I played one of my longest sessions of Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes. This time I controlled our favorite OCD sufferer, Morrigan the Formerly Known as Mad but Now Known as Risen. After 120+ years, I won a Conquest victory against the other 9 factions.

Compared to the other factions, the Empire of the Dead cities grow very slowly. Basically, each Human or Fallen killed adds 1 unit of population to a Dead city, so the Dead faction is forced to take on other factions during the vulnerable early game period. Also, pretty much every other faction hates the Dead by default. The biggest disadvantage is very slow tech progress. My solution was simple: exploit the advantage of unlimited zero-maintenance troops. I founded a fortress city and pumped out cheap, custom designed basic infantry for defense and reconnaissance. Meanwhile, the Dead gained a fair amount of fame by wandering the desert near the capital city, killing monsters and solving quests. Luckily for me, the other factions constantly went to war with each other, allowing my faction to choose the most vulnerable targets. We conquered Magnar first, then Pariden. By the midgame, the Empire of the Dead held sway over the entire eastern continent, conquering and securing several very useful conclave cities and pumping up our research. Toward the end, it was a classic Three Kingdoms scenario: Gilden in the northwest, Tarth in the Southwest, and the Dead in the East. By now, I had mass produced and deployed custom designed Undead Horde infantry and Undead Plague mounted units. It was a lot of fun forcing Gilden and Tarth to surrender, vassalizing their broken, dispirited leaders into the legions of the Dead.

This probably was my toughest playthrough. There were several points where my Empire would have been annihilated if the Kingdoms had stopped their endless infighting and taken the threat of the Dead more seriously. Also, the Wither spell is one of the most powerful weapons in the Dead arsenal: essentially, it weakens elite enemies into regulars and regulars into militia. I'm tempted to write up a detailed chronology of this campaign.