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[jaxler]

I've got my hands on a necromancer and have enough bodies to make an undead legion big enough to bring my FPS to 0, and I'd like to use these to fight off HFS. I know this can work, but i've got a few things I need to do to avoid catastrophic failure.

1: being able to remove the necro once i've reanimated the army: dont want any undead demons flying around.

2: Being able to have a big enough army to beat HFS without necros respawning them.

3: Being able to bathe the battleground in lava once it's all over and thus remove the army of undead.

[BlackFlyme]

1. I don't believe demons can be resurrected, but you could rig up a contraption that can block the necro's line of sight when needed using raising bridges.

2. That will take many bodies. Breed large animals, I suppose. Remember that skin and hair can be animated, though pieces of leather cannot.

3. Pump stacks or controlled flood routes can move magma.

[jaxler]

1. I don't believe demons can be resurrected, but you could rig up a contraption that can block the necro's line of sight when needed using raising bridges.

2. That will take many bodies. Breed large animals, I suppose. Remember that skin and hair can be animated, though pieces of leather cannot.

3. Pump stacks or controlled flood routes can move magma.

What about the bodies of fallen goblins instead of large animals?

[BlackFlyme]

What about the bodies of fallen goblins instead of large animals?

That could work as well. Though goblins aren't very large compared to some animals. But if you want to pit them against the HFS, you should probably throw every corpse you have at it.

It helps that animated creatures get a boost to some physical stats.

[Blastbeard]

creatures une-quip and drop everything on death, and I've never seen them pick their armor up and put back on after reanimation. They might pick something up and use it as a weapon, but I'd avoid an army of animated sapients because naked people are very easy to kill, even with undea durability. Go for something big and difficult to kill even when it was a normal living thing. Elephants, saltwater crocodiles, cave dragons, unicorns, that sort of thing.
I personally recommend hydras. They're a pain in the ass to kill and that's normally only done through bleeding them out. Undead don't bleed, and as difficult as it would be to set up, an army of zombie hydras would a nightmare.

Now, husks are another deal entirely. They keep whatever they were wearing/holding when they get infected because they don't have to die to become a husk. Husked invader forces are proven effective against demon hordes, but they're situational, you can only get them at specific biomes.

[BlackFlyme]

The biggest hurdle is the fact that undead have a sort of health system. It will change in the next version of the game, where it will become possible to "pulp" organic tissues, but for now the demons will be able to kill the zombies fairly easily.

You may want to consider allowing the necros to re-animate the dead.

[jaxler]

The biggest hurdle is the fact that undead have a sort of health system. It will change in the next version of the game, where it will become possible to "pulp" organic tissues, but for now the demons will be able to kill the zombies fairly easily.

You may want to consider allowing the necros to re-animate the dead.

Then they re-animate the demons.

[itg]

As BlackFlyme said, that's wrong. Demons can't be resurrected.

[Blastbeard]

I'm pretty sure animated corpses can be caught in cage traps, provided they were a trappable creature in life. If a necromancer comes to visit, you can pad your undead army with the zeds he brings along while capturing the necromancer. They may or may not hold onto any clothing or weapons they had on them when they appeared on map, if they had any at all. Waste not, want not.

[Tenderroast]

the proposed clean up method will not work. A zombie will NOT burn to death. You will need something to kill the zombies, so the magma can burn the corpse.

[Mr Space Cat]

I'd recommend having a way to seal off the chamber from the rest of the world once you unleash the HFS. Just in case some demons start getting loose. Assuming you have a necro in the chamber behind fortifications and a raising drawbridge, your army can be sealed off and stay self-sufficient.

Having multiple necros to reanimate could improve your army's survivability. More necros=more potential reanimations per second=more corpses per second=longer lasting zerg rush of corpses to fight the demon zerg rush.

Another option for getting maximum yield from corpses would be dropping animals or sapients from high up into the arena to gib them. A goblin can split into a goblin head and 2 goblin arms for reanimation. 3 for 1 deal. I don't think animals like cave crocs can have their legs reanimated, but cave crocodile heads retain their ability to tear off limbs effectively, and I think smaller reanimated parts like heads and arms are harder to hit. If anything you'd have more meatshields per corpse to absorb damage until the demons are dead.

I'd highly recommend taming cave or saltwater crocodiles for most of the army. They breed quickly and are really good at latching onto and tearing off limbs, even when they're just zombified heads. Just kill the ones you don't need someway besides butchering, such as dropping them onto repeating spikes or something, and move the corpse to the arena for storage.

Lastly, do you have the growth fix plugin on DFHack? If you're planning to use any bred animals for the army, and you don't have the growth fix, your army will be really undersized and squishy.

[Blastbeard]

Necromancers don't have a limit to the number of things they can animate, they can raise any visible body or part within 10 tiles every 10 ticks. Multiple necromancers just makes sure the zombies keep getting up even something like a stray fireball takes out their source.

Animated body parts are markedly harder to hit, a proficient swordsman/legendary fighter of mine had a time trying to peg a zombified night troll head she'd been carrying around. Imagining a severed head dodging sword strikes by jumping around via well-timed jaw movements amuses me.

Crocodiles are good, the only problem with them is that all they have is a bite attack, which can only be performed by the head. If the head's off, that part can still raise hell, but all the body can do is push, still potentially dangerous due to their size but leaves much to be desired.

Ideally, you want something with many attacks coming form many different body parts as well as size. Wild animals don't have any variety of attacks, most only have a bite attack and a few have scratch or kick attacks. Hydras hold the record for most natural attacks due to their excessive number of heads, and again I highly recommend them if they are available.

[MDFification]

the proposed clean up method will not work. A zombie will NOT burn to death. You will need something to kill the zombies, so the magma can burn the corpse.

^This. Even if lava would destroy the individual corpses, it won't kill undead. It's widely considered to be a bug. There is a fix you can use by adding melting points (below the temp of magma) to material templates (like fat or skin/bone) so the purging will actually work.

[Mr Space Cat]

Ideally, you want something with many attacks coming form many different body parts as well as size. Wild animals don't have any variety of attacks, most only have a bite attack and a few have scratch or kick attacks. Hydras hold the record for most natural attacks due to their excessive number of heads, and again I highly recommend them if they are available.

Except hydras are a bit hard to come by in a vanilla game. I don't think they're even breedable without modding the vanilla raws a bit. Probably having a couple megabeast corpses like hydras would compliment the rest of the army, but they probably wouldn't act as the backbone, primary source of corpses.

And I'd imagine prolonged combat with demons would result in missing heads and limbs, even for a hydra corpse.

[Frostea]

Undeads tend to be wrecked by demons really fast. I suggest that you supplement the DPS by having some sort of shooting gallery carved out with fortifications for your marksdwarves. Just make sure you are using some decent metal bolts (steel is the best) as you may get unlucky and some metal demons may be spawned.