands, and it still charges horribly slowly now. And in Red Sands you have Skills to increase base Necro Energy amounts and whatnot! Warriors of the North has no equivalent modifiers, strangely, so it's actually a lot more relevant in Red Sands than in Warriors of the North.

The AI cheats on Necro Energy like with Adrenaline and the further you get into the game the more Necro Energy AI Undead will start with, so AI Undead get a bit more use out of it than player Undead, but Warriors of the North also just has much faster combat than Red Sands so even when you've got enemy Undead starting a battle with 60 Necro Energy they may well be dead before it matters.

Mostly Necro Energy tends to mean tough fights have a steeper cliff, where against an equivalent non-Undead force you might barely eke out a win while against an Undead force Necro Energy will start kicking in and suddenly that stack of 5 you can wear down is a stack of 25 and you're doomed.

Interestingly, Necro Energy per se is specific to Ice and Fire, and less surprising is that Necro Energy Blast doesn't exist in the base game. The base game instead gives all Undead a 'Dark Clot' Ability, which is... a 10% chance to drop a Zlogn on death. For that unit in specific.

Yeah, this is one of the more dramatic examples of Ice and Fire being a better and more interesting experience. Dark Clot is a dumb bit of RNG nonsense, with the added unfortunate point of being specifically player-hostile, since it's a quality that you don't wish to take advantage of on your own troops for the most part. Necro Energy's Zlogn generation rules are much better, more enjoyable design.

An additional reason why Ice and Fire is the better experience: the base game hates giving you Undead access. It has a lot of traditional Undead shop-type locations strewn throughout the world, and many of them will function as shops, but they'll only sell Scrolls and Items, not units. Ice and Fire converts the myriad wrecked ships and so on -most of them, anyway- into proper Undead shops, so you can actually play with the Undead.

I can see the logic for the base game being reluctant to offer Undead -Vikings hate Undead, you're a Viking, and you're on a divine quest to wipe out the Undead to boot- but it's not a good fit for the gameplay, and I'm very glad that they recognized this in time for Ice And Fire. I do wish they'd more foundationally constructed the game to avoid this issue, but still.

Just as in Armored Princess and The Legend, Undead don't care about racial Morale.


Zombie
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 60
Leadership: 30
Attack/Defense: 9 / 13
Initiative/Speed: 2 / 2
Health: 36
Damage: 3-4 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire, 10% Ice
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Pass (Charge: 1. Grants a single ally the Zombie's remaining Action Points. If the target has already ended its turn, it gets a new turn), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 2-3 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)
Abilities: Undead, Necro Energy

They've picked up Ice resistance... and Necro Energy Blast, though honestly it's extremely rare for any Undead unit to get high enough in Necro Energy to get the chance to use it. Extremely late in the game, you'll occasionally have enemy Undead manage to get enough Necro Energy for a Necro Energy Blast (Thanks primarily to the increased base values AI Undead get), but in player hands it'll almost never crop up.

Note that Necro Energy Blast doesn't benefit the unit using the Talent. If you do find yourself having access to Necro Energy Blast, you ideally are hitting multiple allies, as just letting the Necro Energy hit 100% provides more percentage of resurrection than Necro Energy Blasting a single ally does while also reloading Talents and boosting Attack and Defense... not to mention if a unit is high in Necro Energy, that's presumably because you've had it in the thick of things, and most likely it's the unit that most needs the resurrections!

Necro Energy Blast can still be useful, and one nice thing is that it actually encourages running melee-heavy Undead armies so you can end up catching multiple enemies and allies with Necro Energy Blast for impressive effect. This all by itself goes a long way to make Zombies more appealing as something other than Pass fodder, though you're sufficiently spoiled for melee Undead options you may well end up not running Zombies per se. I prefer Decaying Zombies, for example.

Also, to be clear, Necro Energy Blast does spend all your Necro Energy. This complicates the question of whether to use it or not.


Decaying Zombie
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 80
Leadership: 40
Attack/Defense: 13 / 15
Initiative/Speed: 1 / 2
Health: 48
Damage: 5-6 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire, 10% Ice
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Pass (Charge: 1. Grants a single ally the Decaying Zombie's remaining Action Points. If the target has already ended its turn, it gets a new turn), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 3-5 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)
Abilities: Undead, Decaying (When the entire stack is destroyed, all adjacent units are infected with Plague. Additionally, any time any member of the stack is slain, there's a 10% chance of infecting all adjacent units with Plague), Necro Energy

At last! Decaying isn't just an annoying 'only really applies to enemy stacks and player stacks generated by Necro Call or Necromancers' trait!

Other than Decaying being made into something sensible-ish, if random, Decaying Zombies have just picked up the usual Ice resistance, Necro Energy, and Necro Energy Blast.

Decaying's new behavior actually synergizes quite nicely with Necro Energy+Blast, as it's another way you're encouraged to try to throw mobs of the Undead into melee with your foes. Since Plagued Undead have their Morale outright rise, letting your Decaying Zombies take hits to trigger Decaying can provide a boost to your units while penalizing your foes. This obviously requires you're not fighting Undead, unfortunately, but there's actually a decent chunk of the late game where you mostly don't fight Undead, and it tends to take until the late game for you to reliably have decent supplies of the Undead anyway, so this is less of a burden than you might think. And in Ice and Fire, you'll get early access to Merlassar and access to the Ice Gardens, so if you feel like running the Undead for a bit in the mid-early game that works out fairly decently too.


