lategame balance . are my concerns true ?

[Tuidjy]

You are worrying for nothing. Hordes of vampires are available only in late
game, and there are plenty of strategies that are at least that good. I have
to admit that I have never faced vampire hordes, but I have messed up devil
hordes simply by teleporting three independant sorceresses on top of Cohen's
main spawn point, and casting wrathful skies and enough horrors to keep the
devils from sprinting to the casters, and then reteating. (I brought a SoS.)
Yes, vampires are immortal, and yes, they will be back, but they are nothing to
write home about. If anything, they will rout much more easily that the devils.

Furthermore, I have had three supercombatants (two arch devils and a heliophagus)
run into a small pack of vampires (30-40) and demolish them... I was surprised,
because my guys were not decked out for undead hunting. But if I had the
chance to properly outfit them (fire shield + fatigue regeneration) I would
bet on five SCs against 500 vampires. (Storm is a must, though) But frankly, by
the time you have hundreds of vampires, your enemy will have something else.

As for domain pushes, you do not need stealthy priests. You need to take
territory, and convert it.

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
if you can name me one other unit which is an even better allrounder than the vampire and explain why then i will agree that i was wrong .

A devil is a better all around unit. It has better attack and defense stats, two attacks, more hitpoints, 15 armour, radiate heat, and have fire immunity. They can be produced by soul contracts in extremely large numbers, and these contracts provide an effective blood income of 7 slaves per turn, which is larger than the vampire lords effective income of 4.3 per turn.

No, they aren't immortal, but they are harder to kill. Blade wind won't have too much effect and fire spells do nothing. They are less vulnerable to air magic with their higher hitpoints, and are also less vulnerable to ice strike, which will decimate vampires.

[archaeolept]

also devils don't run like frightened chickens, which vamps have a definite tendency for.

[Boron]

Graeme Dice said:

A devil is a better all around unit. It has better attack and defense stats, two attacks, more hitpoints, 15 armour, radiate heat, and have fire immunity. They can be produced by soul contracts in extremely large numbers, and these contracts provide an effective blood income of 7 slaves per turn, which is larger than the vampire lords effective income of 4.3 per turn.

No, they aren't immortal, but they are harder to kill. Blade wind won't have too much effect and fire spells do nothing. They are less vulnerable to air magic with their higher hitpoints, and are also less vulnerable to ice strike, which will decimate vampires.

devils have only 8 protection .
they are 50% susceptible to cold .
this means that your mentioned spell ice strikes works quite well against devils too .

staff of storm cancels both for vampires + devils flying .

a devil has 14 str + does 7 damage with his trident .

a vampire has 13 str + 0 ap damage .


on high protection units so the vampire does better damage than the devil .
a vampire has att 11 a devil att 18 .
but a vampire is size 2 while devil is size 3 .

so with swarming against scs the vampire hits about the same time too .
and the vampire does fatigue damage with his drain life . this reduces att + defense furthermore .


vampires suffer from fire spells true .
but from ice strike both suffer the same .
from lighning spells both suffer too .
a vampire takes normally 2 hits from e.g. wrathful skies lighting while a devil takes 3 to be killed .

vampires are undead so antiundead spells are evil too .


vampires should damage high protection scs a bit easier .
devils are though fire immune so immune to fireshield damage .


all in all the devil is really good too but you need a dwarfen hammer to forge a soul contract for 60 slaves .
the soul contract may be killed after a couple of turns by the horror attack too .

so the vampire lord summoning a vampire is overall normally about 10-30% cheaper .
add the fact that vampires are immortal and can be thrown at you repeatedly .


finally with murdering winter i could inflict probably huge casualities to your devil horde thnx to 50% cold suceptibility .


devils are really good too but especially when i am defending and you are only 2-3 provinces away from my capitol you will face the vampire horde each turn repeatedly .
+ of course other things too .

but the vampires are really a great unit worth being a central part in an caelum/abysian/mictlan strat especially .

oh finally soul contract is b5 . so you need to forge normally 2 items for your mages like a brazen vessel + a blood thorn for abysian warlocks e.g.
vampire lords can chainsummon themselves with a cheap skull staff only .

archaeolept said:
also devils don't run like frightened chickens, which vamps have a definite tendency for.

true but a banelord / vampire lord can lead 125 vampires .
so this prevents routing as long as they are reduced to 20-30 vampires normally anyways so it is not that severe

[Graeme Dice]

Boron said:
devils have only 8 protection .
they are 50% susceptible to cold .
this means that your mentioned spell ice strikes works quite well against devils too .

Not nearly as well as against vampires, where the 18 damage will have a good chance of killing them in a single hit. Devils can survive about 2 ice strikes.

a devil has 14 str + does 7 damage with his trident .
a vampire has 13 str + 0 ap damage .

The devil also has a tail that gives it a second attack.

vampires suffer from fire spells true .
but from ice strike both suffer the same .

