Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

The advantage of a mod over a house rule, is that people can't break the mod, while they can break the house rule quite easily.

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

Sure they can fly around, but they can't actually accomplish much while doing so. They don't have the stats to act as thugs, which means that all that they can do effectively is raise skeletons and, in the very late game, cast disintegrate. You also don't need LA Ulm to get vampires, Mictlan is just as capable of summoning them (although they have little reason to bother) and is likely to have a higher blood income to boot.

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

Mictlan will have higher blood income to start but when your hunting in all your provinces it should be around the same(also counts auto-summon free thralls). The flying lets them raid(if you know they wont die) aswell as getting then where you need quickly(particularly useful when defending) and their stats are pretty nice. LA Ulm actually does have better access to vampires(though lower starting blood income unless you use your second tier mages for hunting) due to counts only costing 44 slaves rather than 77 for lords(they have slightly improved stats and +1D and blood, none of which really help any of the strategies i listed)

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

Oh Graeme, you're just not thinking about it. Here are a couple things that you can do with the counts:
Skelispam
Lashimas
Blood Sabbath - followed by hell power (hint: spawns a bunch of horrors while giving you some pretty big death mages until the horrors kill them before attacking the enemy. )
Drop a bunch of counts on the front line with a few death gems apiece and rain shadow blast down. The counts are so mobile, it's not hard to converge 10 of them wherever you want, and 20 shadow blasts has a pretty devastating effect on most armies.
Empowering counts can be damn effective if you're clever with blood sababath (the sabbath slaves are effected by the master's buffs). Empower a count a single level in fire and another count in earth and now you can have a swarm of iron skinned, fire shielded, immortal, flying, regenerating, lifedraining dudes who steadily build up xp because they never die. Variations on this are endless, and you never need to worry about the dude you empowered dying...
Enemy SC giving you grief? Again, converge a whole swarm of counts on him and hellbind the hell out of that heart.

Perhaps they're not the best unit in the game, but they are a FAR cry from useless if you just apply a bit of thought to them. The power of Ulm's counts is not that any individual one is a badass, it's that Ulm is unrivaled in the number of vamps it can generate, particularly early in the game. A swarm of counts can be very effective - and can't quite stress this enough - they're immortal! That fact means you can use and abuse them in ways you never would other units.

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

Those ideas seem quite usefull actually.

Just beware of the opponent using 45 stealth preachers to remove your dominion in a province on the turn of the big battle.... preaching happens pre-combat.

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

Yeah but dominion spread happens post-combat (for whatever reason - including preaching)

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

Do you mean spread to other provinces? Preaching never does that.

Do you mean changing dominion in the province the priest is in? Someone posted success in preaching before defeating an enemy vampire queen, you mean this shouldn't be possible?

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

Either way, with thralls patrolling(without losses due to growth), strong dominion and count mobility you SHOULDNT(not that i dont say wont) have to fight outside your dominion(although attacking can be risky because they could mass preach before you hit them).

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

I find moving around gigantic armies to clobber at each other pointlessly a buzzkill.

Re: playing ANYONE against everyone
 

Me too, generally, thats why i like the stealthy raiding form of play i get from LA Ulm http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif. Usually with them i dont need any large armies because of the versatility and raiding potential(even in enemy dominion a flying, stealthy skele spammer who can handle himself pretty well in combat is nice) that lets me not have to have huge battles.