Undead Spider
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 15
Leadership: 13
Attack/Defense: 4 / 2
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 13
Damage: 2-3 Poison
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire, 10% Ice
Talents: Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 1-2 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)
Abilities: Undead, Cursed (50% chance to Curse enemies in melee), Necro Energy

Just the usual Ice resistance, Necro Energy, and Necro Energy Blast. In theory they're one of the bigger beneficiaries from Necro Energy, since it makes their glass cannon nature more tolerable, but they're still pretty meh in practice, and since Necro Energy builds up based on quantity of hits with no scaling factor for how many casualties you inflicted in actuality tanky Undead tend to benefit more.

This does at least push them a bit away from being more or less 'Venomous Spider, but Undead and replacing a good on-hit effect with a meh one'. Some distinctiveness is good.


Skeleton
Level: 1
Hiring Cost: 20
Leadership: 12
Attack/Defense: 3 / 2
Initiative/Speed: 3 / 2
Health: 14
Damage: 2-3 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire, 10% Ice
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Sow Bones (Charge: 1. Generates three randomly placed Skeleton corpses), Bone Gate (Reload: 2. Teleports to a chosen Skeleton corpse, leaving behind one where it teleporting from. Base Defense is lowered by 50% for one turn, and after teleportation only one AP remains)
Abilities: Undead, Bone (Arrow attacks do only 30% damage, while 'heavy and siege attacks' do 130% damage), Necro Energy

Other than Necro Energy and the incidental Ice resistance, Bone Gate has been reworked to not give an Attack boost but also not cripple their Defense horribly (In fact, it's always just -1 Defense, which... whatever), while the Bone Ability has gained a new flaw of being weak to 'heavy and siege attacks'. They don't even get Necro Energy Blast, most likely because the interface only allows for 3 Talents.

So what constitutes a 'heavy or siege' attack? Why, an arbitrarily-designated list of units! The list is specifically...

Robbers, Marauders, Horsemen, Ents, Ancient Ents, Dwarves-the-unit, Foremen, Cannoneers, Giants, Goblin Catapults, Shaman, Blood Shaman, Ogres, Orc Chieftains, Zombies, Decaying Zombies, Demons-the-unit, Executioners, Brontors, Ram-Thors, Bears, Ancient Bears, Polar Bears, Cyclops, Trolls

... plus the code actually includes the old Neutral Barbarian and Berserker units, though this shouldn't matter to real play.

Notably, this is any damage from these units; a Shaman's Dancing Axes will do bonus damage to Bone units, for example, even though it doesn't seem like a 'heavy or siege attack', and similarly Ents and Ancient Ents get bonus damage not only on their enormous punches but even with their wasp swarms.

In spite of these nerfs, this is probably the Skeleton's apex in the series, simply because they're one of the units that benefits a lot from Necro Energy, Zlogn generating all over the place, and the faster pace of combat in Warriors of the North.

As an aside, if you're actually focused on getting Grand Strategian progress in Warriors of the North, you will come to hate Skeletons. 2-3 Skeleton stacks in a battlegroup is a nightmare where pure RNG determines whether they Sow Bones and immediately Bone Gate right atop whatever unit you least want them to hit or are basically manageable/harmless generic 2-Speed Running melee, with 3 or more at a time in particular being completely outside your ability to control using Christa's Gift.

They were annoying in this regard in Armored Princess, but Undead battlegroups were intermittent outside of one late-game island, and so you could either ignore a given fight until it was possible to stomp at least one stack flat before it could do anything or simply accept that the occasional fight wasn't going to give you Grand Strategy progress, whereas in Warriors of the North you'll be encountering them on a routine basis for the early game, the midgame, and parts of the late game. Which means that for a long time if you're committed to Grand Strategian you're going to be fairly regularly saving, getting into a fight, and then reloading when the RNG doesn't go your way -and the King's Bounty games have a consistent seed for your game such that if you reload and do it again with the exact same choices you'll get the exact same results, so you have to wander off and do a different fight or something if you want to get a chance at the RNG giving you a different result. This can mean ping-ponging between several Undead battlegroups while you try to wrangle the RNG into being cooperative.

But it gets worse.

Ghost

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 160

Leadership: 80

Attack/Defense: 18 / 13

Initiative/Speed: 4 / 4

Health: 40

Damage: 4-8 Ice

Resistances: 50% Physical, 50% Poison, 10% Ice

Talents: Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 4-8 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)

Abilities: Undead, Soaring, Phantom (50% Physical resistance and can travel through terrain), Soul Draining (Leeches for 30% of damage dealt. This can generate additional Ghosts. Undead, Plants, and inorganic units like Cyclops and Gremlin Towers can't be leeched from), Fear of Light (If the battle takes place on the surface during the day, Attack and Defense are halved), Necro Energy

They've switched to Ice damage!... okay and also picked up minor Ice resistance, Necro Energy, Necro Energy Blast, and Fear of Light.

