Strategy for/against the Necropolis by Jason Pierce.

The advantages of a necromancer.
Free skeletons, when a necromancer gets up there in levels he starts accumilating huge numbers of skeletons, this is so powerful since you could end up having hundreds of skeletons (not many stacks are far too well after taking a whack from 200 or so skeletons). This has numerous advantages, one being: you're killing creatures that your enemy PAID for with troops you got for FREE. Ex: 300 skeletons wack on to a stack of black dragons and kills 2, that's 8000 gold your enemy looses vs 0 gold for you. And the kick is so you loose those skeletons but at the end of the battle you get back possibly more than you lost back! Once you get to the point where you've got an expert necromancy, the tactics secondary skill becomes a huge advantage for the begining of the battle: you can group all of your expensive troops into one corner of the battle feild (the corner opposite of your enemies fastest flyers) and position your skeletons forward. This way his fastest fliers have no choice but to waste their first attack on level 1 troops that are costing you no money, and on the next move you can blind them or jump on them with your better units. Blinding fast flyers has two major advantages, one being his best flyers are imobilized, and second is that your enemy no longer gets to go first for the rest of the battle.

ALL undead are immune to BLIND.
Most good battles often become a BLIND spell contest and an army of necropolis troups takes that option away from your enemy. Any good heroes player will tell you 'blind' is the best spell to have. All good strategies have a decent counter but the only one that could be successful is if your enemy has a lot of titans who are also immune to blind and also the best shooters in the game. But this counter is also an advantage for the necromancer since the opponent is having to counter with the most expensive units in the game and if your necromancer moves quickly enough there won't be a whole lot of titans to be had. And the worst that could happen is you loosing a few bone dragons. (If the guy has too many titans then it's over anyway you probably took way too long). So the priority is to focus attacks on titan castles quickly, above all other castles. Rule of thumb for aspiring necromancers: don't put your power liches with your main assault army, instead put them with your main defending army the key is to accumilate large numbers of liches. Any time you have liches thats what an opposing army is going to focus on. Liches are the disadvantage of necropolis castles because they are expensive shooters and not very sturdy. Never attack a castle with liches, the towers will just do nothing but soot at THEM. When attacking castles, the rule is no liches because castle towers will most likely shoot at your huge skeleton stacks which were free anyway, remember? A good way to build up massive skeleton attacks is to attack any wandering units (not for the faint of heart, ruthless is the key word) that want to flee, this works better with lower level units (ex: attacking say 400 troglodytes that try to flee, you lose nothing and gain about 150-200 skeletons).

The rule in opposing necromancers is "always attack a high level necromancer with huge numbers of low level troops": necromancers "hate" armies with say 500 master gremilins, o god he would have to "waste" 1 whole blind spell, then your castle towers would use the practice of shooting at those extra 300 skeletons he "showed up with" at your castle gate). The only thing a good necromancer should fear (except titans but hey every player should fear titans anyway) is high level spell casters with high power ratings. They can oppose you with relatively small armies, whittle you down and retreat. 15 power + armageddon or expert destroy undead is a particular pain in the butt even if all he has is 3 black dragons. The biggest key to any necromancy campaign is to loose as few of high level troops as possible for expert necromancers can go for longer periods with out having to get fresh troops from his castle (thus allowing you to build up another necromancer or anthor army without wasting alot of effort by retooling your main hero with runners). Another thing to watch out for is your morale if you add troops from other castles. Adding just 1 or 2 other stacks of troops from the one different castle won't be too bad usually, but anything more and you're asking for trouble.