Undead Strategy Guide
Andrew Gross (
andrew.b.gross@gmail.com)
v. 1.1
OVERALL:
The most notable feature of the Undead is that all but 2 of their units are immune to Courage checks, and neither of the two units that must make Courage checks are important in most army builds. This means that as the commander of the Undead, you have the luxury of predictability; you suffer nasty surprises far less often than your enemies.
The second prominent feature of the Undead is that they are a defensive faction. Most of their units have below average offensive statistics, as compared to other factions on a point-by-point basis. At the same time, not only do most Undead units have above average defensive statistics, but on top of this they can be reanimated, keeping units alive even longer. One very nice aspect of reanimation is that it puts a sure hit back onto the unit where you need it most; many command cards, while theoretically worth a point of damage, can’t be used on exactly the unit you need with absolute reliability.
Finally, the third important feature is the existence of very useful cheap units. As the Undead player, you can almost always manage to field more units than your opponent, sometimes by a wide margin. In addition, if you have points left over after building your army, you can sometimes afford to field another useful unit, like Zombies; in many armies, if you’ve got less than 150 points left over, you wind up taking a unit that you can’t really figure out a good use for, or else buying expensive command cards.
The combination of these three features dictates almost every viable strategy for winning with the Undead. Most Undead army builds rely on either superior numbers or a heavy concentration of missile fire to create gaps in the enemy line and seize flanks. In both cases, using cheap units with good durability to pin more expensive units in place until they can be swarmed is a standard tactic. Reanimating units in key positions to hold out an extra turn, so that your opponent suffers a break in his line before you suffer a break in yours, is also a feature of almost every battle.
COMMAND CARDS:
You must know and remember the distribution of red/green/blue cards in your deck. The Undead have 18 red, 3 green, and 9 blue command cards. This is the highest concentration of red cards of any faction, and has some important implications.
Often times you’ll be faced with the choice of reanimating a unit, or of drawing one or more command cards. If you mistakenly think to yourself “well, I’m bound to draw a blue card as one of my 3 draws, so I’ll just use that instead of reanimating this turn, and I’ll be okay”, then you better be sure there’s a decent ratio of blue cards left in your deck, because it’s quite possible for you to draw 3 or 4 cards in a row without hitting a single blue. Similarly, you usually don’t need to hoard a red card for the next turn; it’s almost a sure thing you’ll draw a couple to choose from. And because your units have such poor offensive statistics, the red cards should be drawn and spent liberally; they’re more important for dealing damage for the Undead than they are for other armies, because it’s a higher fraction of the total damage they’ll do over the course of a battle.
Maybe even more important than knowing the red/green/blue distribution is knowing the number and the effects of a few key cards: Accuracy (x2), Vampirism (x2), Festering Wound (x1), Wave of Terror (x1), and Raise Dead (x2). None of these cards should ever be played lightly; they should be assigned to particular units or situations based on having the greatest possible impact. If you use these eight cards to maximum effect, rather than just playing them because they’re in your hand and you want to do more damage this roll, you will greatly increase your chances of winning.
Accuracy is an important card to the Undead because their units have such poor skill. However, many of them have good Power. You don’t want to use Accuracy on a unit that rolls only a few dice, or is facing a unit that is a poor matchup; you want to save Accuracy for a unit that’s rolling a good number of dice with a favorable “to damage” roll. You should also be more eager to play Accuracy if your opponent is out of command cards, or if you think he doesn’t have blue cards left due to the cards you’ve seen him play. Accuracy should be worth almost 2 extra hits for the Undead, whereas for many factions it’s only going to be worth 1.
Vampirism is a game changing card. It can be played on the same turn as the unit is reanimated, meaning even an expensive elite unit can suddenly gain back 2 boxes of damage. For a unit with high defensive statistics, those two boxes could very well have taken 3 rounds of combat for the enemy to deal out. It goes without saying that you’d like to use Vampirism on your most expensive units: for the command point you spent to draw Vampirism, you could have just healed a Minor Undead unit anyway, but it would have required 3 command actions to heal a Greater Undead unit. Because Vampirism only gives you 1 extra die and has no other boost to offensive statistics, be very careful of playing it when your opponent is holding blue cards; if you only pay attention to playing it on your most expensive unit, you might get a rude surprise when your opponent whips out the perfect blue card and you find that you only have a 50/50 chance to do even the single point of damage necessary to trigger Vampirism’s effect!