But seriously, Ice damage is the big thing here. This makes Ghost damage output much more consistent -notable Ice resistance is much rarer than notable Physical resistance- as well as speeding up Ghost mirror matches. It's really nice, and I'm so glad to escape the thematic weirdness of a soul-sucking attack made by a unit that can phase through solid objects being significantly protected against by regular armor.

Necro Energy Blast is also relatively plausibly useful on them in player hands, since they're fairly good at getting into the thick of things without suffering much in the way of casualties. Buffering your other units while getting in some damage is quite nice, and the fact that most enemies will kill them slowly even before their leeching goes a long way, making it plausible for them to not only survive long enough to hit 70 Necro Energy but still have the numbers to do appreciable damage once they hit that point. Only Cursed Ghosts and Black Knights are competitive in this regard.

It's also worth noting that Warriors of the North actually somewhat offsets their poor performance against enemy Undead. After all, if your army is all Undead, and you're fighting an Undead battlegroup, then Zlogn will spawn constantly from fallen enemies, allowing you an alternative free method of keeping your numbers up. This applies not only to Ghosts, but also to Cursed Ghosts, Vampires, and Ancient Vampires, and is a decent argument for maybe trying to run an Undead army even against enemy Undead -especially since you can further supplement things with Diplomacy at that point.

Cursed Ghost

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 280

Leadership: 130

Attack/Defense: 21 / 17

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 4

Health: 60

Damage: 6-9 Ice

Resistances: 50% Physical, 50% Poison, 10% Ice

Talents: Scream (Reload: 4. All units of Levels 1-3 in a 2-tile area around the Cursed Ghost are pushed back. Those enemies that aren't immune to mental effects take damage, too. Its base damage is 6-9 Physical and is halved against non-adjacent enemies), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 6-9 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)

Abilities: Undead, Soaring, Phantom (50% Physical resistance and can travel through terrain), Soul Draining (Leeches for 50% of damage dealt. This can generate additional Cursed Ghosts. Undead, Plants, and inorganic units like Cyclops and Gremlin Towers can't be leeched from), Fear of Light (If the battle takes place on the surface during the day, Attack and Defense are halved), Necro Energy

They've switched to Ice damage, just like Ghosts, and picked up Fear of Light, also just like Ghosts, in addition to the more generic minor Ice resistance, Necro Energy, and Necro Blast. No other changes.

There's not a lot to say about them that I didn't already cover with Ghosts. Scream is a bit less appealing on average than in prior games since enemies that won't take damage from it are so much more the norm, I suppose? But it's never been all that much of a damage contributor, it's the push effect that's always been the primary use for it.

Though on the note of Scream, it's an example of arbitrariness with Necro Energy, as it will only generate 80% of the usual Necro Energy.

Vampire (Human form)

Level: 3

Hiring Cost: 160

Leadership: 80

Attack/Defense: 20 / 20

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2

Health: 70

Damage: 6-12 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire, 10% Ice

Talents: Transformation (Reload: 1. Changes forms), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 5-10 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)

Abilities: Undead, Regeneration ('Top' member of the stack heals all damage at the start of the unit's turn), No retaliation, Werewolf Despiser (+30% damage against Werewolves in either form), Necro Energy

Minor Ice resistance, Necro Energy, Necro Energy Blast, and Werewolf Despiser. Werewolf Despiser is mildly amusing to me, but not very mechanically interesting, alas. Unlike Vampire Despiser, you don't fight against Werewolf Elves very much. There's only really two maps in the game that can have them -Merlassar and the second version of Arlania, aside the occasional Ice Gardens guest appearance- and in the case of Arlania all the hostile Elven groups will be replaced by neutral ones if you decide to actually advance the plot before killing them all. (Interestingly, even if you do kill all the Elven battlegroups, the neutral versions will still all spawn in: the game is replacing them, not making the existing groups non-hostile) So unless you actively go out of your way to bring Vampires when you fight Werewolves, it won't crop up much -and that would be a strange thing to do since they both get damage bonuses against each other.

Like Ghosts and Cursed Ghosts, Vampires are one of the better potential abusers of Necro Energy Blast thanks to bat form's leeching making the self-restore of a Necro Energy charge less relevant to them.

Overall though, you use Vampires much as you used them in Armored Princess, and fighting them isn't too different either.

Vampire (Bat form)

Level: 3

Leadership: 80

Attack/Defense: 20 / 15

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 4

Health: 50

Damage: 5-8 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire, 10% Ice

Talents: Transformation (Reload: 1), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 5-8 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)

Abilities: Undead, No Retaliation, Soaring, Vampirism (When attacking organic targets, damage is converted to health, and can even undo casualties), Werewolf Despiser (+30% damage against Werewolves in either form), Necro Energy.

The usual Undead stuff of minor Ice resistance and Necro Energy and Necro Energy Blast, plus Werewolf Despiser, just as their human form. Though notice that the Vampire Bat's Necro Energy Blast is actually weaker than the humanoid form's version of the same. As such, it can be worth transforming back to up the damage if you have no pressing reason to stay in bat form.

