Vampires - you should be afraid of the night

[Baalz]

I’ve seen so many posts, even from several very experienced people about how much vampires suck. QM seems to drop their cost with every version of CBM and I honestly have yet to see anyone but me field them in a single game– outside of Ulm’s national summon which doesn’t really count. People don’t think about them correctly, I’d like to explain how awesome vampires are once you realize how to use them.

The thing you have to realize about vampires is they’re very much like bees. You should not be thinking of them as an individual, you should be thinking of them as a colony. Each individual is almost pointless, you need a queen, and the queen is mostly pointless without a colony, and there is definitely a point of critical mass below which there’s not much point in flying a bee at a bull. Once you line everything up though you’ve got a terribly effective swarm that your opponent can’t seem to swat or get his arms around which stings to death the biggest blundering bear to stumble into their hive.

Your bee queen, usually, is the vampire lord. You can effectively use another unit as the queen, but it is stunning how well suited the vampire lord is and the effectiveness of your queen is generally a factor of how similar they are to a vampire lord. Now, the vampire lord can create free vampires, but even better he can cast blood rite which will build up your colony 10x faster. Unless blood slaves are very tight you’ll want to spend the slaves to build up your colony to critical mass quickly. What critical mass is varies depending on what stage of the game you’re in, what you’re expecting to fight, etc. but very roughly about 50 vampires plus a queen bee is where you’re going to look at as an entry level colony. Waiting around 50 turns for your vampire lord to build a free colony is *never* an option, realize that a vampire colony costs a couple hundred blood slaves before you start. That’s ok though because all you need is one vampire lord with a skull staff and a good blood economy to summon everything else you need, so any blood nation with a helpful pretender can do this easily enough.

Now, once you start thinking about this as a collective colony rather than an individual you start to get an inclining as to why I think they’re so powerful. If I were to tell you that you had a blood summon who cost 200 blood slaves, but had a thousand hitpoints, 50+ armor piercing life drain attacks per round, regenerated, flew, was stealthy, immortal….oh, and was immune to single target spells like soul slay or petrify you’d be b-lining to him like there was no tomorrow. That’s the way you need to think about this colony, its one collective creature and just like most things in dominions your hitpoints heal after each turn, it’s just easy to lose track of that because your hitpoints are spread among many discrete bodies. I almost skipped saying this because I think it’s so obvious, but the vampire colony is a defensive weapon and you’re *never* going to fight out of dominion so all your “killed” vampires show back up at your capital, reporting for duty at a cost of no more than the micro of shuttling them back to where the fighting is.

Now, the reason people think vampires suck is essentially because they’ve got no protection which means they’re easy to swat. Well, so is a bee but it’s got a vicious sting well out of proportion to its size. Vamps have a 13 strength and an armor piercing attack, and they fly - thus swarming around and surround smaller elite groups of units. How good this is scales up with how good the armor they’re facing is – it’s very good against good armor, it’s phenomenally good against great armor. Against that buffed SC with a 30 protection they’re applying their 13 strength against a 15 protection roll – assuming they don’t get a critical hit because they’re flying and swarmed over the poor guy in mid buff cycle who hasn’t had time to deal with his fatigue. Their swarming nature also transforms their good attack skill into an overwhelming one. What, 11 is now a good attack skill? Again, you have to think of them differently than other units. Because they’re immortal these guys perpetually build up stars. They won’t be at an 11 attack (or defense) for long, I tend to think of them as having a 13-14+ attack/defense which is very nice, very nice indeed in a swarming unit who usually expects to have friends to the left and right.

Sounds pretty good, right? But you’re far from convinced, I haven’t said word one to mitigate the reason people think vamps are sucky – that 0 protection and consequent quick death. Doesn’t matter if they in theory can lay the hurt down if half of them die and the other half run away the first round of combat. Well, remember what I said just a little bit ago a swarm is nothing without their queen.

When you’re using this kind of swarm configuration realize that the queen is generally pretty safe. If the battle goes badly, 9 out of 10 times your flying vampire lord will successfully retreat and being stealthy and flying have no trouble making it back quickly to a friendly lab (particularly if you give him a couple vampire bodyguards). This is important because just like any great SC chasis you’re going to want to equip the colony and you won’t feel like your chucking magic items down the drain. Entry level here is a very modest skull staff, but you shouldn’t be too scared to stick more equipment on him as it’s usually pretty safe even if you’re using the colony aggressively.

Let me go back and reiterate before I go to the next section. The smallest vampire colony is about 50 vamps, one vampire lord and you need to give him a skull staff. This is not a *huge* investment (and indeed I’ll show you how to effectively invest more), but this is where you hit critical mass – don’t try this if you can’t clear that bar. Critical mass is…well, critical. You’re also going to need a bit of extra research.