Not at all. Vampires take the full 18 damage from ice strike. Devils reduce the damage by 8 by their armour, and it is then only increased to 15 damage. They can take twice as many hits as vampires.

from lighning spells both suffer too.

Except that the devils can survive 37% more damage.

all in all the devil is really good too but you need a dwarfen hammer to forge a soul contract for 60 slaves .
the soul contract may be killed after a couple of turns by the horror attack too .

You don't need to use dwarven hammers. For the 5500 blood slaves your 100 vampire lords cost, you can build 68 soul contracts without hammers, 91 with hammers.

add the fact that vampires are immortal and can be thrown at you repeatedly .

Throwing them at someone repeatedly doesn't matter that much when they can be defeated without any real losses.

finally with murdering winter i could inflict probably huge casualities to your devil horde thnx to 50% cold suceptibility.

Not that many will perish. Virtually none if they sit in a castle.

devils are really good too but especially when i am defending and you are only 2-3 provinces away from my capitol you will face the vampire horde each turn repeatedly.

But since they are mediocre summons, it's possible to defeat them without suffering too many losses.

oh finally soul contract is b5 . so you need to forge normally 2 items for your mages like a brazen vessel + a blood thorn for abysian warlocks e.g.
vampire lords can chainsummon themselves with a cheap skull staff only .

This really doesn't matter one bit. The one time costs to create the necessary items are washed out in the long term, and 40 blood slaves for two boosters is still cheaper than 10 death gems for a blood nation.

[archaeolept]

ehh, vampires are over-rated, IMO.

sure, its nice having a couple small hordes available for internal security, but otherwise they definitely seem to lack in punch. or as a takedown squad for a couple SC's, sure.

Devils are tougher, have far higher attack and defense, better MR, and vastly superior morale. Sure, vampires come back if they're fighting in your dominion, and they aren't taken over by undead mastery, but it seems to me a strategy that takes as it's premiss the fact that you are already winning by dominion push is, well, somewhat optimistic.

and the cold susceptibility, while potentially deadly, just doesn't seem to come into play so much; so many things are immune to cold that it is the least used of the battlefield attack magics.

the only time i've encountered vampire hordes I used undead mastery myself. Vamp's usually have a 14 MR or so, undead mastery is usually cast for a base 11, and easy to cast two times in a row. that will generally do a number on the invading horde, especially as it stops to fight amongst itself, all the while taking some sort of battlefield damage hopefully.

using vampire hordes against pythium is especially amusing.

[alexti]

I like the sight of endless hordes of vampires coming on the Ether Lord and Harbringer taking a stand in the corner of the battlefield. The rate of the wither-boning seems to be about equal to the rate of the vampires movement, so it looks that vampires are just coming and coming to get slaughtered until they finally break down and try to flee while getting killed by wrathful skies while they're crossing the field in the opposite direction

[deccan]

I think this is really quite a cool idea. But I agree with the others that it seems like mostly a defensive measure.

Some points:

1) Vampires reincarnate in the capital, which can be a long way from the front in a big map.
2) When vampires route, you need to gather them up from neighbouring provinces again which wastes you time.
3) In theory, it is true that if you continue to whittle down an enemy army while your own vampires reincarnate again and again, even if you lose an indefinite number of battles, you will eventually win. However, in reality, there is no indefinite number of battles. Your enemy only has to win a limited number of battles in order to take your capital, and then your vampires can no longer reincarnate.
4) IIRC, having a vampire lord summon a vampire takes up his action for that turn. Having a devil generated from soul contract is automatic. So you could have the guys will soul contracts travel with the army and it would grow over time.

However, I still like the idea of a vampire army a lot. I'd personally like to see a White Wolf type vampire nation mod.

[Sheap]

Well, for a vampire centric nation, there's already Black Forest Ulm, which has a vampire national summon, and a general Transylvanian feel as opposed to the more Teutonic feel of the other Ulm themes. It's not ALL vampires, but what would an all-vampire nation eat?

[deccan]

Sheap said:
Well, for a vampire centric nation, there's already Black Forest Ulm, which has a vampire national summon, and a general Transylvanian feel as opposed to the more Teutonic feel of the other Ulm themes. It's not ALL vampires, but what would an all-vampire nation eat?

I know about Black Forest Ulm but I'm talking about a really all vampire nation. Maybe something like Ermor, but with no auto-summons, something like Death -3 required, few or no gold recruitables, everything summoned with blood slaves. The ultimate expand or die nation.

You'd have vampire spies able to instill uprising, vampire mages (maybe with ilithid type paralyzation powers), vampire / werewolf gangrels (no etherealness, no flying, berserk, high regen, lots of attacks per round) etc.

Edit: I was mucking about White Wolf's site when I found this. Quite aan interesting read:

Vamps vs Wolves - How Should It Balance?