Ancient Vampire (Human form)

Level: 4

Hiring Cost: 460

Leadership: 180

Attack/Defense: 25 / 25

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 2

Health: 140

Damage: 10-18 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, 10% Ice

Talents: Transformation (Reload: 1. Changes forms), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 10-18 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)

Abilities: Undead, Regeneration ('Top' unit restores missing HP at the beginning of the unit's turn), No retaliation, Death's Deception (Critical hits against the Ancient Vampire instead Miss, doing no damage at all), Werewolf Despiser (+30% damage to Werewolves in either form), Necro Energy

Minor Ice resistance, Necro Energy, Necro Energy Blast, and Werewolf Despiser, just as with Vampires.

Something worth explicitly pointing out: Death's Deception only applies to crits from units. Rage, Spells, damage from Fire/Poisoning/Freeze/Bleeding? Can actually crit on an Ancient Vampire just fine. Many Talents will also get crits on Ancient Vampires just fine; if it's a Talent that will always punch through more general evasion effects (eg the Guard Droid's harpoon), then it can crit on an Ancient Vampire.

Also, oddly enough I've every once in a great while seen a unit's regular attack get a crit through on them anyway. I've no idea why, and I've only seen it in Warriors of the North, though that may simply be due to the skewed ratios: no other game in the series has you fight Ancient Vampires as much as Warriors of the North does, after all. I'm inclined to suspect it's a product of the code refactoring, rather than simple luck, but I have no way of being completely certain.

The overall net result is that Warriors of the North has the least annoying Ancient Vampires to fight. (Albeit with the caveat that the Viking has a heavy emphasis on critical hits that can make Ancient Vampires maddening to fight for them in particular) After all, your average damage has gone up against them! This isn't even factoring in how Rage is more powerful than ever before.

Also worth pointing out that while Talents can crit and thus be dodged, the fact that they have depressed crit odds compared to regular attacks means you should still prefer to use damaging Talents over regular attacks against Ancient Vampire's. eg Bowmen should shoot their Flaming Arrows and Ice Arrows at Ancient Vampire's over other targets, if feasible, and then probably point their regular attacks at other enemies. (Assuming the Ancient Vampires haven't gone into bat form, of course) As such, in some sense that end of things has only changed inasmuch as playing optimally can still see you screwed by RNG. This is a bit unfortunate, given Ancient Vampires are genuinely a fairly common foe throughout Warriors of the North...

Otherwise though, what I said about Vampires applies to Ancient Vampires.

Ancient Vampire (Bat form)

Level: 4

Leadership: 180

Attack/Defense: 25 / 20

Initiative/Speed: 7 / 5

Health: 100

Damage: 8-12 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, 10% Ice

Talents: Transformation (Reload: 1. Switches to humanoid form), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 8-12 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)

Abilities: Undead, No Retaliation, Vampirism (When attacking organic targets, damage is converted to health, and can even undo casualties), Werewolf Despiser (+30% damage to Werewolves in either form), Necro Energy

Just as their humanoid form, minor Ice resistance, Necro Energy, Necro Energy Blast, and Werewolf Despiser. Eh.

As with Vampire Bats, Ancient Vampire Bats have a weaker Necro Energy Blast than their humanoid form. Unlike with Vampire Bats, it's much weaker, instead of just having a lower high roll, so if you actually care about the damage output of Necro Energy Blast, transforming before firing is a lot more important than with base Vampires. Just remember that if you Transform back to an Ancient Vampire after moving farther than an Ancient Vampire can walk in humanoid form their turn will immediately end; don't be thinking you can fly 3-4 tiles over to become maximally surrounded, Transform, and then blast everything. Not without a way to give them an additional turn, anyway.

Black Knight

Level: 4

Hiring Cost: 1000

Leadership: 150

Attack/Defense: 28 / 28

Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2

Health: 160

Damage: 12-16 Physical

Resistances: 30% Physical, 50% Poison, 10% Ice

Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 12-16 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)

Abilities: Undead, Armored (30% Physical resistance), Commander (+1 Morale to allied Undead), Rising Fury (Each time the Black Knight deals damage, its base Damage and its crit chance rise by 3 and 3% respectively, to a max of 15/15%), Mastery (Each time the Black Knight takes damage, its Defense rises by 30%, to a maximum of 90% above base), Necro Energy

Some renaming, Ice resistance, Necro Energy, and Necro Energy Blast. No direct major changes.

It's worth noting that Black Knights trigger Rising Fury on a Necro Energy Blast that hits enemies, too.

Black Knights are by far the single biggest beneficiary of Necro Energy and, to a lesser extent, Necro Energy Blast. They're also one of the bigger beneficiaries of random Zlogn generation. They can shrug off tremendous amounts of damage, their damage output rises as they fight -normally offset by casualties- and they're just plain one of the best generic-ish 2-Speed running melee units in the series. Historically they were held back (some) by the clunkiness of undoing casualties due to being Undead, but in Warriors of the North just fighting long enough will undo a good chunk of their casualties, Necro Energy Blast from allies can prop them up still further, and if you're running an all-Undead army then Zlogn will generate from fallen enemies on a fairly regular basis, passively propping up their numbers as they cut down your enemies. This is, in fact, by far the best game for Black Knights, and they were already okay in The Legend and pretty amazing in Armored Princess!

