Death & Life NEED 11 Books to do a Summoner Build properly.

With Death if you waste time summoning Skeletons/Ghouls early your wasting time. The FIRST unit you should ever summon as Death is WRAITHS or maybe a magic spirit to explore a bit. They can create undead far more reliably than Ghouls as well with their Life Stealing attack.

The fact is that when I did this build the last time and captured nearby towns I got the whole darn garrisons back as undead. And they have NO upkeep costs :)

Be careful with Fantastic Units coming back as undead as they cost 1.5x the mana.

For more info on the Wraiths check the link below. But just basic overview they have 7 Atk, 4 figures and a 50% to hit ratio which equals 14 damage on avg from a fully healed unit. They Fly at a rate of 2 movement.
http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Wraiths

Key to playing Death Summoner is not to be faint of heart. but go for the slugger.

For Life you have 2 options but both require the 11 Life Books start. Invulnerable Guardian Spirits OR Torrin gotten through the Rare Incarnation Spell.

Incarnation normally costs 500 to cast but because of the 11 books it only costs 300.

Torrin The Chosen is insanely powerful and has the coveted Magic Immunity. He Starts with the following BASE Stats and Abilities boosting them even more per level.

* Attack 12 + Super Might +1.5 + 1 Per level more. At Demi-God He has a total of 33 Attack
* Defense 8 + 0.5 Per level. At DG has 12 total. If he gets Agility he would add 1 per level for 21 Defense. Super would add 1.5 for 25 total.
* Resistance - 12 (20 at DG) MAGIC IMMUNITY grants all the help he needs here. The only exception being Poison for which his starting 12 nullifies.
* Health Points - 12 + Constitution +1 per lvl for 29 at DG. Possibility for SUPER for 33 max.
* To Hit - the one area he lacks. Will have 30% to max of 60% unless he gets Blade Master/Super ability or Lucky or items.
* Spell Points - 15 + 15 per level, 135 at DG. Possible to gain more from random picks.


http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Torin_the_Chosen

If you cast Heroism on him right away he has 21 Attack, 10 Defense, 19 HP, 40% to hit and 60 SP WITHOUT his Random Picks.

Just played a quick test and his 2 Random Picks for me were BLADE MASTER WOOOHOOO, with Heroism this gave him 60% to hit right off. Sadly the other pick was Arcane Power which is totally worthless as he doesn't have magical ranged attacks to pump.

I was able to take out the following super tough fights early on, within turns of getting him.

- 3 Basilisks and 6 War Bears, non node
- 1 Demon Lord, 3 Demons (summoned by DLord) and 7 Zombies in Wizards Tower

Needless to say Heroism soon was no longer needed what with all the exp he was getting. Jan 1406 he had ~140 Exp.

I think I made a misteake before when I said the first unit you should summon when using 11 Book Life/Death being Torrin or Wraiths.

With Life you should roll out 1 or 2 Guardian Spirits to start quickly scouting things for Torrin to kill.
With Death 2 Magic Spirits to find your Wraiths some enemies/Towns to suck dry.

Also Death and Life do NOT have the possibility of INSTANT summons the way that the other 3 do your right. However the initial 40% discount, upto 60% with 2 more books, is quite often more than enough. They actually win the game faster than the other 3 normally.

I started an 11 Death Book game and Chose Wraith, Shadow Demons and Black Prayer as my spells. Race was High Elves.

Black Prayer is insanely good as it can allow you to raise so many more undead when fighting higher resistance guys. It lowers resists by 2 on enemies.

My Wraiths (1 Unit of them only) took on the following tougher fights listed below;

* Chaos Node - 1 Efreet with 4 Fire Giants. Managed to get off a Black Prayer to help.
* 2 Cockatrices & 2 Earth Elementals (non-node) Black Prayer
* 5 Unicorns & 4 Guardian Spirits
* 3 Basilisks
* 4 Stone Giants (Had 1 cockatrice unit from above so they wasted their first shots)
* 1 ArcAngel + 8 Guardian Spirits (+2 of the undead Stone Giants I raised from above)
* Tauron (10 Chaos Books + Mastery) at his capitol pretty early, 2 Doom Bats, 4 Hell Hounds, 3 Random Heroes and Horse Archers. Used Black Prayer spell only. Got 3 Hounds, Horse Archers and a Doom Bat raised from this fight.

I get you. My only quibble is that I don't consider 11 books a pure summoner build, but a pure Death or pure Life build. For example, I would consider an 11 Chaos book build to be pure Chaos, even though you can play it by summoning lots of things. I guess it's a technicality though.

