Ship Buildings
The main priority of this strategy in terms of infrastructure investments is to maximise your ship buildings before your settlements. This doesn’t mean you ought to ignore them for the whole campaign, you will naturally want to max out The Galleon’s Graveyard at the very least.
The obvious focus is to max your Captain’s Cabin building chain as fast as possible, as this gets you the technology tiers you need, growth and upkeep reduction. You can build the first step of the Anchors as it’s the most cost-efficient growth boost, though it’s not worth upgrading at this time. The reason why this is worth it despite the increased groth cost, is that the growth limit required for each growth point doesn’t change, it’s fixed at 20. This means that every five turns, the anchor alone will generate a growth point.
Once you have done this, simply construct the Tier V Composite Hull and Ship’s Wheel. These are the only relevant buildings in terms of creating Necrofex and reducing their upkeep, so you may recruit them now if you have the capital.
From here, there are three buildings you should get before you consider adding your own flavour to this strategy. You should get the tier V Moonraker sail, Sylvanian Battlements (mainly to help prevent enemy heroes from Assassinating your Gunnery Wight or Blocking your army), and then thirdly getting the Harpoon Launcher as it really does help you in a pinch.
Once you’ve done all of this, you can really build whatever it is you like. An alernative that I enjoy is to simply replace three Colossi with three Rotting Leviathans to add a bit of a wall between the Colossi and their targets. There’s not much to add here, as this process isn’t exactly as difficult to plan out as the Count’s skills might be if you’ve never gone for this setup before.
Technology
Again, this will be a fairly simple list of what order I would recommend getting these in. Apart from the first three choices, you can mix it up as you like really. To give a brief explanation, the priority order ere is upkeep and durability, as the power of the Necrofex Colossus is already more than enough to see you through most things, there’s just the minor detail of keeping them from falling apart.
1: Research Salvage Crews
2: Enduring Reanimation
3: Reinforced Carcasses With this 20% reduction of all physical damage taken, you have gotten the three absolutely mandatory pieces of tech that you need, though I would recommend following the rest of this list in order to get the most out of your army.
4: Gunnery Crews
5: Steel Forged Shot
If you decide to add in a Queen Bess (which you should), you should then research these technologies:
6: Magazine
7: Maintained Cannons
8: Clean yer bores! Simply to make your army a little bit cheaper still.
From here, you should adapt your technology choices based on your playstyle. If you’re a conqueror for example, it would make a great deal of sense to go for the technologies that increase your Growth, Public Order and Vampiric Corruption.
