Age of Wonders III Dev Journals: Necromancer Cities and Units
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Triumph Studios have continued to tell us more about their upcoming necromancer-focused expansion pack for Age of Wonders III, with the two latest journals focusing on the undead cities and units we'll be enjoying once the add-on finally makes its way to our hard drives. There's quite a bit of artwork included, and here's a bit on the units:
The Lost Souls
These are the souls of troubled people who are not able to find rest, even in death. Lost Souls are incorporeal, making them hard to kill with physical damage, and have the Exploit Despair ability, which allows them to deal extra damage against units with low morale. When fielded with higher level Necromancer units that can reduce the morale of living units, the effectives of the Lost Souls can be greatly enhanced. Defeating a Lost Soul during combat is tricky, as it also has the Undying ability. Undying units automatically return from the dead after a few turns in tactical combat. Lost Souls float, and can be summoned onto the world map, making them great scout servants.
The Reanimator and Creeper
The Reanimator is the main support unit for the Necromancer. It is able to heal undead units, which is vitally important as most of them don't naturally regenerate. The Renanimator has a Black Bolt ranged shot and a melee attack with its staff which doubles as a shovel. His attacks Inflict despair, giving him the chance to lower the morale of enemies.
The ability that gives the Reanimator its name allows it to reanimate bodies of the fallen, into undead puppets called Creepers. These cadavers crawl over one another like the maggots they contain. The soulless bodies know no fear, are resistant to many types of damage and can be used to tie up enemy units while the more powerful necromancer units get into position. After the battle, the Creepers disintegrate.
Necromancers will need to make careful tradeoffs using fallen units, as they have other uses as well! The Creepers can devour corpses to rejuvenate themselves and regain lost hitpoints, for example, while the Corpus Furia spell causes dead bodies to detonate, damaging every nearby enemy.
Lost souls that refuse to die, and mindless horddes of reanimated corpses can make like difficult for the living. Of course we are developing counters that help the dead find their peace for good. Some of these abilities will find their way in the new specializations that we will be announcing soon.
