I don't think that Necros have a lack of healing at all - they're the only hero that starts with a healing skill by default. Even Archdruids and Theocrats have to gain a few levels before having a heal. Dreadnaughts that also have a specific heal for machines, also must level up to gain the healing skill. Coupled with the fact that you're almost guaranteed to be offered a Necro hero on the first turn - means an abundance of healing, not a lack of it.

Lack of economy is a bit different. While they don't have city happiness, they also get a flat bonus to all resources simply for being undead. This bonus probably helps them in the early game, whereas an opponent may not have substantial happiness til much later. What I think causes the undead economy issue is actually one of their key abilities - ghoul curse, along with Age of Death. Both of these have the chance to bankrupt a necromancer as their army can grow well beyond their ability to maintain.

As for Fire and Spirit weakness - these weaknesses are mitigated by Necros with their Protection from Light and Archlich auras. Granted Archlich may not occur til much later, but Protection from Light is offered very early. I've played games as a Necro where I would hire a Warlord hero simply to have the Blood Brothers 100% spirit resist. This can make undead completely immune to their main weakness when combined with other buffs. Fire remains a bit of a weakness but with Embalming and hero auras they can end up with Fire protection although it is hard to gain immunity like they can with spirit.

All in all, I do not think these are difficulties. Having played Necromancer for awhile now, I actually think they are quite strong. Especially if you select a race that benefits from their strengths - i.e. in particular, Elves, Tigrans and Draconians receive substantial benefits from going undead as it covers their racial weaknesses. If I had to select any of these as a weakness it would be the economic one.

Morale and higher damage taken due to the Defense malus for Ghouls.

Also, your link is broken ?

Healing for non Necromancer heroes that become Archliches is an issue. You can create heal undead items for your heroes but that is a workaround. I usually don't take the Harbingers of Death upgrade until late game if at all. Sometimes I get the lich upgrade un-intentionally from a library and have to switch strategy on the fly. Compared to say a Draconian Theocrat with, iron heart, heal, prayer for the hurt and healing aura , a live Draconian army will refresh hit points so much faster except if you run with mostly reanimators. This may be balanced because Undead units can be re-animated.
I think ghouls created through ghoul curse should be much weaker but also maybe half the maintenance. Say -2 defense, -2 resist and half or 1/3 maintenance. More hardened full maintenance ghouls could be created in cities through upgrades.

@aaronmv and everyone: the question here is not "is Necro too weak" and I'm not asking for advice how to play it, because as I said, it's one of the best class. The question here is: "what are YOUR difficulties when playing Necro?"

Ok so:
- Higher damage taken by Ghouls due to their lower defense
- Healing for non Necromancer heroes that become Archliches is an issue

Population growth.

Early game expansion is vital to everyone, but for necromancers there's a unique tension between conquering neutral cities, and casting Undead Plague on them so your cities can grow. Plus, the whole issue of making sure your population growth ends up going to the right cities.

On a map without neutral cities, this gets much worse, of course.

It's easiest on an island map + underground map where your flying scouts can discover many neutral cities that are hard to reach and conquer.

All in all, necromancers expand more slowly. You can of course easily compensate by ghouling everything in treasure sites, but I don't enjoy that nearly as much as building a big empire with a strong infrastructure.

As for the healing thing for non-necromancer heroes: I've never found it to be an issue at all. There are so many support units who can get Heal Undead. Wraiths, Frostling Ice Queens, all those racial support units, etc, etc.

Quite the contrary: I find healing for my heroes to be a problem BEFORE they become archliches. It happens quite often that every undead unit is at full health but I have no way of healing a wounded mortal hero.

What about the Undead population you get from clearing + the buildings providing growth?
My personal experience is that my Undead cities grow faster than normal cities due to the huge amount of clearing I do every turn.

So that would add this:
- Low population growth because of the way Undead city works

That depends on how many cities you have.

If you have few cities, you can grow them quite quickly with undead plague + population from battles.

But the more cities you have, the less impact your battles and spells have, because the same amount of growth is spread out over more ground.

Now, you can certainly account for this in your city placement strategy. But the bottom line is that necromancers do better building fewer cities and growing those, while leaving some neutrals to harvest, rather than just claiming as much ground as possible as other classes do.

For the rest of you who are not answering, does it mean Necro is very easy for you? Easier than other classes? Even if we nerf its reanimating abilities and Inflict Ghoul Curse as has been done in the balance mod?

I'm just gonna mention before I start that I have what seems like a bit of an unusual build. Goblin Necromancer with Expander. Swapping out Grey Guard, Destruction, and Shadowborn adepts/masteries as I like. Swarms of low tier units and little focus on research. It's an early-game land grab, basically, and I don't start teching seriously until I run out of targets. Not tested in MP.

