Vampire Coast pirate cove hero mechanics are fundamentally too hard in vanilla IE:

[iffy]

Vampire Coast pirate cove hero mechanics are fundamentally too hard in vanilla IE:

TLDR; there are 134 ports in Immortal Empires, around 33% of them are major settlements, it takes minimum 335 turns to make them all into pirate coves and costs ~2.8 million gold to make a maximum of ~57,000 gold a turn. Yes, I know about the 0 turn cooldown and 0 bonus pirate cove cost mods, but the vanilla IE players get absolutely screwed with the 15 turn mandatory cooldown and fighting your way to make coves is tricky at best because of your lack of movement+needing to encamp+fight the city again/run away.

My solution: remove the Vampire Captain cove creation cooldown entirely, keep the 200% cost during the next turn and then remove the debuff.

Note that I play on campaigns where my goal is to take over every settlement as every major faction at least once, to see how they play against everybody and how the mechanics work in the lategame. Yes it takes 300+ turns, and that's the way I like it.

I also have some basic QoL mods because the vanilla game does not have these features built in and has no options to enable them - no supply lines (more for lategame+early game warrior lord spam to prevent invasions by crapstacks), garrison rework (to make garrisons actually half decent), please stop cheating, speedy turn camera, max level 300, gruz’s training tweaks and 5000 background income to let everyone build at least two armies in the beginning.

Back to my explanation of the specifics as mentioned in the TLDR:

There are two ways to make pirate coves - win the battle against the port settlement, and use a Vampire Captain hero. The later section will cover the easier way, using the hero method.

Winning a battle against a port settlement isn’t the hard part: just use 19 pistols+full tech upgrades or 19 handguns on normal difficulty autoresolve if they don’t have another army as backup to the garrison. It’s making sure that you have enough health+movement in your units to make it back to somewhere where you can win the defensive clapback victory. You can’t regen in contested waters (Dark Elves have this same problem), and so you have to encamp to get the most health back possible per end turn, and then you have to sack the same city AGAIN to get back out to sea. If you’re going in land as compared to out to sea, that army is going to get caught out and eventually killed unless you spend 2-4 turns finding a way out to sea that doesn’t cross through a hostile settlement’s area of control.

There are two kinds of moneymaking pirate coves: the +200 (base) and the 50% ones. Creating a pirate cove costs, from the Vampire Captain hero, MINIMUM ~3000 gold, up to ~7000, without the +300% penalty for creating multiple pirate coves back to back. Actually building the moneymaking buildings costs 2500 or 5000 gold, respectively, for a total cost of 5500 for +200 gold or ~12000 gold for 50%. The 50% maximum gold per turn is likely around ~+1500 per turn.

The +200 costs minimum 22 turns to pay back, and the 50% costs pays back in 8 turns. I strongly suspect that the 15 turn MANDATORY cooldown is the average of the two turn values.

List of ports with approximate turn income, rounding down (used Dark Eldar on a run where I took over every settlement as a benchmark), note that for this particular run, the major settlements routinely run at 1600 or over, whereas the minor ones with the income buildings are at 1298/1293 per turn, but on most of the minor settlements if you want gates+the port+the unique building, you don’t have a slot for the income building.

