Necrophage's gameplay differs quite a lot from other factions. The Necrophages can have only one city but unlimited amount of territories. They have a unique resource called "Corpses" that they gain from winning battles. Stronger armies yield more corpses.
Units also behave differently, instead of recruiting multiple unit types, Necrophages can only build one unit through the entire game, larvae. These little fellas can be evolved in all the other Necrophage units by spending corspes, gold and strategic resources. You also get a free larva for every fight you win which means it is advised to win battles without casualties to grow your army.

Necrophage cannot create camps, instead they create burrows that allow them to connect regions to a tunnel network. Units can use any burrow to travel to another burrow of your choice which takes them one turn. The unit disappears during that time from the map which allows you to hide important units if necessary. Burrows can later be upgraded to nests, Necrophage's equivalent of a camp. A nest will cost the usual influence price but connecting a nest to your city is basically free. Because you can only have one city, placing burrows on strategic positions and upgrading them to nests is necessary to get access to important regions and resources.

Necrophages cannot have any meaningful diplomatic interactions with other factions, including minor factions. Villages of minor factions can only be destroyed but you can still integrate this minor faction in your empire by rebuilding the village. For other empires you won't access to many diplomatic options except the most basic ones, you can however always declare a justified war which also is cheaper for you. This means a Necrophage player can strike at any moment when he wants.

Necophages don't have access to any other population types, neither from minor factions nor through immigration policies (which you cannot unlock anyway).

Lastly, Necrophage units can use a special command called "consume the land". This option allows the Necrophage to destroy a single tile and give the yields to your city. This takes some time and the bigger the army size the faster it works. Necrophage will automatically start consuming the next tile once finished unless something stops them. Consumed tiles have no yields anymore and the resulting resources you get are very low, so you rarely use this to get more resources and instead to deny resources to enemy empires. The way I use it is to park some of my free larva in front of enemy teritories and eat up the land. By the time they take a territory they will have barely anythintg left to use. If they kill my larva it doesn't bother me, larvae are cannonfodder anyway.

As mentioned before, the Necrophages can only build one unit and all other units are evolved from that base unit. Take a look at this:


Necrophage has access to four unit types, flyers, swam, ranged and juggernaut.

Flyers act as scout units, adding extra mobility to your army stack on the map. A single flyer is often good enough to benefit fromt he extra movement range. Besides that they don't have impressive stats so I don't use many of them.

Swarm are the baseline unit starting with larvae and ending with the slicer. The first iteration is usually very weak, being the worst starting unit of any faction. You can use them as cannonfodder or try to evolve them into stronger forms. Later iterations have more health and are great frontline tanks. The swarm ability allows them to walk past enemy frontliners and target the backline specifically. The slicer also fully heals if he kills a unit, which allows them to take hits and then finish off any unit that your other units have weakened.

Ranged units are great to weaken enemies but don't have impressive damage or health. But they later get cruel which maximizes crit chance on enemies with less than 50% HP and the last two ranged units also either give other units a damage buff or create a free unit if they kill an enemy.

The behemoth is the juggernaut units of thje Necrophages, alarge battering ram that can hit two units at once. It's a great unit to deal with multiple units at once, has great defensive capabilities and will be a great addition to any army.

During your match all players compete for some important milestones, the Deeds. These can be achieved only once and the first empire who gets them gets a permanent boost.

You don't need to get all the deeds but you should try to get as many as possible. There are three however that you absolutely should get during your game.


These three deeds provide great stats to all of your units and are easy to achieve on Necrophage. By the time Tidefall 1 hits, you should already have killed enough units for Bringer of Death.

Any other deeds you can get are fine if you can get them but not necessary.
Special mention to Bringer of Metropolises. Since you can only have one city, you can never achieve it but that's okay, you cannot use the benefit either.

Settle your city as you see fit. Since you can have only one city, make sure you get a good starting position that gives you great yields. Food and industry are more important than the other resources in the beginning.

