Question: animate dead

[Desteplo]

So my players had some fun with our death cleric talking about undead
-then they got to thinking of undead mounts.
-how would you balance the animate dead for other creatures other than humanoid?
-would it use up the animate dead slots per cast? (4 different humanoid undead = like an undead bear or something) or take 2 slots to use?

[Princess]

So my players had some fun with our death cleric talking about undead
-then they got to thinking of undead mounts.
-how would you balance the animate dead for other creatures other than humanoid?
-would it use up the animate dead slots per cast? (4 different humanoid undead = like an undead bear or something) or take 2 slots to use?

Easiest solution: Skeletons and Zombies have the same CR as a riding horse. Giving the riding horse poison immunity, describe it as a skeletal or zombified horse, and you're there.

The main thing to keep in mind is that spells are balanced around CR for anything that provides minions. The slightly more complex approach would be to look at Ogre and Ogre Zombie (Both CR 2) in the Monster Manual, make a list of everything different about them, and use that to 'zombify' anything of appropriate CR for the spell level being used.