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[helmacon]

We now have all the means for a sustainable, armed, and capable light infantry force. This is great, but as any tactician knows, the role of your infantry is not to defeat the enemy, but to hold a line in place. We need now to develop a means to capitalize on our excellent infantry forces, and further to develop a counter to any units they may develop who are to large for our infantry to deal with effectively. The following design intends to address both of these problems.

Design: Bone Breakers
The original Idea was to use undead rhinoceroses to create breaches in enemy lines and deal with other large units, but an examination of the terrain we are likely to be fighting in has made us rethink this initial approach. Rhinos are heavily muscled and would have difficulties traversing a swamp or aquatic environment without sinking. In the search for a replacement however, we believe we have found something far superior. Hippos.
Their natural fat deposits both provide buoyancy in aquatic environments and natural protection from blunt trauma. Wide muscular jaws provide crushing force that can tear through infantry and the large mass allows them to easily break through lines when charging. In fact, there is very little advanced necromancy at play here outside of the initial resurrection and maintenance of the creature. There is only one small modification we have made. A large metal spike anchored into the bone of the skull. When driven with the force of a charging hippo behind it, the spike can penetrate deep into even the most armored enemies.   

The bone breakers are a tank of a unit that can fill multiple roles quite effectively. They should be (relatively) cheap as it requires no advanced processes to make, and I believe they would perform admirably within ( and outside of) their roles.

[Rockeater]

Great, now I think air unit would be a good idea

[RAM]

Ivory Bards
A robed skeletal being with a reservoir of necrotic fluid in its skull and knots of flesh warped to hold patterns for simple undead beings. It is primed to convey these patterns upon nearby bones and form a connection to them, which allows them to parasite the awareness and coopt the direction of the subject. They would also have basic communication abilities, likely requiring a degree of necromatic skill from the recipient.
The effect is to have a complex undead that can create very simple undead "Familiars" and then remotely control and observe them as scouts and expendable assets, and return to report their observations to more capable peoples. The Familiars would be optimised for ease of recruitment, requiring only three limbs, an intact skull, and a partial spine, potentially from multiple donors, and would be optimised for scampering on all three limbs. This would normally be difficult, but because the Ivory Bard is constantly maintaining and controlling the Familiar, it does not require a full animation spell, but rather a constant "brute forcing" of the issue by having what is, in effect, a close imitation of a necromancer, constantly directing all of their efforts onto a specific pre-prepared magical formula. Much as newly aspiring necromancers might start their education by holding an undead together before they can learn how to make a stable pattern.

 The Ivory Bards themselves would have little other ability, and their Familiars would be weak and uncoordinated, and there would be but one of them at a time for each Bard, but they could make use of failed undead in the field to replenish lost Familiars, and derive information from places where none could return from by using the sense of a being that can travel some distance from it s master before failing. The advantage of replenishing our forces in the field, along with relaying first-hand accounts to relative safety should not be dismissed.

I am hoping that this is a relatively easy way to get started on magical undead and properly unkillable hordes that just keep getting back up again until utterly pulverised...

[Talion]

Bovine Pump
Utilising a bovine body and replacing the lungs with additional hearts connected to an umbilical hose, the Bovine Pump can rapidly in take and pressurise water in to a long distance spray. The hose is typically reinforced with additional muscle to help control and direct the water. Originally invented for fire fighting work, the Pump can be repurposed for crowd control. Water is not the most lethal of weapons, but the streams of water act to knock over and wash away undead who stray within range. This makes it ideal for dealing with swarms of lesser undead. Access to water can potentially be an issue, but the Bovine Pumps can be daisy chained where practical.

[helmacon]

I'm not a huge fan of the ivory bards ideas. When we did the bonestitchers it became apparent that magic is rare enough even asking the living. Besides, if we really wanted a unit that did that I think using apprentices would be a better idea.

I'm also against the idea of using such a system for scouting in the first place though. It seems needlessly complex and expensive for what it does. Someone earlier suggested birds, and I think undead grackles would be a good choice for a scout. Small, quick, observant, common. They would be difficult to detect or stop, but easy to produce.

