The Tavern

In the past few games where I've gone with Kiku I have not gotten animate dead or simulcrum, which essentially makes kiku's corpse delivery useless. How does that make sense? A necromancer that can't raise the dead? It makes one of my favorite and most useful gods turn into the worst choice possible. Surely animate dead should be guaranteed by the god of necromancy.

You're guaranteed a spell that will do something with the corpses you get. So in the first book it's skeleton or corpse rot, and instead of animate dead you can get corpse armour, which is potentially okay, I guess. It used to be that one spell that made abominations.

I hear you but cigotuvis embrace is pretty much objectively garbage no? Overall dungeon crawl is in my top 5 favorite games of all time but I really think kiku not giving corpse minion spells make no sense. Animate skeleton is useless past the early dungeon levels, corpse rot isn't very good either.

Corpse Rot is actually very good and so is AS. Cigotivi's gives you lots of AC, really a lot of it, though I guess zombies are better.

animate skeleton is nearly as good as animate dead, just really annoying to use

Corpse rot is both guaranteed and one of the most broken op spells in the game. Not getting animate dead sucks, but kiku is still gonna be really good even if you get the worst possible spell set out of the books. (Feature request: remove corpse rot and have kiku guarantee animate dead)

Right. In stable right now Kiku always gives you corpse rot, which kills basically everything until lair, and does SOMETHING to damn near every enemy in the game.

And I'm not sure why people are down on animate skeleton. I have plenty of characters who use it regularly in Zot.

Same reason people didn't like sacrificing every corpse with gods like Oka. It's kinda just... lowkey annoying to have to walk over each corpse and press z-a(or whatever) repeatedly instead of just hitting it once, and gets more annoying the more you do it in one game.

I have a suspicion that the advantage of Animate Dead is that it's all-LOS, not that it makes zombies instead of skeletons, and is hence faster. I expect that a foo zombie is tougher than a foo skeleton, sure, but the speed that AD can make an posse seems to be its key. My current ^Kiku got AS and CE, and still hasn't found AD but got S from a Book of Ice. Simulacrum makes very tough monsters, but there have been a few times where it's slowness and must-by-in-same-square have caused problems. And I can AS after S for 2-for-1 allies; the beefier species make better ones of each anyway.

i find it really frustrating when i don't get animate dead with kiku. it's better than animate skeleton mainly because you can cast death channel, make a lot of noise, and hang back and hex/stab/whatever, then animate dead halfway through the fight and mop up most of the floor with the resulting army, then repeat. or in any situation where you want zombies to help you kill stuff that is already in LOS and you can't wade through it animating skeletons one by one without getting killed (and if you could afford to do that you probably wouldn't need the skeletons in the first place). kiku generally gives good spells and also pain weapon tho and you'll likely find anim. dead eventually.

I believe this thread proves that Animate Dead should be higher level, it cannot be compared in power/usefulness to other level 4 spells. Compare to Summon Ice Beasts, for example.

Is it possible to make level of the spell dynamic? Something like XL/4, min 4, so it will be level 6 in Zot usually, similar to Shadow Creatures.
By the way Shadow Creatures spell has the opposite problem, players don't rush to it early because it is very inefficient until late game.

Summon ice beasts is also really, really good though. Like, "once you get it castable game should be easy through lair branches unless you do something dumb" good.

But it is useless after those branches unlike Animate Dead which stays great in Vaults, Depths and even Zot 5.

Yes, but at any rate I don't think it should have something like a changing spell level, and I doubt it would really block the spell's usefulness for any sort of character anyways. There are spells which take different amounts of MP(ex: searing ray takes more than 2 MP as long as you continue shooting it) so I don't think it's totally crazy to have something like "make animate dead cost more MP based on how many corpses you animate", but I also don't think it's strictly necessary.

I'd rather have Ice Beasts in my starting book than Animate Dead. Or Summon Lightning spire. Or any other good spell that doesn't force me to go Kiku or do some weird things with resting and exploring to get the best results out of it.

It is important to separate power level of a spell from fun level of a spell. Fun is very subjective, power is less subjective.

I was talking from power perspective. Being able to make 3 ice beasts at a whim beats having a strong ally only if you recently killed a strong monster. Does it not?

It works in Lair but not in Depths or Zot where Ice Beasts die too fast and deal too low damage to be useful, it is usually better to spend those 3 turns doing something else. With Animate Dead you can spend just 1 turn to get several more powerful allies.

Obviously ice beasts and lightning spire are stronger starting spells than animate dead and summoning overall produces stronger allies with more convenient mechanics than necromancy. The advantage of necromancy is the combination of good general utility spells and passable quality allies that depend even less on spellpower than typical summons, along with excellent availability of spells via kiku.

In regard to the OP, I've seen this kind of situation a number of times. Not having animate dead is irritating, but your staple kiku spell is corpse rot.

I'm amazed to hear animate skeleton dismissed. Even after the nerfing that they break apart in a while, a big pack of skeletons can be a fighting force and it certainly can cover your escape. Making them is as fast as cutting the corpse, which I'd do anyway since I don't want anybody else using it (though that's not like in the old days either), and animating the skeleton means it's no longer an item that shows up on a find, which is uncluttered, and there's no bullshit about whether the corpse is edible or inedible, it just does it. So if I get that spell I keep it till the end and raise everything that falls in front of me.

You are mis-interpreting. Nobody here is dismissing it outright. All the comments refer to specific comparisons or situations.

Bottom line: yes Animate Dead is great with Kiku. But you don't NEED it from him. If he doesn't give it to you, adapt.

Half-baked idea:
Move animate skeleton to level 2, and raise all skeletons (or at least, the first corpse in each tile) within a radius that rises with spell power, up to a max that is still less than full LOS.

AS would then be guaranteed in the first Kiku book instead of corpse rot (as much as I hate the idea of losing corpse rot).

The downside would be, what if you only want one skeleton (to devour the flesh), and all the rest, zombies?