Start with building Sancity of Nature followed by two farms. This should give you enough food to boost your population production. You only have one city, so high food is a must to squeeze out as much population as possible. Put population down on food production, followed by industry and lastly research. Later in the game you can change industry to research but for the early game this is ideal.

Combine your two starting armies to one and scout your territory for minor factions if you didn't already find any before settling your city. Kill any armies of the minor faction, try to win without casualties so you can build up youir larvaes. Specialize larvaes to feeders, these are usually strong enough to deal with the weaker units you will encounter.
If you can take on villages without casualties, do so, you can later decide to rebuild them if you want to assimilate the minor factions for it's passive bonus. Anything that has an effect on units is fine, everything else depends on your needs.

In terms of FIDSI you want to focus on this in the early game: Food > Industry > Dust > Influence > Science

Food is important to grow population as quick as possible, Industry is necessary to build more districts, Dust and Influence are needed to build burrows and later upgrade them into nests. Science can be left out for now, just build science districts around any anomaly you have, this is fine enough to get the earlier techs unlocked.

One special thing to mention, Dust is not only important for your burrows, your growing army will also cost a lot of Dust so you want to get a few Dust districts so you don't bankrupt yourself.

For research, start with this order:

• Scientific Charter (unlocks science district, imrproves curiosities)
  
• Currency (unlocks Dust district)
  
• Workshop (unlocks Industry district)
  
• Voice of the Masses (unlocks Influence district)

The reason we go in this order is because Scientific Charter allows us to gain early science to research other techs faster and also improves curiosity rewards, which is incredibly helpful in the early game. Currency allows us to gain enough gold to build burrows in neighbouring territories so we can quickly move our units around. Workshop helps to raise our Industry for the early game which further improves our city and Voice of the Masses gives us the necessary influence so we can start claiming territories.
Anything after these techs is up to your game, if you there are many rivers in your surroundings, get Keystones, if your approval starts to get low, get Civil Order. Corrosive Saliva is good to gain some passive corpse income but one corpse per turn isn't very good, so I put this in the back, especially since the science cost is so low that I can research it in one turn whenever I want.

If you meet any other empire, don't engage in war just yet, make sure you are prepared. Place a burrow near their border. Any lone scouts on the other hand are fair game, they are easy to kill (might take two turns since they always flee) and the free larva is not something we want to miss.

Keep an eye out for strategic resources in the ocean. Titanium is a must, Glassteel is optional. Place a burrow on the border of the ocean but don't upgrade to a nest. This is just to teleport to the region once tidefall hits.

When the first monsoon starts, this is when things kick into overdrive. Hunt down any unit you find, enemy empire, minor faction, it doesn't matter. The etxra spoils apply to corpses and you want to stack as many of those as you can. Try to minimize casualties in order to grow your larvae.
The reason we need corpes now is because of what follows after monsoon.

This is where the true game begins. After the first tidefall hits, Titantium and Glassteel open up as well as level 1 fortresses. I already said before you want Titanium, if you did scout properly before you should have no trouble to use your burrow to send a unit to the new territories and claim them for your empire. You ideally want 2-3 titanium deposits, more are even better.

Search for any fortresses that appeared and send your strongest army that is able to clear them. Keep in mind, fortresses can only be raided by a single army and cannot be cheesed with auto resolve. If the fortress is in a territory with Titanium or any useful luxury resource, claim the territory, otherwise just plunder it.

During this time in the game you should eventually unlock the second era, preferably already by the time tidefall hits.
The first thing you will always start researching when a new era starts is the unit specialization tech. This is why we stacked corpses during monsoon, we want these juicy unit upgrades now to improve our military power.
The second research right after is Matriach's Orison. This allows us to build a unique district called the Feedhole. You can only have one in your empire and you want to build it somehwere where it can be completely surrounded by districts. Feedhole provides passively corpses, more for each adjacent district. It also reduces the cost to buy out population with corpses.
This is the most important district in the game for Necrophage, this allows you to bounce back if you endured some heavy losses with your military and need to rebuild.
Fungal Lab is also necessary. This allows to build an improvement that gives your units +5 health regen outside of combat. Very useful to get faster back into fights.

