Iratus: Lord Of The Dead Tips

Not alive but still kicking

When it comes to concepts, the idea of conquering the overworld as a freshly awakened, immortal necromancer sounds pretty easy to handle. Don’t be fooled though; there’s a lot of strategies required if you are going to work your way through everything the surface dwellers have to throw at you. If you’re stuck fighting to the surface in Iratus: Lord of the Dead then you’ve come to the right place though – we’re professionals, and, with our Iratus: Lord of the Dead tips and tricks, you too can carve a path through the living to fulfil your destiny.

Iratus: Lord of the Dead Tips and Tricks

When it comes to surviving the entirety of Iratus: Lord of the Dead, the secret is in building up a steady pace and maintaining a wide, specialised collection of battle squads. If you can assemble squads that compliment each other well in combat then them being a few levels lower than other squads shouldn’t affect you too much – and that’s the true sign that you can survive beyond losing a few minions.

Don’t double-up on minion types

The first of our Iratus: Lord of the Dead tips and tricks is an important one, but not an obvious one. There’s a big temptation early on to build a party entirely from tanks and heavy hitters – a squad of skeletons and knights. There’s a lot of reasons why this doesn’t work, but the biggest reason is placement. Each unit is carefully built around being most effective in one or two positions, with a couple of them being almost useless in specific positions. Each minion type is specialised around two or three roles, which does leave a lot of potential for tweaking, but if you just double down on certain units, then you’re massively locking up your line-up.

My current mid-game squads look like this: Vampire-Head Hunter-Dark Knight-Skeleton; Bride of Iratus-Mummy-Wraith-Zombie; Vampire-Bride of Iratus-Head Hunter-Zombie. I also have a squad that I am training up as replacements if I lose units, that includes a Vampire, a Dhampire, a Dark Knight and a Zombie.

Don’t forget your magic

Magic in Iratus: Lord of the Dead exists outside of the normal turn structure, with you instead allowed to perform a spell once each round. Never underestimate this. Even if you are simply using it to move your units a position (which you have available from the start), there is no reason to let an opportunity to use a spell pass. Against certain bosses and enemies the extra damage that a spell deals can completely change the battle — and that’s before we even get to the all-important blood curse spell, which gives you a vampire minion if the enemy flees from combat.

Focus on one damage type

There’s a temptation to try and strafe both sanity and vigour damage with your squad make-up. It’s a natural solution to the fact that each minion type plays with at least two of the three damage types (yes – magic is a damage form technically, even if it deals physical damage). However, it’s much more important to build your squad around a single damage type, optimising them based around their starting position. 

Units like the Vampire and Head Hunter specialise in vigour damage regardless of the role that they are in. They also both have moves which can damage enemies regardless of their position.

Do try to unlock more units

By the end of your first complete run, this won’t be much of a problem, but it is critical that you start unlocking more units in order to keep tweaking your squads to match your playstyle. While you can’t influence how many enemies you kill, you can definitely make sure that you convert Dhampires by driving them mad an isolating them, or focus on getting the Blood Phantasm by building squads around wrath attacks.

Keep your graveyard full

An understated part of a successful play is in unlocking new parts of your graveyard as soon as you can. The eight buildings that exist there give off a variety of boons which allow you a little room to flex in your master plan. Buildings like the Library and Abode of Wrath allow you to deploy spells and special attacks more often, while the Arena and Mortuary are critical in fielding as many effective minions as you can.

With a full Arena and Mortuary, you can also, effectively have a maximum of 24 troops rather than the starting 16 – something invaluable when you hit the difficulty spikes of bosses and new floors.