How Vampires Count recruit exactly

[BladeofSharpness]

I never played them and I won't probably play them before long (there is so much content!) but how do they recruit units? Even when I clean their board and waste their armies, a few turns later they are back with full armies of experimented, tier II+ units.

I totally get that they can raise the undead basically for free, but I would have thought that even if low quality units would be free, the highly experimented and tier II+ units would need to be recruited as normal from their buildings, but it seems they have some great leeways here and can bypass that.

[Lamp]

The sites of battles that you can see on the map with x amount of casualties. The vamps and VC can raise dead from them, the more casualties the crazier the units.
You can pull things like fielding 2-3 armies of skeletons and get some pyrrhic victory or a valiant defeat that wipes out like 50 full units to start a nice one. Then fighting more battles in that region should add to the pile. Basically as vamps you almost never have to build unit buildings.

[BladeofSharpness]

Ouch ok, so it's a kind of self-fueled mechanic, dangerous indeed! I shall not tarry and will marshall the men ;-)

[Lamp]

Originally posted by BladeofSharpness:

Ouch ok, so it's a kind of self-fueled mechanic, dangerous indeed! I shall not tarry and will marshall the men ;-)

That's the spirit. Once piece of advice: if you come up against Vlad himself and the autoresolve says it's close, take the auto. Vlad is a one man army.

[abyssalfury]

Vamps can recruit units normally, but they can also Raise Dead for instant recruitment (at a cost). The Raise Dead pool is limited, without corpses it's usually something like three zombies and a couple of the skeleton units. However battle sites increase the amount and quality of units that can be raised, all the way up to things like Terrorgeists. This is intended to be balanced out by the fact that most of the (non-hero) higher tier Counts units aren't really 'doomstack' units, so you still want your lower tier trash.

Coast also gets Raise Dead, but (at least to me) it doesn't seem like they get quite as good a selection.

Also, one other important thing with Counts is that they have a chance to resurrect their dead units after a battle, including a loss. This can lead to cases where you deal heavy damage to their army in the first battle, but they manage to bounce back quickly because half their army got back up again after the battle.

[BladeofSharpness]

Thanks for the precisions. I guess that if my army stands nearby a pile of corpses, they can't use it, or can they close as much as possible and trigger their ability?

[Falaris]

There's three mechanics at work for VC recruitment.

First, normal recruitment. Also, since their economy building also improves local recruitment, their recruitment pool tends to be quite high.

Secondly, every lord can 'raise dead'. Dead from battles 'marinate' in the ground - recently dead will only be zombies and such, but long-dead can be raised as all sorts of horrors, even the highest tier units if there were enough dead. It's regional, based on all the dead in the region, rather than a particular locale or battle, and it's instant, not requiring sitting around for a turn.

Thirdly, if they lose units, they can come back after a battle. That is probably what gives them experienced units after many casualties; they have no more ways of getting higher level units than other factions. (You tend to have a +1 in the blue skill line and possibly one or two more in buildings; honestly I don't remember.). They do have several paths to get xp per turn though.

Of course, the main strength of their armies is their lords and heroes; compared with other factions their units are a bit weak, and they also lack ranged, although they do have some quite strong units - healing from necromancers, mortis engine, corpse carts with lodestones, spells is definitely a force multiplier, though.

Basically, if you give them just one or two turns to recover, they'll be back at full strength. You really need to try to have that second decisive fight when you attack.

[jorel91023]

Take what Falaris wrote and look at the advantages you get playing as Vampire Counts, a run I'm doing now with Heinrich Kemmler. You can build armies fast, you get experienced units quickly and make sure to embed a Necromancer hero for Replenishment of your Doom Stacks.

You will want to build recruitment buildings to a high level in a couple of provinces to keep costs lower. Raise Dead gets pricey.

Play as another faction, say Dwarfs. You often get a limit of 2 units with local recruitment. You can bump that to 4 but those improvements are a long time off, at the far right end of their Tech Tree. Now, there are ways around this. You can combine Local and Global recruitment so you get more units faster but Global recruitment comes at a cost.

And, one more thing. Your Legendary Lords are never truly dead if they lose a battle. Like other factions, they will be wounded and need time to recover. But you get more Legendary Lords because of the Vampire's Kiss mechanic. None of those Lords can ever be truly killed.

I came back to Vampire Counts yesterday with a new run and I'm just steamrolling Bretonnia and The Empire. As difficult as they can be to play against as Falaris wrote, those same mechanics make them agile and adept when playing their faction.