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Originally Posted by Micah
Excellent guide, though assuming you'll be hanging onto flying in any major battle is somewhat optimistic. You also mention undead mastery without any reference to its value as probably the best possible counter against your vamps, and thus something to watch out for in a major way. 15 MR on the normal vamps isn't nearly enough to reliably resist the exact tactic you advise using (vortex/mastery spam) and this strikes me as a major oversight in an otherwise excellent guide.
Oh, and to quickly touch on why they are so often overlooked: Defense is < offense. If you've got enough spare resources to blow on a pure defensive force you're generally better off using it for something you can go hit things with instead. I think some sort of dom-pushing ability is pretty key to really leveraging your vamps to maximum value. (And if you're just building up it might be advantageous to opt for making more lords over more chaff, as they can help blood hunt, research or summon allies during peacetime...the chaff is vital, as mentioned, but all you can really do with it if no one is in your dominion is patrol)
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Yes, good points. As with anything in dominions there are certainly good counter and I can't think of a better one. 15 MR is a non-trivial resistance to undead mastery though, even assuming your antagonist has the indubitable +5 penetration or so it's "MR easily resists" so you've got a +4 to resist it, meaning that he'll not be snatching "all" the honey, particularly as you can get into a nice little tug of war over them. Certainly not the ideal situation, but nothing should be immune to everything!
Plus, there are plenty of times you're fighting a nation quite unlikely to be able to cast undead mastery.
As to the offense vs defense, anybody familiar with my playstyle knows I agree with you, but that doesn't mean that it's not a good idea to deploy your resources on purely defensive measures so long as you're getting a good enough effectiveness for the price to overcome the natural benefit of the best defense being a good offense. That is to say, if a gem spent on defense counters 10 that are spent attacking it then that's the way to go with some of your resources. So, I guess my point is its not always a bad idea to invest in defense if you get really good ones for pretty cheap.
PS, yep, dom pushing is great. Particularly because many of the nations who would be looking at using vampires can also blood sacrifice.