Vampires - you should be afraid of the night

[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.

[AdmiralZhao]

Two comments about the vampires, one good and one bad.

Good - the life drain attack doesn't seem to trigger Ritual of Returning. So if you are facing an SC decked out in the Armor of Virtue, vampires would be an ideal counter.

Bad - What is to keep your late game opponent from stealing your honey with a few castings of Undead Mastery?

[KissBlade]

Micah more or less covered the main reason why I, like most vets, don't use vampires. And mind you, I loooovvvee the vampire queen chassis and have tried making it work so often, along with her complementary vampires.

[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.

[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.

[Tolkien]

Originally Posted by 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.

I agree entirely. Fortunately, LA Ulm has great national troops and mages (Iron Blizzard+Stealthy Communions), so expanding outside of your dominion is relatively easy.

I think I'd rather refer to it as trench warfare. The goal for Black Forest with a focus on vampires is bite and hold. If you can capture provinces outside your dominion, you can use your swarms of inquisitors (that should be accompanying every army for Iron Blizzard) to get your dominion into the positive side; and in which case, your vampires can hold it against anything. The immortality makes vampires impossible to overwhelm on the defensive (especially with all the vampire thralls and counts and lords LA Ulm can gather), because kamikazees are easy and cost nothing (due to immortality). The problem is, without stealthy preachers or blood sacrifice, it becomes a hassle trying to dominion push, which limits their offense. Still, you can spread it with juggernauts, temples, prophets, and your God (and lower theirs with items), so it's still viable.