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[Astral]

I don't know why but lately I've had an urge to play as a necromancer - primarily the aspect of summoning/creating hordes of undead that then can further bolster your forces, and through the act of killing off enemies allowing you to raise more.

One of my favorite quotes from How to Be a Villain, by Neil Zawacki:

    "The undead require very little maintenance and rarely demand a salary or benefits. What they lack in speed and agility they more than make up for in persistence and can-do attitude. You won't hear any sass or whining from the undead! Since the victims themselves are transformed into walking undead, these henchmen are a smart investment that will grow your organization even when you are busy with other tasks."

Not having to deal with supply lines, and having a self-proprogating army would be the end goal - it doesn't necessarily have to be undead, but nanomachines could be handwaved in as a technological singularity as well. Even something like the Zerg would fit into the mold - I love Starcraft 2's coop commander Stukov, as he sends endless waves of expendable troops while leveraging a few elite options.

Basically it has to fit into the player or faction that they choose being a prime example of:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeHaveReserves
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ZergRush
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CannonFodder
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnemySummoner

Strategy games that involve conflict across large areas and player-definable goals (such as world domination) are preferred, but some Roguelikes or third person combat games also work (like Mount and Blade).

MMOs need not apply - this is primarily for single player games, though exceptions can be made for really good examples. You can't have as much of a power fantasy with Sir PalaDank at the same level as you, interrupting your immersion/evil overlord power trip.

As far as a list of games that easily come to mind:

• Diablo 2 (the game that really captured it for me initially, at least until they patched lagromancers to have fewer units on screen)
• Diablo 2 Median XL mod (it's different enough to prompt its own entry on the list, and some other classes do the minion spam thing better than Necromancers do)
• Heroes of Might and Magic (particularly 3)
• Conquest of Elysium 2-4 (they look promising, but I haven't actually tried these yet though)
• Mount and Blade (the original, with the Solid and Shade mod by N0ught)
• Mount and Blade Warband (the only mod that readily comes to mind is Phantasy Calradia, currently in its 2018 implementation but it's still buggy as all hell)
• Infectionator/Necronater (flash games but good for a quick fix)
• Morrowind and Oblivion (with mods) and Skyrim (with mods to enhance the existing experience)
• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (though limited compared to other choices on this list)
• Tales of Maj'Eyal (probably one of the best roguelike examples in my opinion)
• Total War: WARHAMMER (Vampire Counts, especially with the Steel Faith overhaul, as it expands on the whole "swarms of undead with occasional elite units" thing)
• Age of Wonders (2/Shadow Magic to a limited extent, and 3 with the Eternal Lords expansion)
• Medieval II: Total War (with the Hyrule Conquest mod, Stalfos)
• Civilization 4 (Fall from Heaven 2 mod, with the Orbis submod, the Scions are basically undead Romans that corrupt the land around them)
• Warcraft 3 (to an extent, though some custom maps did it much better)
• Battle for Wesnoth (though it can be difficult to get the ball rolling on this one)
• Starcraft 2 co-op mode (as Stukov, but the round-based nature of co-op games is a huge turnoff)
• Dominions (Middle age Ermor)
• Warlords Battlecry 3
• Incursion (Roguelike)
• Caves of Qud (Roguelike)
• Dwarf Fortress (Adventure Mode)
• Ancient Domains of Mystery (Roguelike)
• Master of Magic (DOS)
• Overlord 1/2
• Majesty
• Total Annihilation: Kingdoms
• Baldurs Gate series
• Path of Exile
• Grim Dawn
• Heroes of Annihilated Empires

Any other suggestions you guys may have? It seems to be very niche in gaming overall.

[MCreeper]

Will middle age Ermor in Dominions do? Not sure if it meets "killing your enemies allows you to raise them as skeletons" request, and i didnt played it much, but basically it pumps out hordes upon hordes of skeletons (with some elite units being actively summoned by necromancers) while killing off it's living populace extremely fast (and not caring much about it, unlike other nations).