And surprisingly, they're not so bad to fight, simply because of how powerful Rage is, among other aspects of Warriors of the North that make it easier to cut down and/or stall out enemy Black Knights fairly smoothly. (Widespread crits being another one, for example) They could be a bit frustrating to fight in Armored Princess due to their extraordinary durability allowing them to reach your units even while suffering from a hail of Spells, Rage, and ranged unit fire, even if you literally focused solely on dealing with the one Black Knight stack and let the entire rest of the enemy army pass unmolested until the Black Knights finally fell.

Warriors of the North makes them fun from both ends on a quite reliable basis!

Bone Dragon

Level: 5

Hiring Cost: 3200

Leadership: 1300

Attack/Defense: 53 / 53

Initiative/Speed: 6 / 7

Health: 790

Damage: 50-80 Poison

Resistances: 10% Physical, 50% Poison, 10% Ice

Talents: Poison Cloud (Reload: 2. 60-80 Poison damage to all adjacent targets, with a 90% chance to Poison units hit. Units don't retaliate), Eat Corpse (Reload: 3. Destroys an adjacent corpse. For every 2 Leadership the corpse had, the Bone Dragon gains 1 Health. Additionally, all living enemies below Level 4 suffer -1 to Initiative for 2 turns. Plants are exempt from this penalty)

Abilities: Undead, Bone (Takes only 30% damage from arrows, and 130% damage from 'heavy and siege attacks'), Flight, Poison Breath (50% chance to Poison with melee attacks), Necro Energy

The usual minor Ice resistance and Necro Energy, the already-covered new weakness of Bone... and Gobble Corpse has a completely different effect and is now a Reloading Talent instead of a one-charge Talent. It's debatable whether it's an actual improvement, but it's probably more thematically coherent at least. It'd be even nicer if it could actually resurrect dead Bone Dragons...

Alas, they don't get Necro Energy Blast. Admittedly, they already have an area-of-effect Talent, and Poison Cloud is probably more useful overall than Necro Energy Blast would be for them, but it's still a bit surprising. They've got room for it, after all. Also note that Poison Cloud only gives 80% of the usual Necro Energy.

On the other hand, Zlogn generation and allied Necro Energy Blasts makes it a lot easier to be a bit cavalier with them in combat. Especially late in the game when you're actually leading 10+ at a time, a casualty or two may well be entirely undone for more-or-less free! Since one of the main problems with Bone Dragons has always been that they're a relatively frail dragon and not as good as the other dragons at tossing out damage while taking none, this is a big boost to their appeal.

One thing worth pointing out is that Warriors of the North is willing to throw the occasional enemy Bone Dragon at you as early as the second island. This makes Warriors of the North the only game in the series where Bone Dragons can show up early enough to really leverage their per-head durability, and such encounters can easily merit avoiding them for an unusually long time even if you're not focused on Grand Strategian ranks simply because they don't wear down as you fight them and so can dish out a disproportionate amount of damage before finally collapsing.

Skeleton Archer

Level: 1

Hiring Cost: 24

Leadership: 14

Attack/Defense: 3 / 2

Initiative/Speed: 4 / 2

Health: 10

Damage (Ranged): 2-3 Physical

Damage (Melee): 1-2 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, -10% Fire, 10% Ice

Talents: Poison Arrow (Charge: 1. Ranged attack that does 2-3 Poison damage and Poisons the target), Black Arrow (Charge: 1. Ranged attack that does 3-4 Magic damage and removes a single positive effect from the target)

Abilities: Undead, Archer (Range: 5), Bone (Arrow attacks do only 30% damage, while 'heavy and siege' attacks do 130% damage), Necro Energy

Just the usual Ice resistance and Necro Energy, plus the nerf to Bone. They don't even benefit much from the Ice resistance and Necro Energy! They also don't get Necro Energy Blast, most likely to leave room for Dragon Arrows, though this isn't much of a loss. It would've been nice to be able to walk up behind Undead allies and heal them, but it would've been pretty limited.

Though this is probably their weakest entry in the series. Not because they're any worse -the new weakness on Bone isn't exactly an enormous nerf- but because the other Undead benefit so much more from Zlogn generation and Necro Energy Blasts going off in brawls. And of course if you've been playing the whole series, the sheer novelty value of melee-focused army of Undead being actually quite competent may well mean you're disinterested in giving them a chance after having used them in the other games.

Like Skeletons, you will come to hate Skeleton Archers if you're committed to Grand Strategian ranks. They're basically glass cannons and yet they aren't actually that fragile for the Leadership, they're a ranged unit that cannot get distracted by their own Talents (Necromancers will usually prioritize Plague, Magic Lock, and Raise Undead over actually attacking your troops), and Poison Arrow means that frequently even if you nearly kill the stack what happens is they hit something with Poison Arrow and once its turn rolls around the Poisoning causes a casualty. Particularly if you use units like Slingers who are per-head frail, where there's not a lot of wiggle room.