[Rockeater]

I think descent air power is going to be soon so I would like having something a bit stronger then grackles

[helmacon]

Air power and air control are two very different things. A skeletal Dragon is a lot of air power, but very little control. It would do next to nothing to keep the air free of grackles. Besides, they are a simple scout unit, and would be good to give us a bit of experience before making an aerial superiority unit.

[Rockeater]

Reading about them a bit, thought they were smaller, I will vote for them, just think we could go for a bird of prey

[helmacon]

Grackles are objectively the best bird, and one of my few undying loves left to me in life.

[Rockeater]

So you plan to write the proposal

[helmacon]

I can do that later today if you want, but it's literally just "animate grackles and use as scouts".

[Rockeater]

You need a bit on communication.

[RAM]

I'm not a huge fan of the ivory bards ideas. When we did the bonestitchers it became apparent that magic is rare enough even asking the living. Besides, if we really wanted a unit that did that I think using apprentices would be a better idea.

I'm also against the idea of using such a system for scouting in the first place though. It seems needlessly complex and expensive for what it does. Someone earlier suggested birds, and I think undead grackles would be a good choice for a scout. Small, quick, observant, common. They would be difficult to detect or stop, but easy to produce.

Special corpses: Corpses of paladin, powerful mages and kings. These corpses are rare, even with those that are being exhumed from the labyrinth beneath the city and those that are smuggled in from outside. Special corpses are used to make truly powerful things. Whether Powerful Units of Death Knights and liches, or Floating monoliths that fire necromantic energy, Flying undead Valkyries or flaming skeletal Giants. Special corpses are the remains of the truly powerful, the hero’s and Tyrants of the world. (Rare, Cannot be gained from recycling)

Magic undead are somewhat confirmed to be an option. An expensive option, yes, but one that seems well-suited to our role as knowledge-seekers. While the examples given are all high-end special-units, they are still made from corpses, so the underlying principals should be consistent, even if we can't pull off anything better than rote-casting a single spell. Yes, it is difficult, but it is also thematic, and could be very powerful if we can manage to pull it off, which will likely require baby-steps. Animating something that requires constant concentration to maintain seems like a very baby-level piece of necromancy to me...

The Ivory Bards offer an intelligent minion that can scout extremely aggressively with little risk and abundant opportunity to report back. Sending something similar to a three-legged dog loping out to claw and bite whatever it can reach while everything it sees is also seen by a much-less-but-still-expendable unit that is likely safely behind a building has utility that is, as far as I can tell, vastly superior to a literally dumb bird. Yes, the bird sees more, but then it either pecks the target to pieces, in which case scouting wasn't needed, gets killed and can't report anything, and lacks enough mental faculty to report anything anyway, or makes a big target of itself by circling over enemies, which is very useful, but still inferior. Now,granted, my proposal looks more difficult, but the experience offered in terms of spell-casting undead seems more thematic to our cause and to have more long-term value than experience gained in the field of animating animals. That said, getting a dead bird to fly is going to be a difficult prospect, and a great chance to learn about incorporating the more difficult aspect of biology into designs.

[Rockeater]

We should have ended it already

Ivory Bards (1):Rockeater
Bone Breaker (1):Rockeater
Crow Femiliar (1):Rockeater

[VoidSlayer]

Put Together

Normal zombies are taken from normal folks, and the corpses of heroes are rare to find.  To create a champion zombie, we need to sift through the parts of many normal people then stitch them back together into a superior zombie.  Using the most juicy, undamaged brain bits reformatted into a single warrior mind with muscles, bones and connective tissues carefully selected and harvested from other zombies.  The resulting zombie may look patchwork, but has peak conditioning both physical and mental on top of unending undead stamina.  The intelligence is aided by the constructed brain, making it a skilled warrior and field leader.

A highly skilled champion zombie to lead our infantry in the front lines.