[MrRoboto75]

Warlords Battlecry 3

[Frumple]

Incursion's got it. It's not really mass-spam sort of necromancer, but they're solid so far as dead critter minion goes.

[gomez]

You already mentioned might and magic which is probaly the best you gonna get, but in Caves of Qud you can make monsters into minions

[Robsoie]

Noticed that you didn't mentionned Dwarf Fortress.

In Adventure mode it is possible to acquire necromancy power (as it has always been the only type of magic DF had, future versions should add more), and necromancy in DF was extremely powerful.
Allowing to do rather big carnage and  big *spoiler dont click if new to DF adv mode*conquest

They are less powerful in recent versions tough as after the undead becoming overpowered terminators in early DF2014 versions due accidentally to some change in how combat/damage worked in DF2014, Toady had been nerfed them down to roughly past level (so they're still strong but without a single undead being nearly able to take on an army by itself)

A couple of additional games with playable necromancers :
Tales of Maj'Eyal
Ancient Domains of Mystery

Old but still great DOS era Master of Magic have some undead summoning based spells in the death magic branch , one of the strong "hero" is a necromancer in case you need specifically a necromancer.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Not necessarily a necromancer in the classic sense, but Overlord and Overlord 2 are pretty much the essential necromantic experience.

[wereboar]

Warlords Battlecry 3 (really unique undead faction gameplay)
Majesty (priestesses of Krypta ftw, maybe try Warlock spin-off series)
Nox (old but gold. I think you can actually play a necromancer although I never tried)

[IronyOwl]

Warlords Battlecry 3

Warlords Battlecry 3 (really unique undead faction gameplay)

This is a real good one. Mass skelly spam is entirely feasible, as is summoning of a few other types.

Lords of Magic. Necromancers can raise corpses into skeleton mooks or shades, regenerating losses or building an army from scratch. There is a max unit size per army, though, so no infinite skelly hordes all at once.

Eador is basically a fanmade HoMM3 clone with an overarching presence, so it should work about as well for your skelly fix.

[Kagus]

Didn't play much necro in CoE3, but in CoE2 they were definitely one of the most interesting classes. ...not necessarily "good" or "balanced", but interesting. The main gimmick being that the act of directly forcing the dead to rise is outlawed by divine mandate; the living shall never command the dead. So enacting the forbidden rites carries the curse of necromancy, blasting the practitioner's sanity until they end up as a gibbering invalid.

So, naturally, you don't wanna do that. There are ways around the law, as you're allowed to make deals with the dead in return for services or servitude, but that requires collecting certain materials... most notably, the left hands of hanged men. Kinda tricky to stock up on, as they don't exactly grow on trees. ...well, I mean... you understand.

The trick is to attract apprentices drawn by your mastery of the dark arts, get them to sacrifice their cognitive functions by raising the dead, and using your bucket of zombies to take control of enough large settlements with strict legal systems in order to get you the hands of glory necessary for the transformation into a lich. See, becoming a lich means you're now technically dead, so the magical laws against necromancy don't apply to you anymore and you can go around farting out hordes of shamblies as much as you like (although you still only get appreciable numbers in places like fresh battlefields or old cemeteries).

Dunno if Age of Wonders really counts for this, as in 1 you still had to pay them wages, and they were likely to give you just as much sass as living troops if they didn't like your face... 3 was better at this, but still... best part about any of them was to just annihilate the landscape and turn it into a blasted wasteland of death, which the undead understandably were quite fond of.

There's an old game for Xbox and Windows called Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without A Pulse. It's more just being a highly infectious (and dapper) patient zero than being a necromancer, but I had some of my best horde moments just playing the demo. So far as I know, there's no (legal) digital distribution of the full game, so it's a major pain to get hold of. Still though, probably the best zombie-related game I've ever played... And there are a lot of those around.


I feel like I need to give an honorable mention to Dungeon Keeper and, to a lesser extent, War for the Overworld. Harvesting the bodies of your enemies (alive or dead) and then using them to fill out your ranks of the damned and blighted was always good fun, and economic! DK2 even had a campaign mission based specifically around that mechanic.