I can testify that a Death build with 8 books plus Conjurer and Channeler is really, really hard. So definitely 11 Death books is the way to go. Especially so since it's so much more unusual to find extra Life or Death books as loot during the course of a game.

I tried both Sorcery (with High Men) and Nature (with Barbarians), and both games had quick negative outcomes, but that's largely due to my inexperience with summoning and -- more importantly -- the lousy starting positions I had. For my Sorcery game I was stuck on a small island with only room for one extra colony and no hills or mountains at all. Terrible. I should have rejected it as hopeless, but I gave it a shot.

To demonstrate how ignorant I am of summoning as a play style, I was disappointed to learn you can only summon phantom warriors and phantom beasts in combat. I never thought about it before because I don't usually use summoned critters, but Sorcery would be awesome if you could make an army of phantoms. Alas, no.

I had a little more luck with the war bears from Nature, but that game was a rather poor start as well (although it improved when I found Transmute in a portal tower -- only the second site I cleared). With a little support war bears are strong enough to take out fire giant guardians.

Ah I see now where our misconceptions started to part ways.

The main problem with your idea imho is that the Conjurer+Mastery+9 Book combo is hoping to reliably gather it's missing books asap. The only real reason to choose Conjurer + Mastery for these guys is that the retorts will be much harder to get later reliably but the books are much more likely.

Not to mention that Hell Hounds & PWarriors are a bit unbalanced and give Chaos & Sorc a quick leap over the others.

Hell Hounds get 2 Attacks. When at full strength they deliver a 12 atk Fire Breath with 40% chance to hit and a 12 atk normal atk with 40% to hit. This gives on avg 5 damage each atk, and when dealing with multi figure units killing off half of them before they can retaliate is very very desirable. If chaos had to rely on Fire Elementals cast only in battle they would suck worse than the others.
This is especially helpful in Sorcery Nodes guarded by PWarriors as they only have 1 hp each even though there is 6 of them they are only dangerous when they get to strike at full strength usually.

*ALL THAT for only 16 Mana each + 1 a turn to maintain !!! War Bears Cost 28/2 and Sprites 40/3 both worse creatures for nature and more expensive sigh. Sorc has no first level summons not in combat. Well other than Floating Island lol.

Sorcery has much the same type of advantage when NOT fighting in Nodes as their PW's only cost 4 mana each in combat. With the 9 Book start you have 18 skill points per battle which = 4 warriors possible. Phantom Beasts (PB's) will only cost you 14 when you get them. Air Elementals when you get them cost you only 20.

* There is a Permanent Summoning Trick that can be used on Combat Summons. It involves using Word of Recall on the unit in battle then LOSING the battle, or at least NOT winning. Read below if you want more info. It works on ALL combat summons even non Sorcery ones.

http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Air_Elemental#Permanent_Summoning_Trick

Well I'll be. You learn something new every day. Thanks for the tip, EvilLoynis.

The problem was that I faced down 4 Stone Giants at ounce. They have a Ranged Attack strength of 15 with a 50% to hit x 2 shots. Now normally Wraith could face this pretty much no problem but 8 attacks before they can close for combat leaves them usually with 2 or fewer figures left to fight. That was why I brought along a decoy for them to kill that I really didn't want to keep anyway.


Death Starting Strategies.

As I said before it's usually best to send out 1 or 2 Magic Spirits to start scouting around your starting city. This helps you discover Towns, Opponents and also lairs/nodes/Towers and what type of guards they have.

Now because most Death Realm guys including Ghouls, Zombies, Skeletons And even Sorcery Node Defenders Phantom Warriors/Beasts ALL have Death Immunity, therefore Life Stealing does NOT work, if you realize you have a lot of these around you Wraiths are not always the best first choice.

In this case Shadow Demons would be a better choice to summon to grab the early Nodes and Lairs. This is because they have both REGENERATION and FLYING. You start by softening up mulit unit figures with his ranged attack then move in for the kill. If one figure dies off, hit done till it regenerates then continue. In Sorcery Nodes especially fire no more than 1 shot at PW's and finish them off with melee. Even if you have to let the timer lapse and the battle end it usually takes no more than 2 tries to clear a Node or Lair this way.

Also because your clearing those places you will quickly get mana to start summoning the Wraith for other fights.

Shadow Demons normally have only 1 movement because their Flying ability overrides Non-Coporeal. Does the same to Wraiths but you don't notice because they have 2 movement already. By pairing your Shadow Demons with a Magic Spirit you can gain 2 movements per turn because while the MS's Walking takes precedence and allows their non corp ability to kick in. Remember you only have to move the first space with the magic spirit then you can move the 2nd step alone, this is for if you get into a fight or want to explore Myrror for that last movement. Then you just send the magic spirit to the same spot on it's own plane and you start the turn with them on the same spot again for movement.

