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[Wilfred of Ivanhoe]

I have a 1064-year-old pocket world here. As one might expect, the necromancers have long since taken over and reduced civilization to a few holdouts in the monasteries and caves of the map. I started a fort and have been fighting them. This current siege is very, very odd to me based on what I thought I knew, so I need your help to explain to me what's happening.

This current undead siege has ~200 attackers, mostly "undead", but 53 of them are regular living "invaders" as best as I can tell (not displayed as necromancers or any other Ñ night creature), with 3 of those being weapon-master soldier Angels (not experiments or nightmares, I checked).

Spoiler: Partial List of Guests (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Creepy Angel Description (click to show/hide)

They give me Twilight Princess Shadow Beast vibes.

I had already accepted that the necromancer must have found a vault due to the fact that "Fighters of Erod" corpses were among those that were sent to harass me (I didn't know any entity could interact with a vault before this particular game), but what's confusing is the fact that a proper undead siege that was announced with "The dead walk! Hide while you still can!" contains living, non-undead combatants as part of the siege. It was my understanding that animated dead were opposed to all life, so any regular zombie would attack anything that wasn't undead or else didn't have the [NOT_LIVING] tag. Whether angels fall in that distinction idk, but regular elven and dwarven warriors who, as far as I can tell, are perfectly alive, don't seem like they'd be excused from the animated corpses' bloodlust. What is happening? Are they all secretly vampires?

On a side note, none of the angels sent to attack my fort had any divine metal at all. These living ones and the corpses before them had regular-degular bronze/iron/copper gear. It makes me wonder what the necromancer did with that stuff. I wouldn't think they can breed, and apparently the gods replenish their own vault's populations according to the wiki, so why would any spawned angel relinquish its divine clothes and arms for bronze and leather? I'm guessing the dead ones were from the necromancer's initial attack on the vault, but these ones are alive, so I guess the vault got conquered and the site got incorporated into her group. It looks like ol' Sesle (the leader of the necromancer group that conquered the world) is a hell of a diplomat negotiating a peace settlement with emissaries of the divine. The warriors aren't even of her god. She worships Ohid, another death god who likely granted her the Secret. Maybe Ohid has major beef with Erod and empowered Sesle to fuck her shit up. Also, considering that Angels apparently start with "Talented" combat skills, these 3 here apparently have been doing a good bit of work since joining the necromancer's armies.

[Cathar]

Just a heads-up : those are not "angels", they are necromancian experimentations. They are very well alive and can reproduce. If you integrate them into your civ you can play as one as an adventurer, but for the time being they'll be loyal to their master.

[IncompetentFortressMaker]

Just a heads-up : those are not "angels", they are necromancian experimentations. They are very well alive and can reproduce. If you integrate them into your civ you can play as one as an adventurer, but for the time being they'll be loyal to their master.

That description of an "angel" does contain the following phrase: "It was created by the human goddess Erod and is of a part with chaos, death, suicide, valor, and war."
So... theoretically it should be an angel, not a necro experiment. I'm totally lost on how one of those got into a necro army though.

[Wilfred of Ivanhoe]

I'm almost certain that necromancer experiments whose base is humanoid are represented by H or H and have the description "was created by So-And-So after cruel experiments on whatever." These guys were represented by the cyan Ä, and their descriptions say they were created by the goddess, not as a result of any experimentation. To be fair, these guys all had the same color despite their different professions, like experimental races do, but the wiki suggests that all angels of the soldier class are cyan. In any case, they would either be red or green if they were experiments, and none would have the umlaut. Plus, I don't pay too much attention to names, but "Hobñor" seems like divine language to me, since the name doesn't strike me as obviously dwarven or goblin. I could be wrong, but I think these were real angels. They died easily enough, though

[brewer bob]

Yeah, 'Ä' is definitely an angel in unmodded DF.

[Mobbstar]

The angels are honestly easier for me to grasp than the elves.

It is a rare but known circumstance that vaults behave as ordinary sites if built or embarked close enough.  I believe if an adventurer talks to the sentient angels to make them Historic Figures, and then in fortress mode the vault looks to your prospering economy, you can request those angels as workers.

As Wilfred said, the vault has been conquered or assimilated somehow.  Angels are [NOT_LIVING], therefore coexistence is possible, and possibly desirable given Erods description.

Elves are trickier.  They do not fear mortality and thus never become necromancers.  They do not build temples where they could topple statues, but may visit other civilisations' temples.  Werebeast infection can be ruled out because those are not undead.

I am at a loss of ideas there.  Living elves and dwarves among primitive undead, how curious!

[Wilfred of Ivanhoe]

It is a rare but known circumstance that vaults behave as ordinary sites if built or embarked close enough.  I believe if an adventurer talks to the sentient angels to make them Historic Figures, and then in fortress mode the vault looks to your prospering economy, you can request those angels as workers.

That sounds bad-ass. I'm gonna have to try that out eventually. I think the pocket size of the world might have enabled the necromancer to discover the vault and assimilate it. Since the world was so small, she was a lot more likely to set up her tower near it.

I did some digging around in LegendsViewer at the site populations, and I checked Sesle's necromancer tower. It had about 3000 zombies, as you might expect, but it also had 300 goblins, more than 300 elves, and 127 human and some dwarves too. LegendsViewer notes the 3000 zombies as "animated goblins," so the ~700 civilized beings there aren't mindless. A good portion of them have to be the "bleak ones" I've been fighting and possibly other necromancer apprentices, but is it possible that there are a significant number of civilized beings at her necromancer tower site that are 100% not undead? Maybe not, since her last military conquest before attacking me in 1051 was in 672. I don't know if intelligent undead can have kids, but if they can, then it would make sense for all of them to be bleak ones.

Even if that's not the case, maybe the reason why living marched with undead against me is that after the major civ entities were crushed, the populations that survived scattered to the caves and whatnot and formed outcast groups, after which they surrendered to Sesle, so they didn't get killed, maybe. Then, as a result of those groups being absorbed into the necromancer's civ entity, she was able to draw on their populations to fill her undead armies when she attacks me. Given that that's more than likely how she had angels in her army, maybe this is how the presence of the living invaders in the undead siege and the zombies' tolerance of them is explained. So, this fiasco might be a case where civ loyalty trumps the [OPPOSED_TO_LIFE] token. At least as long as the necromancer isn't onsite to resurrect the zombies as they fall.