So, difficulties:

Healing is only an issue until I research reanimators. Then I just spam them, and never run out of health, unless my reanimator - cadaver ratio gets a bit one-sided.

Population is never much of a concern for me. I get substantially more growth from capturing large cities than I do from growing my own.

Mana and CP is my big concern in the early game. Whispers of the Fallen + 1-2 undead plagues + a few lost souls / banshees is about as far as I get before my mana economy starts collapsing - and even getting to that point is difficult, given how much CP some of those spells take. It generally comes out to around 300 CP, give or take 100. Leaves you limited on combat spells and summons, both of which are quite important.

Fire weakness is only a concern vs. fire elementals, simply because it's so hard to kill them with ranged attacks (applies to all necros, I feel; blight and frost being primary ranged damage channels, and fire elementals having good resists)

Spirit weakness is never a concern vs. independents. Spirit elementals drop at incredible speed to any kind of blight damage, and also can't inflict that much spirit. Human priests will often prefer healing over attacking. And anyways, a quick raise lesser fixes any mistakes. The priest won't survive more than 1 attack.

Low armor is a problem, to the point where I'll refuse to attack some stronger enemies without a substantial amount of cannonfodder cadavers to eat counter-attacks.

Anything that boosts armor is a must. Anything that boosts damage is a must. You already have numbers; the longer you can punch up with those numbers, the better. If you stop being able to handle the stronger enemies, well, ideally you'll already have something bigger coming down the line. If ya don't, well that's a problem.


Edit:

An addition on Morale: Morale doesn't have all that much of an impact in the extremely early game. You miss out on a comparatively small amount of income, and your units can't crit (until Puppet Master). Not the best, but it can be dealt with, and comes with the obvious "no morale penalties" advantage.

Late game is where it matters. Not getting the high-morale city events makes a huge difference economy-wise. Personally, I like this; it puts a ticking clock on the necromancer, saying that you must win the game before your opponent outdoes you economically. But it does qualify as a "difficulty."

Maybe give Archlich heroes access to devour corpse ability or convert their healing skills to heal undead. Usually the first 40+ turns or so I have mixed army of live units with increasing number of undead units. If research is set to slower setting it could be quite a while until reanimators are available and then the upgrade for support healing with re-animation ability is even later.
The undead economy is always an issue to be managed, it is not really possible to crank out Palace of the Perished at all cities like say a Warlord or Dreadnought can max out city upgrades. So free undead units won through recruiting need to be used to capture more fully developed enemy cities or make some vassals. Running at a gold deficit is not a strat I enjoy playing for more than a few turns. I usually end up playing Orc as Undead because of racial governance economy bonuses and victory rush for the live units I get from quests + heroes.

Your 2 answers more or less match the previously described possible causes of issues for Necro. MrNo, you mention CP and mana, but I don't think that's specific to Necro. Sorcerer and AD have the same issue for instance, and I think that's normal that CP and mana are limiting factors.

Summary of possible causes of difficulties when playing Necro (will be used in the poll to identify the biggest issue):
- Lack of healing for Undeads
- Lack of economic (gold, mana, research, production) bonus because of the lack of morale for cities, translating in a lack of economic competitiveness, especially in late game
- Higher than usual losses against certain sites because of Fire and Spirit weaknesses
- Higher (physical) damage taken by Ghouls due to their lower defense
- Healing for non Necromancer heroes that become Archliches is an issue
- Low population growth because of the way Undead city works


From the answers we had, it seems to me one of the biggest challenge for single players (SP) is the fact that Necro does not play well when turtling and playing "empire building" strategies. One way to help a bit such players would be to add more economic bonus to the economic buildings of Necro. In the balance mod, we could remove the economic bonus associated to Necromancy and move them to buildings in cities. That would avoid snowballing for players who clear very easily and get Necromancy very quickly and help SP who want to build empires.

Fair. Rather a long post to repeat what was already said. And it didn't particularly answer your posted question.

I find Necro to be by far the easiest class to play. I haven't used the balance patch. I can see that pushing the reanimates further down the line for heroes would be a bit inconvenient, and the ghouling being harder to pulloff due to despair changes is certainly a hit to late game, but I don't think they'd be serious nerfs by any stretch. Again, though, no MP experience or mod experience.

If you're looking for a way to promote empire building for necro, I'd suggest looking to Undead Plague as well. If you could find a way to target the recipient city, that would be incredible, though I doubt you have access to that functionality. Failing that, perhaps have multiple cities receive its benefit? Decreasing benefit with range?

Or just up the undead pop income from appropriate buildings (I think harvester's is good where it is. Gives a good boost for how cheap it is. Embalmer's and Cathedral always felt a bit low to me though.)