This is one way Ice and Fire giving early access to Merlassar helps a lot: Ents and Ancient Ents shrug off Poisoning damage and are individually respectably bulky and insanely bulky, respectively, and overall Skeleton Archers prefer to target your nearer units. (And Ents and Ancient Ents get bonus damage against Bone units!) With some Initiative support -such as the Skald's relevant Edda or Battle Cry, which the Viking will want to spam anyway for a Medal- and/or a bit of luck (eg rolling Water for Elemental Power means the Ents only need 1 other Initiative booster) you can arrange for the Ents and potentially even the Ancient Ents to go beforehand and get close enough to distract them. Or maybe you got lucky and got Teleport, whatever.

Still means you have to put up with Skeleton Archers on the first three islands, though...

Necromancer

Level: 4

Hiring Cost: 1000

Leadership: 200

Attack/Defense: 30 / 30

Initiative/Speed: 7 / 2

Health: 140

Damage(Ranged): 8-12 Magic/

Damage (Melee): 4-6 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, 10% Magic, 10% Ice

Talents: Magic Lock (Charge: 1. A single enemy unit has all its Talents blocked off for 2 turns), Raise Undead (Charges: 3. Raises a corpse as 120 Leadership per Necromancer in the casting stack, with the new stack size unable to exceed the size of the corpse's original unit. If the corpse is an Undead unit, it arises as the same unit, except Vampires and Ancient Vampires always arise in human form, whereas non-Undead are more complicated: see 'Necro Call'), Plague (Charge: 1. Infects every unit on the battlefield with Plague)

Abilities: Undead, Cloud of Darkness (Range: 6. Splash attack that always Curses hit units, doing 50% of base damage to all units adjacent to the primary target), Necromancer (Recruits one of Skeletons, Skeleton Archers, Zombies, or Decaying Zombies after a battle completes. This will prefer to add to existing stacks, but if no relevant stacks are present in your army but you animated one mid-battle, that will be prioritized instead. Regardless, this effect is capped at 3% of the Necromancer stack's Leadership), Necro Energy

Aside the standard Ice resistance and Necro Energy, Necromancers have made use of the more mediocre melee Undead more appealing via their Necromancer quirk. It's a nice touch. No Necro Energy Blast, again most likely because of the 3-Talent interface limitation.

Amusingly, while Necromancers can be a bit irritating due to their high Initiative and their willingness to occasionally just open the turn blasting one of your units, in Ice and Fire there's incentive to save killing them for last. The more stuff they animate, the more experience your units gain, after all.

Within battle, though, they're pretty much the same as ever. Necro Energy won't crop up very often for them -ideal use of Necromancers involves heavy use of their Talents, after all- and the potential to get a Zlogn heal is only likely to crop up if you decide to outright Teleport them into one. Their ability to Magic Lock things with no real qualifiers is a bit more significant since Warriors of the North and Ice and Fire in particular adds a lot of Talents you might want blocked off, and their use for mass Plague as a force multiplier on Spell and Rage damage is less appealing since you're fighting Undead so often in Warriors of the North, not to mention the new Plague-immune units like Ice Spiders, but the effect is relatively small. Especially since the game being so reluctant to give you Undead sources tends to be a bigger factor in whether you use any given one or not.

A strange detail: with Raise Undead on the Necromancer in specific, trying to animate enemy Druids, Soothsayers, or Mystics will result in them arising as their living selves and still hostile to you. Necro Call works fine on these three, it's just Necromancers who suffer this, unlike with Priests, Inquisitors and Paladins.

Pirate Ghost
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 300
Leadership: 50
Attack/Defense: 12 / 10
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3
Health: 30
Damage: 4-7 Ice
Resistances: 50% Physical, 50% Poison, -30% Magic, -30% Fire, 10% Ice
Talents: Treasure Hunter (Charge: 1. 50% chance to generate a Treasure Chest somewhere on the battlefield. If successful, +5 Morale to Pirates, Sea Dogs, and Pirate Ghosts for the rest of the battle), Necro Energy Blast (Charge: 1. Only available at 70 or more Necro Energy. All nearby living units take 3-6 Magic damage, while nearby Undead heal/resurrect up to 10% of their original stack size)
Abilities: Excavator (+10% Gold from overworld loot), Cursed Treasure Hunter (Drawn to chests, automatically traveling to the nearest one at the beginning of their turn if there is one), Marine (+1 Morale in naval combat), Elementally Vulnerable (-30% Magic and Fire resistance), Nimble (20% chance for incoming attacks to Miss) Undead, Phantom (50% Physical resistance, and can pass through impassable terrain), Necro Energy

For some reason, they got a new, much more purple backdrop in their UI portrait.

Mechanically, they've switched to Ice damage -finally having them consistent with Ghosts and Cursed Ghosts!- but lost a point of damage in the process, as well as picking up the usual minor Ice resistance and Necro Energy, while losing 5 Defense. Additionally, their Talent has been completely replaced (Aside using the same graphic), and they've lost Avarice (Good!) as well as Vindictive, (Bad, technically, but it was niche so whatever) in exchange for picking up the standard seafaring criminal Ability of Nimble. (I resent the swingy randomness, but it's much more consistently useful than Vindictive was...) And of course they've picked up Necro Energy Blast, and they're one of the more likely units to actually end up using it.