Naggarond, 1900
Nagrar 700
Shagrath 1200
Fortress of the Damned 1600
The Folly of Malofex 500
Bilious Cliffs 1200
Port of Secrets 1200
Temple of Heimkel 700
Frozen Landing 1300
Sjoktraken 1200
Winter Pyre 1300
The Monolith of Flesh 700
Varg Camp 1200
The Monolith of Katam 1700
Serpent Jetty 1200
Troll Fjord 1200
Isle of Wights (special port building) 2000
Pack Ice Bay 700
Altar of the Crimson Harvest 1300
Longship Graveyard 1100
Bay of Blades 1200
Castle Alexandronov 1300
Erengrad 1800
Norden 1100
Dietershafen 600
Wrecker’s Point 1200
Marienburg 1900
Altdorf 1600
L’Anguille 1100
Lyonesse 1300
Mousillon 1200
Bordeleaux 1500
Brionne 600
Bilibali 1600
Nuja 600
Magritta 700
Tobaro 1100
Miragliano 1500
Luccini 1200
Sartosa 1500
Myrmidens 1600
Martorca 1300
Barak Varr 1200
Stonemine Tower 1200
Gronti Mingol 1000
Zandri 1200
Al Haikk 1500
Copher 500
Lashiek 400
Sorcerers’ Islands 800
Sudenburg 1000
Plain of Tuskers 400
Dead-Head Monoliths 900
Nahountl 600
Zlatan 1700
Fortress of Dawn 1700
Dawn’s Light 1100
Serpent Coast 1200
Lybaras 1200
Bitter Bay 1400
Ruin’s End 1400
Fu Hung 1400
Bamboo Crossing 1600
Shi Long 1200
Hanyu Port 1500
Bridge of Heaven 600
Dai Cheng 1100
Li Zhu 400
Fu-Chow 1100
Chimai 1100
Zhanshi 1600
Beichai 1600
Haichai 1400
Castle of Splendour 700
Volulltrax 1300
Grotrilex’s Glare Lighthouse 1200
Tor Elasor 700
Tower of the Sun 1600
Tower of the Stars 1200
Dragon Fang Mount 900
Shattered Stone Isle 1200
Dread Rock 1300
Shattered Stone Bay 600
Hag Grief 2400
Circle of Destruction 1200
Blacklight Tower 1600
Karond Kar 1600
Slaver’s Point 1200
Citadel of Dusk 1600
Kaiax 1500
Mangrove Coast 400
Chupayotl 1000
The Copper Landing 800
Great Turtle Isle 1700
Blood Hall 1600
The High Sentinel 600
Temple of Kara 1100
Bregonne 1100
Tlax 900
Pox Marsh 600
The Awakening 1600
The Blood Swamps 1100
Fuming Serpent 1100
The Star Tower 1500
Altar of the Horned Rat 1400
Shrine of Sotek 600
Monument of the Moon 1100
Swamp Town 600
Port Reaver 1100
Skeggi 1400
Ziggurat of Dawn 400
Grey Rock Point 1300
The Moon Shard 700
Arnheim 1600
The Twisted Glade 1600
Slaver’s Point 1200
Karond Kar 1600
Blacklight Tower 1600
Circle of Destruction 1200
Lothern 2100
Whitepeak 700
Tor Anroc 2400
Tor Dranil 800
Tor Anlec 600
Elisia 700
Mistnar 1200
Tor Koruali 1000
Tralinia 1200
Elessaeli 1700
Shrine of Loec 1200
Angerrial 500
Port Elistor 1300
Evershale 1200
Whitefire Tor 1000

The total gold (assuming extremely favorable conditions) per turn generated from the settlements to their owning faction (Dark Elves in this case) is 114,000. Assuming dividing by two, that’s 57,000 gold per turn, and would cost at least 964,800 gold (assuming 33% are the 12,500g major settlements) to build those and even assuming 6 Vampire Captain heroes and a minimum of 2 turns between each new pirate cove, would take 44 turns, minimum. An additional 92,400 gold with the 350 gold per turn per vampire captain hero upkeep over those 44 turns would be added on. That total expense is 1,057,200 gold total, and at a profit of 57,000 gold per turn, takes 18 turns to pay back.

Even if you are absolutely rushing and have done everything right, it is virtually impossible to outearn the Elves or the Dark Elves or the Chaos Dwarfs within the same timeframe, and this is assuming a two turn cooldown on each pirate cove and no cost increase for having built a cove recently.

If you include the 15 turn cool down and the 300% max cost increase, the raw gold spent on the coves goes to ~2.1 million (~16000 gold average per cove using 300% max cost*134 coves and would take 335 turns to build), the hero upkeep cost increases ~7 fold to ~700,000, costing in total around 2.8 million gold, and will take ~49 turns to pay back. Just acquiring the ~2.8 million gold to pay for those coves would likely take 50-150+ turns of insane battle victories, and then you get the privilege of spending it on maintaining your armies. Ironically, because of the required battle victories to get the 2.8 million gold massive warchest, getting the pirate coves would become irrelevant, as you would have the military strength to dump 1700g upkeep 19 pirate gunnery mobs with pistols as crapstack extra garrison armies to tie down anyone sacking your major settlements.