Anything after that depends on your match. I suggest getting tradepost, not because of the roads but because you can buy and sell resources. Since you always will only have one city, luxury boosters will always cost 10 resources, which means it's cheap to just buy these resources and use them instead of gathering them.
This was changed and now you need additional luxury resources depending on the number of territories attached. It's still cheaper than for other factions.

At this stage of the game you can start war with other empires if you haven't done it already during monsoon. Tahuks and Aspects have fairly weak early game units which makes them easy fodder for the swarm. Destroy their cities and if you can, their empire. If you cannot destroy them, consume the land to deny any chance for expansion.

As before, scout for the next strategic resources, in this case Lazualin and Hyperium. Lazualin is absolutely necessary for your army, but Hyperium allows you to build some faction specific districts and improvements later.

When the next monsoon hits, same spiel as last time, go absolutely crazy on every unit you can find, devour them all.

Use your burrows to claim territories with strategic resources. At least one deposit for hyperium and 2-3 deposits for Lazualin are required for this stage in the game.

Scout for level 2 fortresses, defeat them as soon as you can. Use fortresses to claim nmew regions, at this point in the game influence cost for upgrading burrows to nests will become noticeable. If you cannot get territoiries through influence anymore, use only fortresses. Don't even bother with upgrading your influence gain anymore, the costs rises exponential, you won't catch up anymore. This is why you don't take territories that you don't really need, you can bottleneck yourself if you do it too early.

Look for natural wonders, by this point at least some should have appeared. If they are next to a fortress, great, take it, if not but you can still afford the territory, take them anyway. If neither, consume the land so another player won't get much out of the region.

Like before, always focus on technologies that improve your military in any way. You should at this point have access to Matriach's Rise, if you did get it earlier even better. This unlocks some faction specific districs and one improvement that are very useful. Matriach's Tail is a dtsrict that can fire at nearby armies. Use it to defend territories far away. Matriach's Eye increases science for your empire but unlike the Tail it can be only built once. Make sure you can surround it with districts for maximum value. In era 3 you also unlock Collective Sacrifice. We don't use the "Bait Doomwraith" action because we want kill our Doomwraiths but this gives an extra damage bonus to all units which is nice.
Corkscrew Drill is also useful to improve the yield from our extractors. We have many units, so we need a lot of resources.

It should be possible to reach era 4 in this section of the game.Techs that are useful here are Matriach's Glory, Accelerated Larvae, Hothouses, Logistics and Mercenaries (for the +20% extra crit chance on units).

By this point you also should have destroyed at least one, possible two empires. Collect your armies that you don't need to clear fortresses and start surrounding one of the remaining empires and declare war. If you cannot defeat it before monsoon hits, don't worry, just raze everything you can and devour the land so they cannot rebuild.

Once monsoon hits you can finish of the empire and if you still have time start war with another empire. Don't forget to put Behemoth's in the army that sieges cities to speed up the process.

The end game has begone. By this point you know the drill, expand to new lands, take fortresses, take resources.

This is the time you should worry about how you want to win. The two obvious choices are Conquest and Insight (Master path). Conquest means you destroy all other empires. If you think you can do this, go for it but it's a very long and tedious process, especially if you go against the Kin of Sheredyn which have absurdly high fortifications. But if you trimmed down the other empires whenever you could, this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Insight is in my opinion easier to do, you just have to clear 10 fortresses and win immediately. Since we cleared fortresses the entire game, by this point you should have it in the bag. Level 3 fortresses should be no match for you anymore, you have access to the strongest units, have the best heroes and all you need to do is claim your victory.

You could try to get any of the other victory conditions if you want but Necrophage are not good at them.