The overall result is probably a net positive, outside of being less exploitable for infinite money. Though it also means they don't have a source of Astral damage. But. I'm glad to see that gone, frankly. Even aside the infinite money aspect, them randomly having Astral damage was just jarring, and given how swingy the damage was it wasn't like it being Astral damage served to make it a reliable damage source.

Oh, and totally unmentioned by the game is that they've picked up Excavator, just like the living pirates have always had. I'm not sure why the game doesn't mention it, but there you go.

Surprisingly, you don't fight them very often in Warriors of the North. They mostly tend to show up in wrecked ships, with a handful of Isles of Freedom battlegroups being able to include them as well. They're so rare, in fact, that I spent a good chunk of my original run wondering if they'd been removed from the game!

As such, it's less important to be prepared for them on a regular basis than you might expect given how common Undead are.

Note that in the base game Pirate Ghosts don't have the 'real' Persistence of Mind Ability, but in Ice and Fire they do have it.


Evil Eye
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1750
Leadership: 300
Attack/Defense: 26 / 32
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 3
Health: 150
Damage (Ranged): 13-18 Magical

Damage (Melee): 13-18 Physical

Resistances: 50% Poison, 20% Magic, -50% Fire, 10% Ice
Talents: Electric Discharge (Reload: 3. A target enemy takes 11-15 Magic damage, with a 30% chance to be Shocked, and then all adjacent units take half that damage as well), Icy Geysers (Reload: 4. Three random enemies take 10-12 Ice damage, with a 30% chance to be Frozen), Book of Nightmares (Charges: 2. Summons 140-180 Leadership in Books of Nightmares nearby an existing ally)
Abilities: Undead, Soars, Lightning (Range: Infinite. 50% chance to Shock with ranged attack), No Melee Penalty, Vulnerable to Fire (-50% Fire resistance), Magic Protection (20% Magic resistance), Drain Life (Melee attacks steal health and can even undo casualties. This leeches 80% of the damage dealt), Necro Energy

The only new Undead unit in either of Warriors of the North or Ice and Fire, and it's Ice and Fire in specific. Like a lot of Ice and Fire content, it's largely lifted from Red Sands. The biggest difference is that in Red Sands Icy Geysers fires off 2-6 geysers while having only a single charge available, instead of being slowly-reloading but consistent in geyser count.

Note that where the Geyser Spell prioritizes Gremlins, Icy Geysers actually can't hit Gremlins, even if they're the only targets left. It's a bit disappointing to go in thinking Evil Eyes are a handy way of quickly pushing through weak Keeper fights only to discover they're actually really bad in them.

One of the big things worth noting about Evil Eyes is that they're fairly unique in being a unit that doesn't really care about its own position while being incredibly mobile. None of their Talents cares specifically about their own position, their effective range on their ranged attack is infinite, their only Ability that encourages you to care about positioning is purely a way to undo casualties, and they're a 3-Speed Soaring unit. The overall result is that they're really good at keeping out of reach of the enemy, or baiting enemies toward awkward positions, or ranging out to collect a chest with minimal interference to their main duties, or otherwise doing any number of useful things while simultaneously dumping damage on the enemy and summoning distractions and all. The utility of this honestly cannot be overstated, and they're simultaneously one of my favorite units in Ice and Fire and also do a really good job of illustrating exactly why this kind of behavior isn't the norm; the game would lose a lot of depth if you had more units that could ignore battlefield conditions nearly entirely.

The fact that they have Drain Life is also fairly convenient from a player perspective, since they're pretty rare to be offered in shops, and even fairly rare as enemies, limiting your opportunities for Diplomacy pulling their numbers up. Being able to avoid casualties through Drain Life is very helpful for their sustainability -and is also, in a way, actually a contributor to them not caring overly much about battlefield position, since fighting at a distance keeps them safe by preventing them from taking hits while fighting up close gives them opportunities to heal. (And they have No Melee Penalty, of course)

Generally speaking, you should use their Talents before their regular ranged attack. Electric Discharge is a little weaker against a single target, but that just means you should arrange to hit multiple enemies with it. Ice Geysers is also weaker against an individual target -not counting the potential Freeze damage- but so long as there's three valid targets its total damage will still be better. I prefer to open with Electric Discharge, both for the Shock potential and because going Ice Geysers->Electric Discharge results in them both being ready again on the same turn. (Assuming you didn't use them both in the same round via granting Evil Eyes a second turn) And also because Ice Geysers is less sensitive to enemy movement.

It's also worth pointing out that Evil Eyes really hate fighting Ice Creations. You can't leech from them, they have 80% resistance to everything except Evil Eye's melee, and an Evil Eye's Ice resistance is far too minor to really help -especially since Ice Creations actually have 25% resistance against Physical! It won't crop up too often, but it might be worth keeping an anti-Ice Creation unit in Reserve if you're running Evil Eyes. It's either that or accept that Evil Eyes are going to be contributing nearly nothing against Ice Creations.

Also note that the Evil Eye's regular ranged attack and both of its attacking Talents only provide 80% of the usual Necro Energy points. If for some reason you really want your Evil Eye's Necro Energy up as soon as possible, you may need to get it into melee.