[Sire of Suns]

I will admit I didn't read the whole post, however from skimming it I can see you've encountered the same issues I have as well. Playing the Vcoast the way they are set up to be played doesn't work well and isn't fun, playing them like other factions has the same issue, and simply cheesing in order to win is not something I consider "fun" (because of the sea lanes and the AI not using them, it's incredibly easy to cheese the campaign as the Vcoast).

So yes, their mechanics have fundamental flaws, and I use various mods to make it so that their mechanics, roster, buildings, etc., are all fun and useful.

Maybe someday the CA devs will have the time to look over the mods and issues people keep presenting with the Vcoast and fix some of their issues.

[lethminite]

I won't pretend to be familiar enough with vampire coast to really comment on your specific suggestions (only played them once), however it sounds like they should probably have some techs that maybe add some extra charges of the cooldown, reduce the cooldown, and reduce the building costs.
Could just chuck those in as extra bonuses for a few existing researches.
If it's just for painting the map, and it's generally balanced for the first 100-200 turns, could put it at the end of the tech tree, if they need help earlier, put the bonuses earlier too.

I do also want to note, that part of the reason for the cooldown, is probably for fighting against vampire coast, and making sure destroying a cove is actually worth your time, and they can't just auto-rebuild it a few turns later. So if it gets made easier to make coves, individual locations will probably need their own cooldown, preventing one from being rebuilt in that city for ~30 turns or something.

[Sire of Suns]

Originally posted by lethminite:

I won't pretend to be familiar enough with vampire coast to really comment on your specific suggestions (only played them once), however it sounds like they should probably have some techs that maybe add some extra charges of the cooldown, reduce the cooldown, and reduce the building costs.
Could just chuck those in as extra bonuses for a few existing researches.
If it's just for painting the map, and it's generally balanced for the first 100-200 turns, could put it at the end of the tech tree, if they need help earlier, put the bonuses earlier too.

I do also want to note, that part of the reason for the cooldown, is probably for fighting against vampire coast, and making sure destroying a cove is actually worth your time, and they can't just auto-rebuild it a few turns later. So if it gets made easier to make coves, individual locations will probably need their own cooldown, preventing one from being rebuilt in that city for ~30 turns or something.

It isn't possible to destroy pirate coves, unlike Skaven undercities. Though Skaven undercities are *also* barely worth investing into without mods to make them actually worth it.
The ai doesn't really use coves themselves, nor undercities (unless specifically hard coded to do so, like in end game crisis). For whatever reason these things got nerfed quite a bit, but are still somewhat relied on for faction parity in theory, so it doesn't quite work out. These days, in vanilla, cheesing with both Vcoast and Skaven (which works out better for Skaven and "looks" less cheesy, but isn't *really* how they're meant to play) is the way to go. (Vcoast need coves for things like research, income, lord/hero levels, hero capacity...)

But the idea of adding things into the tech tree/s could be quite good and help things to get rolling more in the late game.

[Aleera]

May I suggest you something OP?

Pirate cove creation is bound on cd to the hero that created the cove. You can use a vampire captain to establish a cove. Disband the hero and recruit a new one. Then use this new hero to create another cove.

Ad infinitum.

[Garatgh Deloi]

I don't think you are supposed to compete in earnings with other races from just using pirate coves.

The first flaw in that argument is that different races have different incomes and costs and can't economically be compared 1 to 1. A thousand gold for x race doesn't have the same value as a thousand gold for y race. Some races gets a ton of income from settlements but little from combat. Some gets tiny amounts from settlements and everything from combat. Some have free units but expensive buildings. Some have extremely expensive units. Etc.

The second flaw is that vampire coves is more of a bonus mechanic for the vampire coast, rather then a core mechanic they are supposed to focus their entire campaign on (similar to the Skaven under empire). I believe the intention is/was that you are supposed to use normal settlements as well (You can easily make +1800 gold from a major port settlement alone).