Festering Wound is very nice because it allows you to add a point of damage at exactly the point you need it, provided you do at least one point of damage. For a faction with poor offensive statistics, this is a major benefit. Festering Wound acts in much the same way as Vampirism, except for it’s the enemy unit that you want to be expensive, not necessarily your own unit. Playing Festering Wound on a moderately priced enemy unit just because it’s in your hand, or because it will trigger a Rout check, is not as useful in the long run as playing it later on a unit that’s much harder to hit. Unlike Flesh Rot, which theoretically also does an extra point of damage, your opponent doesn’t know that now is the time to play that Parry card that he’s been saving to make you roll “1s” to hit.
Wave of Terror is an often misunderstood card. First, note that it is played during either player’s Movement and Command phase, not just in the Undead player’s Movement and Command phase; many players overlook the wording, and assume it can only be played on their turn. Second, note that it causes fear checks, not rout checks; a unit that fails its Courage check is (-1)-1/-1 for the turn, but it doesn’t Rout! The optimal time to use Wave of Terror is usually the turn after impact. For example, your line final rushes, and each fearsome unit in your line causes its opponent to make a Fear check. Then it’s your opponent’s turn, and during his Movement & Command phase, you play Wave of Terror and they all have to make Fear checks again. This isn’t always the best time to play it, but it usually is, and it’s never a bad time.
The important point to keep in mind with regards to Raise Dead is that there are two of them in your deck. Keep track of how many you’ve played. If you’re getting towards the end of your draw pile, and you still have one left, it can often make sense to draw command cards rather than reanimating, because you’ll get an “extra” command action this turn when you draw it.
UNITS
Skeleton Horde: Useless in all situations. Even if you have exactly 149 points left, do not buy one.
Skeleton Spearmen: Useless in all situations. Even if you have exactly 167 points left, do not buy one.
Swarm of Rats: Potentially useful in a narrow range of situations, particularly in some scenarios or if you’re relatively sure what your opponent is fielding. If your opponent has reasonable missile fire, he can evaporate one unit of Rats per turn, which is just awful for you; you can tell yourself “at least he’s not shooting at my expensive units”, but 109 points is too expensive for ablative armor. If your opponent has good toughness, those 8 dice aren’t going to do much—you’re going to hit with 4 or 5 at most, and then need “1s”—it’s easily possible to rate to do less than 1 hit even with 8 dice, and even if you do get a favorable matchup, your opponent can make it unfavorable by playing a blue card, whilst you cannot counter with a red.
Ghoul Pack: More useful than most players give it credit for. The fact that it takes Courage checks and has a Courage of only 8 seems to be really bad. But look more closely: it has only 1 green box. That’s actually to your benefit. First of all, the Ghoul Pack becomes a quandary for an opposing missile unit: if he shoots at the Ghouls, they’ll rout early, then have plenty of speed to catch up with the rest of the army. But if the opponent doesn’t shoot at it, the Ghouls are fast enough to sweep around the flanks and gain pinching/flanking attacks. If they do rout from initial melee damage, they rout far enough to get away from all but the most speedy pursuers. Not a front line unit, and not every army build should have them, but they shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
Zombies: The mainstay of the Undead faction, and one of the reasons it’s so successful. If you eliminated Zombies from the faction, it would suffer an enormous drop in effectiveness. Zombies are insanely durable for the points: for 90 points, you get 6 boxes of damage, a toughness of *3*, immunity to Courage checks, and the ability to reanimate a box of damage for a single command point. They can’t hit anything, but that’s not their job; their job is to tie up 200 point units turn after turn as the rest of the Undead army crushes the balance of the opposing army.
Abominations: Zombies on steroids. For 153 points, you get *11* boxes of damage, the same 3 toughness, immunity to Courage checks, the ability to reanimate for only a single command point—plus 6 dice, so that even with cruddy offensive statistics, you have a reasonable chance of putting a hit on your opponent each round. Oh, and they’re Fearsome for good measure. Abominations are so good that they were made Elite in order to keep the Undead balanced. For a long time I started every army build with the maximum number of Abominations allowed for however many points we were using; I no longer think this is always the optimal build, but I also don’t think you can get yourself into any trouble by doing this.