Also, I've been thinking on the whole "Archlich hero" thing. How about just saving people a bit of trouble and giving all heroes Heal Undead along with the research? Or with healers of the dead, if you felt that better balance wise.

To boost undead Empire building, I think the "corrupt the source" mod is on the right trajectory.

Corrupting more things on the strategic map fits the general style and feel of the necromancer class, and maintains (or even enhances) their unique flavour.

To enhance this further, a mod like that could add unique mystic city upgrades to corrupted buildings (Like the Stables of Unlife in vanilla) that have an economic effect, i.e. further boosting population growth or adding a percentage of income.

Although changes like that are perhaps better left to mods other than the balance mod. Could be part of that community expansion thing, though, if that's still happening.

Lack of healing is a non-issue. The Necromancer access to heal undead at recruit with its 25pt value (in excess of all other heals) is quite effective. The quick distribution of the ability to all supports overcomes healing deficits. In my experience a Dreadnought will encounter far more taxing healing woes than a Necromancer, & Dwarf & Orc Dreadnoughts in particular: - no "Natural Healing" equivalent for hero. Bad (or no) direct heal for living units. Requires investment and hero presence to simply ascertain "functional" level machine healing. Engineers pretty much never obtain sufficient rank to obtain Emergency repair. Vehicle maintanence is just bad. The ubiquitous distribution of Heal Undead, on the other hand, is a very simple answer to the undead's thematic "cannot regenerate" trait. *You cant heal, but wait: here's tons of healing.*

Specific weaknesses are largely overcome ( or exceeded ) through hero choice, racial choice, & specialization. Overall, Undead are more resistant than they are weak, with 100% blight protection (is blight the most frequent elemental attack?), and 40% frost protection. Furthermore there are more dangerous status effects to which undead are immune than vulnerable (mind control, taunt, panic) than vulnerable (turn/control undead).

When asking about Necromancer weaknesses I'm inclined to respond, "What weaknesses?" The one point of contention might be economy. Granted; Undead cities get a 15% bonus to all production(s) out of the gate; much like a living city with 200-399 morale. I can't find any specific written reference to this and don't think it ever grows but I'm not sure of that. In anycase; it's available immediately which might allow some immediate momentum but, then again, starting cities get at least much of a starter bonus anyway. Definitely, in the long run, a Necromancer economy would be hard pressed to keep pace with an extreme example of a rogue with multipe 600+ morale cities (easily done w/ iron grip) churning out income at +50% values. One might argue this is one of the few points of tradeoff for Necromancers with their many tactical strenghts. That may be in a practical sense but clearly over a the extremes of a very long many-city campaign a large deficit between undead and a specialist with max morale bonuses would be large.

Without testing it's hard to say if the one unmitigateable weakness of economy needs be ammended to maintain parity with peers. I'm inclined to say it's a legitimate point of tradeoff but would admit there needs be *some* level of compromise for the extreme cases. I think an interesting approach would be a unique mechanic of sacrificing undead units in cities for a temporary bonus related to tier and/or value. How such a thing could be implimented I have no idea but it is very thematically in-line with the Necromancer: adding more corpses to the pile (something useful to do with those cadavers). And, such a thing could be the mechanic that allows some level of catchup to extreme morale-driven income but still be throttled by what might be a necessary class-based weakness.

Otherwise corrupting resource nodes as was mentioned could be a good path too; would require less micromanagement - but overtaking resources through casting is problematic in the additional strain placed on castingpoint pool to service what is largely a city building chore. Corruption of map resources further demands purification answers ( which adds complexity ). If it was a desired solution I'd think the option better relegated to later tier unit upgrades: say a laborer, settler, or support unit ability addition a later stage empire upgrade.

I wonder how the balance would shift if Necromancers never got "heal undead" on their units, but instead healers of the dead gave Raise Cadaver to all supports. (It'd obviously need to be renamed.)

Reanimators could start with Lesser Reanimate and gain Control Undead with Healers of the Dead. Or the other way around. Maybe they could still get Heal Undead on gold medal, like Engineers currently do. It'd be easier for them to reach gold medal.

This could be combined with DBM's suggestion of using cadavers to fuel the economy or population growth (which I'm not actually sure is possible.. maybe with a spell that costs very few casting points? Kills units and adds some mana/research or adds pop to the nearest city.) to bolster the economy.

Necromancers could still ghoul-spam their way across the map, but it would be extremely difficult to keep all those troops alive with virtually no sources of healing. They'd mostly end up cannon fodder that would only last a battle or two. So there'd then be no need to nerf Ghoul Curse or Inflict despair. It'd be thematically fitting, at the least, though I have no idea whether it would result in any kind of balance.