[Red Bat]

Originally posted by Garatgh Deloi:

What makes you think you are supposed to compete in earnings with other races from just using pirate coves?

The first flaw in the argument is that different races have different incomes and costs and can't economically be compared 1 to 1. A thousand gold for x race doesn't have the same value as a thousand gold for y race.

The second flaw is that vampire coves is more of a bonus mechanic for the vampire coast, rather then a core mechanic they are supposed to focus their entire campaign on (similar to the Skaven under empire). You are supposed to use normal settlements as well (You can easily make +1800 gold from a major port settlement alone).

The problem with that is that the Vampire Coast ONLY makes somewhat good amounts of money from ports and certain settlements with unique building chains, and they also get less trade goods on top of that. The Pirate Cove mechanic is supposed to fix their bad economy. Which it kind of does, but their economy will still always be kind of bad.

With Skaven, their economy is bad until it isn't. They can eventually actually make higher than average income from settlements. The reason why Skaven can't just blanket the map and make bank is actually just the food mechanic, which if you really want to, you can fix with undercities.... Or you just make the same sort of money pirates make from pirate coves using undercities. The only real way undercities are worse than pirate coves is that you sometimes need to invest into reducing discoverability.

[Sire of Suns]

Vcoast is generally just bad on the campaign map. In multiplayer skirmishes they're quite good, but in campaign... not so much. Their units aren't exactly cheap in terms of effectiveness, so they do need quite a bit of money to keep going. And given that most of their "power" really comes from things that you're very restricted on (legendary lords for shipbuilding, settlements being sub-par and having bad garrisons, coves being just bad, needing heroes for coves but being heavily restricted in how many heroes you can get even from coves, etc.).
Really, the mods that change their campaign from frustrating to enjoyable and feeling like I'm a pirate, are the ones that make coves cheaper and have little to no cooldown. Then I'm able to run around to every port with my heroes and slowly build up with that, then I have the eco to back up my bad land locked settlements and generic lords swarming with raise dead.

[A.Pot]

Yeah... this is one of those overly analyzed posts. Vampire Coves are meant to supplement your economy or provide other bonuses. You are playing pirates. You are supposed to be raiding, pillaging and causing all sorts of mayhem as your main source of income.

[Man of Culture]

Originally posted by Sire of Suns:

Vcoast is generally just bad on the campaign map. In multiplayer skirmishes they're quite good, but in campaign... not so much. Their units aren't exactly cheap in terms of effectiveness, so they do need quite a bit of money to keep going. And given that most of their "power" really comes from things that you're very restricted on (legendary lords for shipbuilding, settlements being sub-par and having bad garrisons, coves being just bad, needing heroes for coves but being heavily restricted in how many heroes you can get even from coves, etc.).
Really, the mods that change their campaign from frustrating to enjoyable and feeling like I'm a pirate, are the ones that make coves cheaper and have little to no cooldown. Then I'm able to run around to every port with my heroes and slowly build up with that, then I have the eco to back up my bad land locked settlements and generic lords swarming with raise dead.

I did not have this same experience. I found their units to be extremely effective and cheap. The only expensive stuff they have are the single entities or depth guard and honestly you don't need those. You play like a mix of skaven and vampire counts.

[Many-Named]

Originally posted by A.Pot:

Yeah... this is one of those overly analyzed posts. Vampire Coves are meant to supplement your economy or provide other bonuses. You are playing pirates. You are supposed to be raiding, pillaging and causing all sorts of mayhem as your main source of income.

Bam, right there.

[Father Ribs]

Impressed that you spent this much time crunching numbers, but as mentioned, factions that make money by killin' don't measure the same as factions that make money by growing wheat (or mining, etc).

I haven't done VCoast in a while, but don't you want to use those to increase your hero counts and spread corruption to make your raids more effective?

[Red Bat]

Originally posted by Father Ribs:

Impressed that you spent this much time crunching numbers, but as mentioned, factions that make money by killin' don't measure the same as factions that make money by growing wheat (or mining, etc).

I haven't done VCoast in a while, but don't you want to use those to increase your hero counts and spread corruption to make your raids more effective?

