Vampires - you should be afraid of the night

[Executor]

I use vampires a lot also.
I actually had a game where my whole strategy was based on them.
By turn 55 or so I had about 70 Vampire Lords and over 500 vampires, but

that's when the Armageddons started. I was summoning 5 of them a turn before

Armg. killed about 98% of the pop.

It was actually very amusing when people ganged up on me, they were

reluctant on sending SC's agaisnt me since they were afraid of the vampires

that were placed randomly in the provinces.

It was with Sauromatia, a whole different aproach on that nation and would

have certainly worked if not for those damn Armageddons.

[sum1lost]

Claws of _____ hurts this strategy badly, as immortality doesn't seem to protect against imprisonment, and claws of _____ tends to target higher-HP units (such as the vampire lords)

I'm also curious to see how well this does against other strategies that specialize in attrition- such as massive, cheap buffed swarms (undead are especially nice against vampires as far as combat goes...)

[WraithLord]

Very fine material. Thank you Baalz for another great guide.

Your guides are far more than a dried up articles about how to this or that. They actually capture the imagination and make you want to try the shiny new toys you describe

Couple of comments:
1. I 2nd Micah's comment regarding undead mastery and wanted to add that there are a bunch of spells that will mess badly with your strat.i.e. DtD/wither bones spam, solar brilliance, master enslave, Purgatory. Worst are the enslave spells that will just steal your vamps.

2. Storm will kill the vamps flight. No more swarming the buffing SCs. An example: Imagine 3-4 colonies getting cloud trappezed by a mage squad. One carries the SoS, first turn the vamps start crawling towards them and the lords cast their B/D spells. Then the mages go and cast undead mastery/master enslaveX(# of mages -1), last mage casts VoR. Voila, I just stole (some/most of) your precious vamp

Personally when I see an opponent in MP that has tons of Vamps running around I start to think hey, here's someone who won't stray away from his dominion and then I start making builds for undead mastery.