Vampires - you should be afraid of the night

[Radio_Star]

I'd actually batted around the idea of vamp hordes from MA Marignon for awhile based largely on what's in this thread.

It seems like an odd choice, but you've actually got a few key things going for you. First and maybe foremost, you've got some of the best dominion control around. Stealthy preachers and inquisitors, stone idols forged for your high stealth spies while they cause their own havoc are a few of the cool tricks available. This gives you a good chance to push your dominion on offense and anything you take with non-vamp troops can be flipped almost immediately by the ensuing inquisition. Getting started in blood isn't too hard for you since you can take a fountain of blood to pop out SDRs for your dirt cheap friars. It'll take several of them per province, but once you get started you can free them up to go stealth preach and facilitate your offense. Astral and blood also have very nice synergy in communions and Marignon's got some of the biggest astral chops around. It's a minor side benefit, but getting into blood with Marignon means boots of youth for your old fogey casters. Marignon's mages also do well under darkness, with astral fires for 100 prec AoE and incinerate for single target obliteration. If you play around with hell power, it should also be noted that you can toss out horror marks and then incinerate any horrors left standing at the end.

Finally, you're provided with wonderful counters to the biggest things plaguing vampires: astral lets you whip out antimagic for undead mastery and any undead/demon horde wanting to play under the cover of darkness with you? Well, you're freaking Marignon. Those demons can, quite literally, take their ball and go the hell home.

[Tolkien]

Originally Posted by Baalz

PS, yep, dom pushing is great. Particularly because many of the nations who would be looking at using vampires can also blood sacrifice.

Except for LA Ulm. But at the least, Black Forest gets cheap and powerful inquisitors, so it's relatively easy to maintain your dominion within your territory, so vampires will be able to fill a solidly defensive role. If you can spread dominion with a stealthy prophet or use enough dominion lowering items like stone idols or even construct some dominion spreading units (Juggernaught, which can be easy with LA Ulm's solid astral economy), they can go on the offense, but it's still, it's harder to use vampires offensively with Black Forest, without blood sacrifices or stealthy preachers.

[chrispedersen]

Nice job Baalz.

This is essentially the position I laid out in the LA-ULM thread. Vampires are *way* underrated. With LA Ulm I have actually gotten 72 by the end of year 1.

[chrispedersen]

Once you prophetize your vamp, give him a amr and lead shield astral cap - mr is 28 or so. Its not beyond the realm of possibility either that he will be returning the undead mastery favor.

Vamps have so many great tools.

Lamashtas, retreat.
Summon Hell power.

Give him a Black Heart.

However Baalz you are a bit off on one thing:

Vampire lords thrall freespawn will always give away position. So while the opponent may not be able to hit you while you are sneaking - he knows where you are.

[Baalz]

Nope, only Ulm's national summon make thralls

[Dragar]

Very nice, the only major downsides those that Micah brought up. In particular it definitely needs to be part of a strategy employing strong dominion push. As a purely defensive strategy I think it is perhaps overkill

The other potential weakness is someone beelining to your capital, either overland or with magic. If I knew what I was up against I'd be planning a blitzkrieg to take out the enemy capital, at which stage all of the immortality is out the door. Seeing as the strat is largely defensive in nature an attacker can take his time getting it just right. I'm sure there are a number of ways you can make that difficult to do, if taking capitals was easy a large number of strats would fail, but this strategy in particular would unravel very quickly if that occurred.

[Micah]

No, you won't lose all your vamps to a mastery casting, but you're gonna lose about 20% of your horde per casting to someone with decent penetration. These traitor vamps will last for all of 1 spellcasting phase before being slaughtered by their former buddies since they're completely surrounded, so there's not going to be much of a tug of war even if you're firing off your own UM casts, just pure losses.

This isn't to say vamps are worthless, they're actually quite good at specific roles, but this is a gaping hole in the strat that needs to be plugged by AoL or antimagic in any serious engagement, and I think that leaving it out of the guide was a significant oversight that I wanted to address.

On the offense/defense debate it really depends on your position. In most cases when you're in a good position in the game you're able to dictate where major battles are fought (your victim's homeland), and thus have little need for defense, regardless of the value you can get for it. When you're overwhelming an opponent (and remember, fair wars are for suckers) the most you'll have to worry about is a few raiders which are generally better countered by spells than troops. On the other side of the coin, once you're being beat on by a larger opponent you're generally hard pressed to keep your blood flowing, and it's a bit late to invest in the vamp factory. So outside a scenario when you can dom-push well they're best in situations when you'll be fighting an even battle, or when you're expecting to get beat up by a larger opponent but have time to prepare. Neither of these comes up all that often, but when they do vamps are one of the perfect units to do some damage with.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by Radio_Star

Getting started in blood isn't too hard for you since you can take a fountain of blood to pop out SDRs for your dirt cheap friars. It'll take several of them per province, but once you get started you can free them up to go stealth preach and facilitate your offense.

Sanguine Dousing Rods won't have any effect in non-Blood mages. You need at least Blood 1 to benefit from it. But you're right, it isn't that hard to start a blood economy.

[DonCorazon]

I think of LA Ulm as Iraq. I still shudder thinking about fighting QM's LA Ulm. Swarms of immortals totally alter the dynamics of the game into a slow, torturous struggle to push back their dominion while dealing with constant kamikaze vampire attacks. You can’t just race in and conquer them and leave a string of PD1 provinces behind your lines with enemy dominion. Vampire lords with medallions of vengeance make a heart pounding sight as you pray to take them out before they blow up in the middle of your back line of mages. Their low protection and moderate MR leads to a lot of cat and mouse maneuvering where first attack advantage can be key in order to get off some Control Undeads / Rain of Stones and the like before they wreak havoc. Good times.

[Executor]

I use vampires a lot also.
I actually had a game where my whole strategy was based on them.
By turn 55 or so I had about 70 Vampire Lords and over 500 vampires, but

that's when the Armageddons started. I was summoning 5 of them a turn before

Armg. killed about 98% of the pop.

It was actually very amusing when people ganged up on me, they were

reluctant on sending SC's agaisnt me since they were afraid of the vampires

that were placed randomly in the provinces.

It was with Sauromatia, a whole different aproach on that nation and would

have certainly worked if not for those damn Armageddons.