[3.5] Commanding an Undead Army via Bone Knight

[Jaraak]

First of all its my first time on the forums, so, Hi!

To business.

I am playing in a campaign where the party are a bunch of soldiers/officers in an army being controlled by a fairly expansionist empire. My character is a cleric, soon to be Bone Knight, of a war god. I want to revolutionize War in the same way the Karrnathians did.

What I need help with is the specifics on how to command a company of undead.

The basics.

My thought so far is to get some intelligent undead via Bone Knight. At level 3 Bone Knight I can command 4 Karrnathian skeletons. These I will make my Squad Commanders of roughly 15 undead a piece. I will be effectively a cleric level 12 for purpose of commanding undead (Thats 48HD via animate dead + 12HD via Rebuke = 60HD)

So I command each squad of 15 mindless undead to follow every command issued to them by their captain, a Karnathian Skeleton.

4 Squads of 15 each, totalling a company of 60 soldiers.

My commands as a Bone Knight will be issued to my Karnathian Skeleton Captains.

Further

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to optimize this, based around a level 12 PC. (I'm a persist cleric)

Things that interest me are:
Increasing Turn Resistance of the 1HD Skeletons/Zombies
Increasing effectiveness of 1HD Skeletons/Zombies
Survivability of the Karnathian Skeleton Captains
Mass Healing of the Squads

I dont want to invest too much of my own characters resources (persists) without a decent outcome. I plan to wander amongst the ranks during battle sucking souls via consumptive field and cackling madly.

[Coidzor]

I suppose the Deathbound Domain is out of the question if your deity is a war god, then? It'd bump it up to 6/HD worth of undead from animate dead. Either on its own or when paired with Desecrate.

Also, your math seems a bit off, you'll have 4 squads of 16 if you have 15 skeletons with 1 commander each, so you'd have 64 fighting individual undead.

Edit: For healing, you want to execute some spies or whatever rabble you can execute (or animals that you can get away with killing and not eating) by turning them into black sand. Then you give your troops sturdy boots full of black sand so that they keep getting healed by it.

Black Sand is from Sandstorm.

[Jaraak]

I like that idea. Black Sand is pretty awesome.

I don't really want the Captains fighting at the front line, just directing the lowly skeletons. If the Captain dies then the skeletons are uncontrollable (except by direct commands from myself)