The problem is a lot of factions with terrible economies meant to be supplemented by raiding/sacking/razing don't actually get any specific bonuses to doing so that aren't also available to factions that have good economies. Vampire Coast does technically get the benefit of them being able to raid and then immediately setup a pirate cove, but that's kind of what this topic is about. I don't remember if Vampire Coast also gets extra tech or skills or anything that boost raiding/sacking/razing, but I'd imagine they'd still be making less money at the end of the day.

[leandrombraz]

Originally posted by Red Bat Media:

Originally posted by Father Ribs:

Impressed that you spent this much time crunching numbers, but as mentioned, factions that make money by killin' don't measure the same as factions that make money by growing wheat (or mining, etc).

I haven't done VCoast in a while, but don't you want to use those to increase your hero counts and spread corruption to make your raids more effective?

The problem is a lot of factions with terrible economies meant to be supplemented by raiding/sacking/razing don't actually get any specific bonuses to doing so that aren't also available to factions that have good economies. Vampire Coast does technically get the benefit of them being able to raid and then immediately setup a pirate cove, but that's kind of what this topic is about. I don't remember if Vampire Coast also gets extra tech or skills or anything that boost raiding/sacking/razing, but I'd imagine they'd still be making less money at the end of the day.

Each race has different values for how much gold they make from these actions, so even if a faction doesn't have specific tech/skills that boost it further, they can have an inherent boost and just be naturally good at it.

[Sire of Suns]

Yes, you can easily cheese with the Vcoast. But playing them the way that they are "meant" to be played, going off of what mechanics they have, roster, buildings that can be built, etc., they don't function very well or enjoyably within what they are "meant" to do.
Sure, we can ignore the bad units or the units that aren't efficient and "aren't needed" and just cheese the AI all day long. This isn't about beating the game per se, this is about playing the Vcoast as... The Vcoast.

One of the issues with simply raiding, sacking, razing, etc., is that the Vcoast doesn't really get much more out of that then other factions. Heck, you could play the Empire the same way and do just fine comparatively, and what's more is that the Empire's economic base is also better. The best raid/sack/raze playable factions are the WoC, Norsca, Beastmen, and Khorne. The Vcoast are nowhere near as good as them at that. The Vcoast needs to go further afield, further from the places they can easily hide and recuperate, gets less out of it (with cooldowns and increased costs too!), doesn't have the power in their armies to just keep going without spending more money on Raise Dead, their tech tree is slow and not super helpful, they have the additional infamy mechanic that locks some of their most needed and powerful options, it goes on and on. Add to that compared to other "raiding" factions, they tend to struggle more with being at war with the same number of people. Sure I can go sack every port of Ulthuan to get coves and build up, but that will take so long to pay off that by the time it does you can bet the donut has confederated and is sending their armies across the world to destroy your settlements. Vcoast also has the issue that they still need their settlements, you can't just abandon those without the "no settlements" attrition taking place.

For the people that play Vcoast regularly or recently, that aren't happy with cheesing and ignoring entire portions of a faction in order to win, the Vcoast needs adjustments.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by A.Pot:

Yeah... this is one of those overly analyzed posts. Vampire Coves are meant to supplement your economy or provide other bonuses. You are playing pirates. You are supposed to be raiding, pillaging and causing all sorts of mayhem as your main source of income.

Those don't provide high income though. Vampire coast don't get the post battle loot of factions like norsca or greenskins, on top of having more expensive buildings which make less money.

They basically forced post battle loot into being your main source of income by making sure everything else is useless. It only works because post battle loot is so stupidly overtuned that even middle of the pack post battle loot is enough income by itself to win a campaign, and even crappy low tier armies can kill everything if you get a level 50 LL and rank 9 units.

If people in this game ever come to the obvious conclusion that player strength effectively scaling with difficulty is a really bad idea, vampire coast will cease to function. Or there will be like 10 players who like vampire coast still complaining about how easy every other faction is while everyone else refuses to touch them (we kind of already have that tbh).

The post is over analyzed though. The entire thing could be changed to "vampire coast are incredibly poor because they have no buildings to make decent money, poor trade, and average post battle" and that single sentence would cover basically everything.