Stacking help for Nether mages

Units Available to Nethers : Units summonable from start, without buying spells. Units included are those which follow "standard rules". For example...staking is fairly loose if you have devils because they are so damn powerful, granted they are more powerful with good stacking, but it really dowsn't matter too much in offensive....

Nether Units (standard):

Skeleton Zombie Ghoul Wraith Vampire Lich Ascendant Units

Pegasus Angel Verdant Units

Dryad Nymph Werebear Eradicant Units

Salamander Lizard men Hellhound Chimera Hydra Phantasm Units

Sirenes Shadow Monster Mind Rippers A healthy nether stacking consisting of Liches as core army, closely supported by a number of Mind Rippers and followed by lots and lots of Zombies or similar is fairly powerful. I have gone max 200 in rank with Liches as core army, after that they are far too expensive and can't be supported with my 3500 land. This constellation has a weakness against ascendants who attack with AA. Get mind bar and shroud of darkness going to minimise effect of ascendant spells and that will help alot. I have gaze of death as defensive spell, and although I sometimes get lucky once killing 30 dominion it has a rather mixed efficiency.... Much has been debated on this, and it is also often very useful with 20 k wraiths as core army, supported in substance by sirenes , and zombies. This may land you anywhere between 200 and 10 in ranking. The sirenes are very resistant against several attacks, and the wraiths can paralyze avoiding counters. The thousands of zombies are good fas fodder and can generally get you much land in successful sieges etc. It is very good to get Black Sabbath going, which gets you 666 skeleeton and zombies / turn. It GREATLY boosts your mana-income and allows you to reach high ranks with very little land. It gets you recovered very fast as well.

I recently decided that I should get as many units as possible, and just over-summoned greatly. I ended up with 2500 lich, 23000 wraiths, 600 000 zombies 200 000 skeleton, 1800 mind rippers, 300 archangels (I bought Summon Archangel spell), 1000 hydra and 1000 vampires. This army had a net power of well over 20 million, landing me at rank 7 (over 30 million power total). I thought this was great, but soon I was attacked and my defense was really bad. I lost several hundred acres, but not many units died, so I ended up going -20 000 mana / turn (I had only 1200 nodes so that was bad), -10 000 pop (max pop of 700 000), yet my geld was +800 000 /turn. Most of the units I had are/were undisbandable so I was stuck with them. I disbanded all my zombies and skeleton though, after which I was attacked again. I was kicked bck down to 1000 in ranking and had lost over 1000 acres.

In short the moral is that it's the stacking rather than the amounts that matter.

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2000