The two base spells which your vampire colony should never have to fight without are rush of strength and darkness. Vampires are frickin’ stalkers of the night, it’s no wonder you’re unimpressed if you make a habit of just flying them around at noon. Vampires fight in the dark – always! Now, just think about how your colony looks when we assume any significant fight occurs under these two spells.

That 14 attack/defense starts looking immensely good when your opponents are halving their values and you’re always swarming. Precision values are quartered so enemy archers and mages are now sporadically raining stuff down all over the place rather than concentrating, and your vamps have enough hitpoints to easily ignore a stray shot or two despite having no protection. The other side of that coin is that when using a lifedraining attack offense = hitpoints. You’re swarming guys with halved defense scores using buffed armor piercing attacks – think you’re gonna restore your hitpoints fast? Haha, you even raise your hitpoints above your normal maximum with lifedrain so unless you’re getting whacked for 30+ damage per hit one lucky hit won’t phase you (and it’s only gonna be a lucky hit to land on your 14 defense when you’re surrounded by other vamps and your opponent is using half his attack value). Oh, and remember when I said even the SC with the uber armor would be having lots of 13 damage rolls made against a 15 protection roll? I lied, it’s actually always going to be 17 vs 15 (rush of strength). When you’re talking about a swarm who easily clears the chaff then completely surrounds the SC this will certainly drop most tartarians, and I pity the non-darkvision angels or celestial SCs that ventures into vampire territory. Those are magic attacks boys and girls, so don’t think your etherealness or mistform is gonna help, and your base morale of 15 gets + 1 for being in friendly dominion plus one for each star, so I wouldn’t count on awe doing much.

Did I mention this was the entry level vampire colony? An no, I’m not talking about using other mages to drop army of lead or anything like that (though of course if you’ve got it, by all means use it!). Let’s take a look at how absolutely ridiculously nasty a good vampire colony can be with no external support at all.

Now, there’s not really too many things without darkvision that you’ll ever have to do anything else to completely dominate from SCs to uber elites to batteries of artillery mages (who blast their own units as often as not in the darkness - you flew into immediate close combat and they can’t find the end of their nose in the darkness. Guess who wins if everyone “dies”?). Thing is there are so many more tools in your tool chest you’ll never run out of things to toss in there as your opponent’s deployments evolve.

[As I start talking about specifics here I wanted to point out that these specifics are based on CBM. Everything is fully doable vanilla as well, though you’ll have to work a little harder at some of it]

So your opponent says “screw this” after you chewed up another of his big expensive armies and he hasn’t permanently caused you a single casualty. He comes at you this time with undead of his own. Swarms of longdead. Legions of wights. “Go ahead,” he implies, “Drop darkness again. See if I care!”. Meanwhile, you’ve forged a ring of sorcery for your bee queen and a void eye.

Now, there are some really fun combinations that open up in mixing blood and death, one of which is that soul vortex turns blood slaves into fabulous fatigue batteries. One of the nice implications of this is that by casting soul vortex and holding some blood slaves you can drop several spells which put you at 200 fatigue with just a turn or two between to suck the juice from your batteries who conveniently cluster around your passed out body. Your D3 vampire lord is now D5 with a staff and ring of sorcery with +3 penetration. Bring a bunch of d gems and blood slaves - soul vortex, undead mastery X 4. Once your vampire lord comes out the other side of that, assuming you haven’t won yet the spellcasting AI is going to drop a steady stream of wither bones on any undead who were stout enough to still have troop blocks of any significance. Yep, that’s wide area 18 AN damage with no MR check, so no worries about all those wights who scoffed at your undead mastery.

Now at this point I also wanted to emphasize that a vampire colony works best as a steady investment. With a good blood economy it’s not hard to summon 30+ vampires per turn so it’s not much of a stretch to plan on having several hundred along with several queen bees at a reasonably early point in the game. This allows you to have several defensive squads under “normal” conditions meeting all your opponents forays with the massive strategic flexibility of flying combined with stealth, spreading all out and hamstringing him every time he turns around. As nasty as what I just laid out in the previous paragraph is, realize that in actuality if you’re talking about a huge army of powerful undead your opponent invested heavily in you’re going to have all your swarms working together for the big fight. One queen bee spamming undead mastery and several others spamming wither bones while hundreds of vampires swarm around tying up the opposition – it doesn’t matter if they brought 10,000 longdead or 200 wights they’re getting good and exploded. A vampire colony has nothing to fear from undead.

“Alright,” your opponent concedes “that wasn’t a very good idea. You kill the hell out of anything without darkvision, and you just stole my whole undead army from me. But I’ve got it this time. SUCK DEMON!”.