Zombie Trolls: Maybe useful in some situations, but not in the general case. The 6 Power looks nice, but the Undead’s weakness isn’t their Power, it’s their Accuracy, so this isn’t actually helping your army out that much—the Zombie Trolls are replicating an advantage you can get many other ways, and they are also asking for exactly the same red command cards as most of your other units. The 4 toughness is very nice, no doubt; although the Undead army excels in toughness, 4 is just a whole lot better than 3 against many opponents. However, 232 is a lot of points to get that extra toughness.
Skeleton Trolls: Quite useful due to decent offensive statistics and average defense. A 5 skill doesn’t look like anything to write home about, until you start looking at all the units with 4 skill that you’re fielding with your Zombies, Abominations, and Skeleton Bowmen shooting at anything other than short range. The speed of 5 can be nice in the right situation, though often it’s not as useful as you would think because the rest of your army is moving half as fast. Not every army needs one, and almost no army needs two, but one to supply some directed firepower and make a hole in the enemy line can often be a reasonable choice.
Skeleton Cavalry: Almost completely useless. The problem is the same as with many other cavalry units, but it’s even worse for the Undead: lack of damage boxes. This unit is probably going to die in 2 turns, whether it reanimates or not (remember, you don’t have many blue cards, and you’re better off using them on more expensive units, so your opponent is quite likely to be gaining a command card advantage when swinging on your cavalry). It could be useful in a scenario that calls for speed, I guess.
Skeleton Bowmen: An important unit in many Undead armies, not just missile heavy ones. Keep in mind that the continual struggle for the Undead is figuring out ways to deal damage. Even though the Skeleton Bowmen don’t have impressive offensive statistics, they do allow you to concentrate your fire on one enemy at a time. Once you blow that enemy unit up, hopefully you can exploit it to gain pinching attacks, which is how you start dealing your damage—causing Rout checks due to pinching, combined with getting the multiple +1/+1 bonuses. For some reason, many players want to play Accuracy on their Bowmen units, perhaps because the picture and name evoke missile units. This is a mistake—save your Accuracy for a unit with more dice and more Power.
Death Knights: Not very useful. I hesitate to call them “useless”, but I’ve never seen an army build that I thought was impressive that featured them, so maybe I’m just being sucked in by their glitzy numbers. They take Courage checks, which is awful; if you make a habit of fielding them, once every 3 games or so they’re going to blow their initial Rout check, and 500+ points is going to be taking free swings on their rear and cowering away from the battle for a while. 7 boxes of damage is okay, but nothing special. Consider this: for fewer points, a Tyrannosaurus Rex has 15 boxes of damage and the same base defensive stats—the only advantages the Death Knights have are due to defensive modifiers against missile fire and while final rushing, and the fact that you can reanimate them—at the steep price of 3 full command actions. I would be inclined to at least experiment with this unit if it didn’t need to pass Courage checks, but as it is, I’d just get too frustrated having an entire army that doesn’t rout, and then watching my most expensive unit run away at first contact.
Giant Catapult: Very useful for stand and shoot army builds. Way back when only the three initial factions (Men of Hawkshold, Orcs, and Undead) were available, I prepared for the first Sword Tournament by playing various army builds against each other. The rules at that time didn’t have the penalty for extreme range, and cavalry didn’t have the bonus against missile fire; using those rules, I quickly came to the conclusion that stand and shoot armies were the way to go. The question then became, which stand and shoot army would win in a battle between two such armies? The obvious answer was the Undead, because of the Giant Catapult. If our missile units target one another (which is the correct strategy—when your missile units are dead and mine aren’t, you’re obligated to come marching across the field to engage me, with an army that wasn’t designed for that, while taking missile fire the entire way), then the 4 toughness of the Giant Catapult, along with the fact that it can be reanimated, means that it will always outlast any other elite missile unit. For dueling stand and shoot armies, the Giant Catapult is pretty much an auto-win, under any version of the rules.
For the case where your Undead stand and shoot army faces a melee army, the Giant Catapult is still quite useful, because it’s a perfectly serviceable front line unit. It has some of the best offensive statistics in the Undead faction, even while engaged; and its toughness of 4 and 9 damage boxes makes it among the hardier units as well. The fact that the Undead can load up on Zombies means that the steep 510 points you pay for them can be mitigated; an Undead Catapult plus a Zombie unit averages out to 300 points each, which suddenly doesn’t seem so outrageous. I have won all three Sword Tournaments I entered using three different army builds, but all three of them featured two Giant Catapults.
