Managing undead allies

[Ququman]

I gotta say, whatever game I start to play, I always want to try necromancers first thing, because I like swarming and well necromancer gameplay generally speaking.
So I tried necromancers (DDNe for example) and Death Knight (very very enjoyable imho, TrDK are nice and MD/Na DK) and I have a bunch of question about undead management.

1. How do you use your undead while fighting ? With DKs I found out dropping them in a room of a level and then recalling them if I need to is very effective, and allows you to kill most of early game hazards easily (long sentence, sorry). Also, Mirror is a nice panic button. I also do stair dancing when I start a level to pull ennemies in the middle of my undead stack one level higher. Is there other tricks you can use with undead ?
Also, early on when I play as a Necromancer I don't have recall, so how can I manage them ? most of the time they're so slow, never here with me if I don't wait for a loooong time. Should I not use them ?

2.DKs again, how does Invocations affect the animate dead ability ? Does the freshness of the corpses affect too ?

3.Zombies or skellies, what is better ?

4.Should I consider quickly learning spells coming from other magic schools with necromancers ? I seem to have trouble getting a decent damage output when Pain becomes wea against ennemies.

These are most of the questions I have atm, sorry if my english is kind of messed up.
I hope the answers can help other people too

[Ququman]

Oh I almost forgot to ask, what are the reasons that makes zombies pickup their weapon or not ? I can't find a way to have them use their weapon for sure :p

4. It never, ever makes sense to use only a single magical school. Low skill levels are really cheap compared to high ones, and there are a large number of extremely helpful low-level spells. In particular, nearly everyone will want Charms and Translocations.

True enough. I do it with every class, so I don't see why I shouldn't make it with necromancers. That was kind of a dumb question, but I always have crappy castng for different magic schools with DDwarfs ^^"

[Ququman]

okay, thanks for the answers

Well in my head they were not very good, must be me being used to playing Deep Elves too much I guess.

[eharper256]

With 1. Personally, I just tap the "." key every three moves, staggering my move speed manually. BUT, early on you should ignore raising of dead in general, they'll be too weak, especially skellies. Focus on using Pain, Regen and melee if need arises. Don't forget Dispel Undead; you'll be great at it and it makes threats that are bad for some characters (wraiths, some player ghosts, hungry ghosts) a pushover for you.

When you get to Orc, mass zombie raising starts to be good, especially with Ogre zombies and such. However, abominations are just around the corner at that stage (assuming Kiku worship, of course), and if you can play Corpse Stacking, an army of large Aboms can get your through Lair and other places quite easily. Once you get Agony, use it in conjunction with Pain (Agony seems to have a longer range, but can't kill stuff directly, just cuts HP ala. Torment) as things barrel towards you. Corpse Rot can also help with big hordes- kill the first line and then evaporate their corpses as the second charge over them.

This is in view of being a DENe, however, so may not fully apply.

[Bim]

I normally raise as much as I can (that I don't need to eat) even if it's moderately weak. You can use it as a meat shield/gives you a bit of extra damage in combat. Also, remember your 't' commands,I sometimes like leaving zombies and then wandering off, you sometimes get random experience and they normally stay vaguely where put (I think?). Also, as soon as you get haunt and necromut., its uber mega spam time. I literally can't love haunt enough. Oh hia storm dragon....HAUNTHAUNTHAUNTHAUNT.

Agony is also pretty brutal early on, especially if you want to do more necro/melee, as it softens stuff up very substantially, and can make hydra's a breeze. However, careful not to have hydra vs zombie with sharp weapon. I had an elf zombie chop a few more heads into a hydra, which was more than just slightly annoying.