Let’s look at some more advanced tactics to handle one of the worst case scenarios – a huge swarm of mixed demons. Let’s say your opponent has had mages spamming ritual of the five gates for years and you’re looking at a huge mass of every demon imaginable. Or Lanka is knocking at your door with Palashankas stretching over the horizon. Has the vampire colony finally met its match? Now, it’s true, demons are going to be one of the tougher things for a vampire colony to deal with, though the same can be said for most things facing those beasts. No worries, we’ve got some more tools down here in this chest we haven’t used yet.

Now, if you’re looking at fighting large numbers of some of the toughest units in the game, you really are talking late game so I’m going to go ahead and assume we’ve also built up a pretty respectable vampire colony. If you’re talking about smaller numbers of demons you’ll typically be facing midgame, just swarms of vampires with no particular support will typically do all you need as you should handily outnumber them and really concentrated blocks of units don’t fare any better than SCs…100+ vampires with rush of strength will chew up almost any smallish block of troops even if they take a lot of “casualties” doing so. So, what do you do about that really big army of demons though?

Let’s say your well developed vampire colony is actually pretty modest. 200 vamps and 3 bee queens (though it’s not hard to imagine building up 500+ vampires over a couple game-years). I think you’d agree that’s a pretty low bar for battling all the fury that hell can dig up. Those 3 queen bees will be configured thusly: 2 of them have a skull staff and several D gems. One, a crystal matrix, a bunch of blood slaves and an evil grin. Again, about as modest as you can imagine, if everything goes tits up you’re scarcely noting the gems you’re out at this stage of the game while your troops reform for another try next turn.

Deploy your troops thusly: all bee queens in one square, 10 vampires set to guard each commander (30 total). The rest of your vampires spread out in archer screen type formations to minimize hits from a presumed large block of lighting demons and enemy mages while you ignore the *hell* out of frost fiends. Set your guys to hold and attack large enemies. Your queen bees cast this:
Turn 1: Sabaath slave X2, the master casts: summon hell power
Turn 2: rush of strength, bloodletting, the master casts: bloodletting
Turn 3: bloodletting, bone grinding, the master casts: reinvigoration
Turn 4: bone grinding X3 (you don’t have any slaves left at this point)

How this should work out is like this. Your vampire bodyguards completely surround you keeping the horrors that pop up from having any chance of getting to you, while they handily dispatch said horrors (magic, AP attacks with a good attack score – also why you don’t care about horror marking your bee queens. They’re horror immune.). Before any bone grindings are cast each of your bee queens has cast bloodletting which is more or less a push as far as damage to each side goes, but supercharges your queen’s hitpoints. Plus, your vamps are regenerating while the demons aren’t so the advantage tips towards you. Then, the bone grinding starts. You’ve only got one bone grinding going off before your vamps enter melee. You’ll be doing equal amounts of damage to both sides (haha, stupid demons thought their high protection would help) but the important difference is that your vamps are laying down life drain damage and regenerating while the demons are not. Your vampire lords have supercharged their own hitpoints into the upper 40s so are unlikely to be brought down by the 4 separate 3 point AN attacks, but how many of the demons are that lucky? If you should happen to lose, plenty of demons will have been killed, plenty of the survivors will be crippled, and all of your vampires are reborn fresh. Worst case scenario is you’re out the fairly cheap items you had on your bee queens, more likely they’ll retreat leaving a decimated demon army.

Now, as nasty as that sounds, it also sounds kinda iffy. I’ll go ahead and fess up, I left a part out for dramatic effect. You’re going to want to empower your vampire lords. Empowerments are very expensive, but they’re also a very solid investment in an immortal unit, particularly one who is doing such heavy lifting. Now, as we’re not talking about one particular nation here I wanted to be clear that there are huge benefits from empowering just once in most any path you’ve got the gems to spare in.

Consider how the above scenario vs the demon hoard would look if the master queen bee who gets + 2 from the hellpower, + 1 from the sabaath, plus one or two extra boosters (depending) had added just one of the following to the mix:

Fog warriors
Demon cleansing
Will of the fates
Army of lead (you’ll want to skip the bone grinding’s in this case and instead lay down rigor mortis)

Heck, with the health gain you get from that life drain attack mass protection or quickening add an amazing amount of survivability, while things like firestorm can’t damage you fast enough to matter. Add in further combos like grip of winter + rigor mortis or blood rain + winds of death + wailing winds (hint: routing + mass decaying = no need to cut off their escape route).

Point is, one little empowering will go a very long way, and so long as you’re not reckless in deploying your colony you’re assured that investment will be paying dividends for the rest of the game.

