Strategic combat + Death realm

[Seravy]

I've been thinking a lot and I realized the AI is at a really huge disadvantage when playing the Death realm.
The main selling point of that realm, to some extent in the vanilla game, and even stronger in CoM, is the ability to gain undead through combat and replenish/create armies on the go. Of course, it also grants access to all the undead immunities, which are a huge trump card against other death or even sorcery wizards. While summoned Death units also have these, there is a huge difference between armies containing some such units, and those made entirely of them.

Now, the problem is, strategic combat does not apply spell effects or abilities, in short, does not create undead at all. Never. Aside from Zomibe Mastery, the AI has no access to undead units, unless the human player loses battles and does not reload.

While I don't intend to make strategic combat as detailed as normal combat, it's not possible to do, I think this is such a major problem that it needs to be implemented somehow. It wouldn't be too hard to change the dead enemy units to "dead from create undead damage" based on some formula that considers the presence of create undead, life steal, drain life, summon zombie and syphon life, but I'm not sure how the formula should work. All of these abilities and spells are completely different and rely on different sources (attack strength, enemy resistance, own casting power). The space is quite limited too, so it needs to be something very simple.

[Tiltowait]

Every 2 'create undead' units that attack, 1 undead unit is created, selected randomly from the list of eligible units that lost.

[Seravy]

How about, equal unit cost to (total cost of units with create undead+(skill of the winner wizard)*number of death books owned/2)?
Randomly selected would be complicated, so in the order the units are in the array (that's random enough anyway)

Edit : Life Steal will also be treated as Create Undead because it can also raise undead. Maybe it would be better to have that one add a constant amount instead of unit cost? Not sure, I mean I'm not sure how accurate we want this to be, considering everything else is very inaccurate and strategic combat can have a completely different outcome than normal anyway. So maybe a Demon Lord creating more undead than a Wraith while it's not how it normally works, might not be a bad thing?
What I'm a bit worried about though is, this might end up making those units far stronger in strategic combat than normal. Demon Lords are expensive so they could turn things like very rare creatures into undead...wait, they actually can do that if you cast Black Prayer, a total of -7 save, paired with a weak 10 strength ranged attack is a good enough melee to life steal ratio to actually raise things like Great Wyrms...I guess they would not have enough ammo for it though, but aside from that they could.
Okay, I think this might work, let's do it.

[Seravy]

Done coding, and ran a few tests. All of these results are from Caster of Magic.
the targets are a Chaos node with many fire Giants, a neutral town with 5 units (swordsmen and shaman) and a ruin with a Stone Giant.

300 skill, 10 death books.
Chaos node yields 2 fire giants and a gargoyle.
Ruin yields 1 War Bear.
Neutral town yields all 5 units.

100 skill, 10 death books.
Chaos node : 1 gargoyle
Ruin : 1 war bear
Neutral town : 3 units (2 shaman 1 swordsmen)

100 skill, no death books.
No undead anywhere, obviously

No death books, 1 Wraith in the army
Chaos node yields 2 fire giants and a gargoyle.
Ruin yields 1 War Bear and 1 Stone Giant.

No death books, 1 Death Knight in the army
Chaos node yields 5 fire giants and a gargoyle.
Ruin yields 1 War Bear and 1 Stone Giant. (probably that's everything inside)

I believe these are satisfying results, although I do need to mention costs in CoM are slightly changed from the original, most fantastic creatures are worth more "cost" than what it actually takes to summon them.
The amount of undead produced when Wraiths, Death Knights or Demon Lord hit an army of normal units will be pretty large, however, in my experience, that does happen even in normal combat, a single wraith can transform all 9 enemy normal units to undead more often than not, as long as they are basic units like swordmen and not from top resistance races.

[spottedshroom]

Seems like an excellent improvement and suitable for inclusion in the 1.5 patch.

[Seravy]

Got some testing done today, and found something interesting, an undead Phantom Warrior walking around controlled by the red player. Turns out, Death Immunity does not prevent raising as undead, it merely turns the damage taken into normal damage if it was from create undead. Obviously, Life Drain cannot target the unit in the first place, and Life steal does not damage so it was pretty much doing the same thing, up till now.
However, as strategic combat does not go through the normal ways of killing the unit, just sets it to dead (or in case of this feature, to "dead to be risen"). Likewise, it also bypasses the check where it sets phantom units to automatically disintegrate instead of normally dying.
The question is, do we want this to work or not?
We can argue that immunities don't work in strategic combat in the first place (which is 100% true), so create undead bypassing it as well is fair game.

The other, more interesting question is the rising of "phantom" units in other words units only available from a combat summon spell. I could understand the restriction if they were actually combat summoned, and that works as intended (in fact there is no such thing as combat summoning in strategic combat), however, I don't see why it has to apply to "permanent" versions of the monster, meaning, neutrals in nodes and lairs. Regarding this matter, I only see two reasonable solutions, either enable raising these in normal combat too (it's separate from actual summons not being possible to raise so it would not break that, it would only apply to the lair garrison or rampaging monsters which are, by definition, permanent units anyway), or adding an additional check to make sure these aren't raising from strategic combat.
Either way, phantoms would not raise from normal combat due to their immunity, but elementals could.

Note that Death realm units, including the undead themselves, cannot be risen, that works as intended, fortunately.

[Tiltowait]

You can't have undead phantom warriors, they're not real in the first place. It's just an unexpected bug.