The common theme I'm noticing for all successful summoning builds is the fast start. Chaos and Death both have a way to start breaking nodes, ruins, and enemy/neutral cities very, very early.

Quite different from A/R builds, where you can turtle for a long time.

Very True and the sad fact is that if you were playing PvP 11 Book Death start would probably be the #1 win scenario. Unless your opponent knew you were going todo this and chose 11 Book Life (Incarnation & Dispel Evil FTW) to counter.

Sorcery also has quick way to take cities and ruins early as well with Phantom Warriors. They just need a medicore unit to wipe up the remains. I like Barbarians for this myself.

Ha! I tried this strategy last night, and it was indeed probably the quickest win I've ever had -- and that's despite picking gnolls as my race.

There are certain types of units wraiths can't handle, but they easily kill everything that matters to win the early game; hellhounds, war bears, giant spiders, normal infantry units...even sprites (as long as there aren't too many) and phantom warriors (because wraiths are immune to illusion) are not very hard. With a little backup they can kill fire giants.

On my first turn after summoning a wraith, I used it to break a Chaos node with two doom bats. Easy victory (and one of the doom bats became undead, but I had to disband it because it cost something like 14 mana per turn).

I don't know whether you've tried ghouls before, but I notice that, compared to wraiths, they seem to be much better at raising opponents they defeat. My wraiths never got a guardian spirit to come back from the dead despite killing quite a few, but my ghouls from a previous game could raise them reliably. Undead guardian spirits are quite handy since you can't summon them as a Death wizard.

It's sadly true they don't handle creatures well if they have "Death Immunity" ability and are in groups larger than say 2, such as Zombies, Skeletons, Ghouls and Phantoms* mostly. 1 on 1 they can still usually handle these guys, but rarely do you get only 1 of them or in groups of less than 3 at least.

*Remember when fought inside a Node Phantom Warriors have a 5 Atk * 6 Figures even not piercing armor this is still dangerous since you cannot suck life back or regen during battle. This is why Shadow Demon rock in taking out these guys.

http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Immunity#Units_with_Default_Death_Immunity

Ghouls vs Wraith Undead Raising.

The thing you may not realize is that Wraiths raise dead only through their "Life Steal -3" ability, they need to suck at least 50% and because Life Steal -3 depends on the targets Resistance. Guardian Spirits have 11 resistance at the least when battle starts, Life Steal will only bring this down to 8 so usually their normal attack does more than 50% damage thus not raising them. Casting Black Prayer (-2 Res) and Darkness (-1 Res) makes it much more likely to raise them but it is still tough.

Ghouls just need to do the majority of the damage to the unit on the other hand. However the number of units a ghouls can deal the most damage to compared to Wraiths is very low thus why Wraiths are usually better overall.

http://masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Ghouls#Create_Undead

Quote taken from the link above.

"One of the Ghouls' most interesting property is their ability to Create Undead - raising dead enemy units to serve the Ghouls' master after the battle is over.

This occurs only if the Ghouls have inflicted a significant amount of damage to an enemy unit during a battle. It is generally agreed to that the Ghouls need to inflict at least 50% of the unit's total (maximum) health in order to raise an enemy unit, though sometimes even 90% isn't enough. Note that it is possible to raise a unit even if it was killed by something other than Ghouls, as long as the Ghouls caused the majority of damage to that unit. "

Well, having tried it, I recommend ghouls for cracking sites with guardian spirits. They kill the guardians without too much effort, and you get undead spirits back, and they're useful. Which means ghouls have one specific task at which the excel. For almost anything else there are better options.

Have you tried death knights? I found the spell near the end of my game, but since I won so fast I never got a chance to try them. I know death knights are pretty nasty to fight against unless you have units tough enough to beat them fast. In my Chaos summoner game I sent a huge stack of hellhounds against a ruin with a single death knight and he wiped the floor with them.

Death Knights are basically flying, undead Paladins. With Life-stealing attacks. When you consider that pretty much the only weakness Paladins have is that they cannot attack flying units, you can see how Death Knights are very nearly unstoppable killing machines once you get them.

Death knights lack magic immunity, so they've not quite paladins.

Lately I've been having lots of fun with the conjurer retort. I'm currently winning a game with 10 death books. This gives you 12-mana skeletons for an early rush strategy. I barely managed to defeat with an 8-or-9-stack of skeletons and the darkness spell, then proceeded to research lycanthropy and shadow demons in order to defeat Jafar, who got storm giants really early. I've now researched death knights and am in the process of mopping up Sss'ra on Myrror.