As enemies, Evil Eyes are fairly annoying, but used quite sub-optimally. They don't recognize that they have Drain Life and No Melee Penalty, insisting on staying out of reach of your units, even when dealing with units whose Magic resistance is greater than their Physical resistance. They're quite random about whether to use their Talents at all, and aren't very intelligent about their targeting in general. They'll still randomly mess up your plans with Shocks and Freezes and the occasional well-placed Book of Nightmares, but their effectiveness as enemies is just way less than their effectiveness in player hands. And of course the player is a lot more likely to be equipped to pick on their serious Fire weakness than the AI, between Gudrida's Rage and Spell access. (... and I guess Loki's Aid in the late game, technically)

Evil Eyes are another Undead unit that secretly has the 'real' Persistence of Mind.

Book of Nightmares
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: N/A (Technically 400, but this doesn't matter)
Leadership: 100
Attack/Defense: 15 / 20
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 40
Damage: 4-7 Physical
Resistances: 50% Poison, 80% Magic, -100% Fire
Talents: Random Spell (Charge: 1. An arbitrary chosen target enemy is hit with either a random negative Spell effect or is hit with a random damaging Spell), Drain (Charges: 2. Consumes an adjacent allied stack whose Health is no more than 40 per Book of Nightmares and who is below Level 5, adding 2 charges to Random Spell)
Abilities: Strong Spells (Book of Nightmares casts Spells as Level 2 versions), Magic Immunity (Unaffected by Spells and has 80% Magic resistance), Persistence of Mind (Immunity to mental effects), Poison Protection (50% Poison resistance), Vulnerable to Fire (-100% Fire resistance), Eyeless (Immunity to Blind, Precision, and Greasy Mist. Also can detect invisible creatures), Book of Nightmares (Melee attacks against units below Level 4 have a 30% chance to cause Fear, and when a Book of Nightmares stack is completely destroyed the corpse vanishes and a Zlogn is left in their place)

Strictly speaking the Book of Nightmares is a Neutral unit, but it can only exist through Evil Eye summons and it's Undead-y with the Zlogn effect and all. (Though amusingly rolling one into a Zlogn will do damage to them) So here it is. Obviously it's lifted from Red Sands, though it's definitely one of the more nifty concepts to lift.

Side note: they don't leave behind corpses when destroyed, just like Books of Evil.

The damage a Book of Nightmares does when casting a damaging Spell is a bit odd. If the Book of Nightmares is commanded by a Hero (So for one thing, anytime you're using one), it calculates the damage exactly as if cast by the Hero, but the final damage has 75% shaved off... except that the Berserker Skill can trigger on it to double it to effectively 50%. Anyway, unlike the Book of Evil, you often would rather the Book of Nightmares cast a negative effect instead of inflicting damage. (At least it means randomly rolled Lightnings aren't ripping holes in your own forces...) You might expect the stack size to matter, but no; if your Book of Nightmares does 1,000 damage at 100 members, it will still do 1,000 damage at 1 member.

If not commanded by a Hero, the damage modifier is instead defined by location, where even unled Books of Evil will generally do more damage later in the game. (... not that you encounter them enough to be liable to notice)

One thing that's fairly annoying about Book of Nightmares is that its death animation leaves you not playing the game for a long time. It's a neat little animation -albeit unchanged from Red Sands- with the book doing the normal Book of Evil death animation, then the Doom graphic appearing over it, and this generating a Zlogn, but there's a several-second pause where you just can't play the game at all. It's sufficiently irritating I honestly prefer not to summon them at all if I suspect they might get taken out, which is a bit frustrating.

As far as actual gameplay goes, Books of Nightmares are really useful as meatshields in an Undead-heavy army. (Hence why it's frustrating that the animation makes losing them so tedious) Not only do they tank some damage your own units would normally suffer, but then they always leave a Zlogn behind when finished off, all but guaranteeing your forces can get some resurrections in. It's a good idea to be aggressive with them, both in hopes of triggering the Fear effect and because having them die is actually useful to you. Even if Evil Eyes are your only actual Undead, against non-Undead forces the guaranteed Zlogn is an automatic trap, and heck even against Undead the resurrection amount they get will usually be fairly small and at times forcing an enemy to come to a premature stop can be worth even significant resurrections.

The fact that they're immune to Spells also makes them convenient as meatshields when you want to use eg Blizzard. They're really good, even if you never use Random Spell!

If you do use Random Spell, it can potentially cast...

Magic Poleaxe, Poison Skull, Lightning, Ghost Blade, Weakness, Slow, Corrosion, Helplessness, Pygmy, Doom, Fear

... and it has some rules on these: it won't cast Slow on a target whose Speed is 1, it won't cast Corrosion unless the target has Armored (Unfortunately, there's an error where Droids don't get counted as Armored for this purpose even though they're by far the best target for Corrosion), it won't cast Helplessness on a target that's below Level 3 or has 5 or less Defense, and it won't cast Pygmy or Doom on a target that's Level 4 or higher.

I do wish Lightning wasn't in there, but Warriors of the North has enough Spell-immune options it's not nearly as frustrating as it would've been in prior games.

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Next time, we get started on Neutral, starting with the animals.