I also wanted to make it clear how fabulously flexible the strategic deployment is. Have you ever contemplated raiding Helheim? Looking at all those apparently empty territories that your scouts send word back about is nerve wracking, are you teleporting right on top of the anti-raiding squad? This is like that only more so – these guys FLY!. Where the hell are they? Not only do you not know, you can be sure they’ll be zipping right over to the least convenient place before you know it. As if that wasn’t enough, I’d like to refer you to a seldom used spell – Stygian paths. It’s seldom used because how often do you want to jump a big army into combat using a spell that’s gonna kill an unknown number of them and damage many of the rest? Vampires are *perfect* for this spell though. Being stealthy they avoid much of the damage. Having high hitpoints and regen they’re fine to fight after taking some light damage, and the few that die…well, the damage occurs in the province you target, so as long as you’re jumping into friendly dominion the two or three who die just show back up at your cap. Your vampire lords can cast this using just two boosters, so your strategic deployment options really are limitless. One note though, the movement for this spell triggers in the movement phase, not the magic phase, so unlike teleporting you can’t use it to catch enemies before they move. Still immensely useful though.

I wanted to finish up by emphasizing something which is so intrinsic to the vampire colony that it might be easy to lose the significance of. They’re all immortal. As nasty as the stuff I just laid out is, realize that your opponent has to fight that fight every couple of turns even if he manages to win. Swatting at the bee stings is pointless, there is a literally never ending stream of these guys swarming from your capital perpetually. That is the true strength of the vampire colony, as tough as they are they can easily take down anything even tougher by doing what vampires do – bleeding them.

[Dedas]

Awesome...

[cleveland]

Holy Moses. Outstanding.

And don't forget: the real defensive potential of the Vampire comes during Capital Defense. I've now killed the same Vampire Lord a half-dozen times sieging the C'tissian capital...since they re-spawn INSIDE the capital, he keeps coming back. I can't imagine facing an unending squad of 200 of the little SOBs.

[Lingchih]

This is very good. I've honestly never used vampires, but I may do so now.

[alhorro]

Vampire lord is also a best prophet possible — after prophetizing he turns from just a thug/support mage into a great SC.

There are easy ways to counter vampires though. Evo and anti-undead mages surrounded by chaff have great chances to destroy the entire pack in one turn even in darkness, not to mention that getting a dv mage is not harder, than getting a VL. VL has low MR and could be easily mindhunted, and without gear he can't survive a single earth attack — so sending a "queen" without decent backup means a certain decapitation of your pack. As for SCs — any SC with the vine shield and enough hp/def/prot/luck to survive the first round of swarm attack, easily sends them all to torpor.

Vampires are handy of course, but the best application of them — defensive anti-sc VLs with flambergs/demon banes/etc and immortal chaff to protect your mages from flyers.

[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)

[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]

Originally Posted by alhorro

Vampire lord is also a best prophet possible — after prophetizing he turns from just a thug/support mage into a great SC.

There are easy ways to counter vampires though. Evo and anti-undead mages surrounded by chaff have great chances to destroy the entire pack in one turn even in darkness, not to mention that getting a dv mage is not harder, than getting a VL. VL has low MR and could be easily mindhunted, and without gear he can't survive a single earth attack — so sending a "queen" without decent backup means a certain decapitation of your pack. As for SCs — any SC with the vine shield and enough hp/def/prot/luck to survive the first round of swarm attack, easily sends them all to torpor.

Vampires are handy of course, but the best application of them — defensive anti-sc VLs with flambergs/demon banes/etc and immortal chaff to protect your mages from flyers.

That's just not true unless your opponent is just outmaneuvering you all over the place. If you're using them defensively then you should have a good idea what you're dealing with, and even if not you're only out a little time to redeploy much more effectively for round two. If you know what your opponent has and you still let a little old vine shield stop you I don't have a whole lot of sympathy. Lets see...

Life for a life - anything which is not lifeless or having ridiculous hitpoints will be splattered before you know it.

Drain life - oh, there are lots of people with vine shields? That's ok, you take your time chewing through the swarm I'll keep-a-sniping until you're all gone.

Disintegrate - Oh, you are lifeless? Well, lets just see how many MR rolls this takes.

And to answer your next objection...Oh, I'm sorry, you brought a fire brand with the idea that you're going to chew through my swarm quickly....did I forget to mention that I threw some lifelong protections on my vampire lords (a great addition to the swarm). How many times do I get to cast disintegrate/drain life now? I do believe the answer is "until you are dead".

Earth attack - after the very first time you kill my vampire lord (as in use a powerful earth mage and some gems to send my guy back home for a turn) I'll start attack, then sneak, attack, then sneak meaning you're unable to target me with the earth attacks. As to the mind hunts, the vampire lord's MR is 17 (under the dreadfully bad assumption that I don't throw a armor of souls and amulet of MR on him) so how many pearls are you spending exactly to check the (several) vampire lords I have running around without ever actually killing any of them?

[Baalz]

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)

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.