There's this niggling memory scratching at the back of my brain about another necro-esque game I played relatively recently, but I can't put my finger on it. There's also another thread with the same concept that's from, like, 8 years ago or so, might be able to dig up a name or two from there (I'm confined to my phone for the time being, so I'm afraid I'm not going to be much help in finding it again).

[Frumple]

Warlords Battlecry 3 (really unique undead faction gameplay)
Majesty (priestesses of Krypta ftw, maybe try Warlock spin-off series)
Nox (old but gold. I think you can actually play a necromancer although I never tried)

Nox had a summoning class, but necromancy was an enemy thing to the extent it was a thing at all. Think there were ways to get undead summons, for what that's worth, but it wasn't particularly necromancer-y.

Now, that said, yeah, nox is pretty great. Aged surprisingly well, too, and I think there's still some fan ran multiplayer junk putzing around.

[Cyroth]

Master of Magic, if you can enjoy really old games.

Pretty sure you can summon undeads that will turn their kills into more (upkeep-free) undead units for you if you win the battle, so if you keep winning you can end up with large armies of free-but-squishy units.

[Shadowgandor]

Heroes of Annihilated Empires is an rts that has an undead faction. It scratched that itch for me quite well, although the game itself is a bit buggy and unbalanced and has a campaign that feels unfinished (intro of 1 faction and...that's it. 3 hours of gameplay or something).

[Biowraith]

Along the Diablo 2 lines, Grim Dawn (with the Malmouth expansion) and Path of Exile both have necromantic options.

Path of Exile has a spell to raise zombies from enemy corpses, a spell to raise skeletons out of the ground, and a spell to create a spectral version of a dead enemy (plus some other summon options like golems).  The skeletons are melee types, but I gather there's a gem that upgrades it to add mage types.  I'm not super experienced with the game, but with items and skill tree nodes it's not too hard to have about 20 undead pets running around.

Grim Dawn doesn't use enemy corpses for its necromancy, it's almost all from-the-ground (or thin air) options: a spell to raise skeletons, a spell to raise a fat poison corpse, and a spell to create a spectre by zapping an enemy (not a copy of that enemy though, just a generic spectre).  The skeletons have basic melee types, with chances to spawn crossbows, mages, and heavier melee guys.  It's not quite as swarmy as PoE; with items you can relatively easily get 10ish skeletons, 1-2 poison corpses, and 2 spectres.  There are other pet options via a 2nd class, items, and 'devotions', some of which are necromantic themed (off the top of my head, Revenant devotion gives a chance to spawn a time limited skeleton proc, Unknown Soldier has a 'living shadow' summon proc, and there's a book that summons a fiery skeleton knight thing).

[Mech#4]

I think you've got most of the major titles listed that I could think of.

Some more suggestions are:

Total Annihilation: Kingdoms.
One of the factions, Taros, has a necromatic bend to it. They can build zombies, skeleton archers, flying skeletal snakes (Rictus) and dark riders among other things. They're more dark/evil themed than solely undead but you can spam the cheap units to swamp the enemy in zombies, as useless as they are.

Diablo 2:
The mod "Median XL" may allow for a bigger necromancer horde play style. I can't say for certain though, and the mod does make things quite a bit harder.

Baldur's Gate: (I'm pretty certain this can also be done in Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale 1 and 2).
Through cheat usage you can create hordes of skeletons, change them to your side and have them fight for you. Not really usable while playing the game as you have to input cheats multiple times to spawn entities.
To enable cheats, open Baldur.ini and add Cheats=1 under [Game Options].
Example:
CLUAConsole:CreateCreature skele01
CLUAConsole:CreateCreature zombie

CLUAConsole:EnableCheatKeys()
(One combination of "CTRL" + "A-Z" converts the enemy under the cursor to your side. I forget which).


Other than that... Might and Magic 7 you can have your mages turned into liches but there's no summon skeletons.
Black and White 2 had undead summons I think, but the games not really worth buying just for that one spell.