Can't win as Vampire Counts. HELP!!!

[Icedcooled]

I can keep up with the AI on normal ME till the point where it doesnt make sense anymore.
The Point is always the same.
Dwarfes declare war on me without a reason.

The North is fine till the empire starts their confederation ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. They cover the west and north. I am winning the battles but cant keep up with multiple fronts and their Army stacks. Auto resolve doesnt make sense and playing each match gets very tiring.

Diplomacy doesnt work at all. My allied factions dont attack, making peace is apparently never an option but only an offer from the AI. I dont see the AI going to war against other factions. For instance Bretonia leaves their terretory just too send three 20 stack armies to me.

Without Empire starting their confederation ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it would be so much better. Is there a way to stop their confederation hack?

[Gamefever]

Its easy.

Take Sylvania entirely....Dont need allies, if your ally is a Vampire your doing it wrong.

Dwarfs actually wont attack you if your strong.

To get strong you need to consolidate the whole 2 starting provinces you get as Vampires.
Easiest Lord to start with is actually Isabella
Bring in Vlad on turn 2
Between turns 3-6 you should be able to take castle to the south east....Its got a gold mine.

Your research focus should be on Free Zombies 1st, this is a priority mission objective.
Why Zombies and not Skeletons...
Cause of Cost, simple as that.....You can save a lot of resources simply getting Zombies first the initial purchase price point between the two might not seem like a lot but its quite severe on your coffers for the first 50 turns.

Your next immediate objective is to churn out Vampire Hero's, these in turn are used to kill off agents and cause a lot of havoc for the Blood Kiss Points.

Your first unlock from Blood Kiss points should be the Female Vampire Lord...
She has special abilities that make Vampire Lairs 50% off in cost, this comes at about 10-14 LVL....So it takes time, BUT once you have it your going to start rolling in gold.

Meanwhile....All those armies get filled with Zombies cause they are super cheap....

This way you focus on development for a while.

Specific Hero skills to look for anything that gives 10% cost reduction for building....This stacks BTW....So having 10 hero's with it means free buildings.

With free Zombies, you only pay cost of the LORD and Heros in the army....Keep that in mind....It means you can field a lot of armies full of fodder.

[DarkFenix]

Yeah, Isabella plus zombies makes life pretty easy. Her and Vlad's mutual buffs make them great, and Isabella buffs vampire heroes to insane levels. If you can get even 4-6 vampire heroes accompanying Isabella and Vlad, you'll wipe out any stack you like with them. Zombies are just there as cheap chaff units to stop enemies focusing fire on your heroes too much.

Don't ally with anyone next to you, other vampires are rivals, other races are food. At best maybe non-aggression with a faction you don't intend to attack just yet, or ally with the enemy of your enemy (like the greenskins).

[VoiD]

Ah Vlad, great hero, one of the strongest for sure, he can take an entire 20 units army during midgame if they can't focus fire him with lots of armor piercing damage.

Try being very, very aggressive, if you need money sack rich towns, also screw recruitment, you don't need it, I finished the entire campaign on legendary mortal empires and I never recruited any units past the first 10ish turns, just raise dead, tons and tons of dead, and remember the big battle sites, you can raise every unit from the dead, including blood knights and terrorgheists.

Try to rush the free skelletons technology ASAP, having many armies costing exactly 0 gold is great, if they die who cares? Just raise another, I literaly beat the chaos invasion by losing battles and throwing infinite free skelletons at them + corruption attrition untill they couldn't keep up with it any more, all you need is a massive barrier of corpses and nasty spells to take down the toughest foes, a couple of strong units per army to do the heavy lifting, fun times.

[Humble]

That's because all map changed and a.i changed since the hunter and the beast dlc/patch, before then I mostly always love to playing Isabella (because vampire hero thing and like full power of vampire working together than sole with full of zombie) I had no problem play normal level, and a.i doing normal level, but now, in the normal level, seem like hard level, they shouldn't mess up with level, if I want play hard level, I will moved up but I don't, and never will, but they just mess up and make normal level is hard level, basic a.i 3 army and knew where to attack together, one army won't do, you had to had 3 army together at least to better odd, and slow taken city, not too fast.

Used to be in normal level, you only need one army but now it's not case, you need 3 army together to better chance odd winning in long terms game in normal level (now hard level)\
Because a.i will use 3 or 4 army attacking, used to be rare but now it's just so common and early of game.

[Cacomistle]

A lot of people are mentioning Isabella. She's incredibly powerful and there's basically no way to lose battles with Vlad+Isabella+vamp heros. Isabella+vamps can beat late game doomstacks without taking damage, other than maybe wood elves (unless you just cheese out all their arrows) or if you go up against mammoth/dragon spam. Dwarves can maybe get a bit tough if they bring lots of thunderers since they're short and can still hit your vamps, but they have no other way to damage vamp heros with 70+md and all the melee attack debuffs you can get.

However, as op said, fighting all the battles gets tiring. And you have to fight out literally every single battle. If you go up against a 6 unit garrison with 10 vampire heros, you'll probably lose 1 even though that same army can beat 4 chaos stacks.

The free skeletons help a lot with that though. 2 stacks of zombies/skeletons can beat empire stacks in auto resolve, and you can win the 1v1 if you have mass skeleton with just a couple black knights. And you can afford like 4-5 of those armies defending yourself while you just run over everything with vlad+isabella if you want. It means a lot of fast forwarding through siege battles that vamp heros cannot possibly lose to expand territory though.

Nothing about Isabella vamp hero strategy should function different with ai improvements though. They'll never get stacks that can beat vamp heros. And since vamp heros are literally all you need to expand, you can afford about as many skeleton stack as you want to defend your territory. You're working off like 1000 base upkeep + the lords of whatever new armies you spawn. So even if you have 5 armies on legendary, its probably like 2000 base upkeep * 1.6 = 3200. Affordable off drakenhof alone.

[Darth Alpharius]

1. Ally with the greenskins
2.Then get 18 Blood Kisses and unlock only Bloodknights to get 100% resistence to Attrition.
3. Wipe out Dwarves.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by Gamefever:

Your next immediate objective is to churn out Vampire Hero's, these in turn are used to kill off agents and cause a lot of havoc for the Blood Kiss Points.
.

Isn't that t4 on mannfred? Just use necromancers for that. They're way easier to produce. And less useful in your armies until they're high level.

[Darth Alpharius]

Wounding agents also gives Blood Kisses.

[Greldinart]

dwarf are pain in open field, but cities are really easy to capture, they always put ranged on wall...easy to attack with troops and backstab with varghesit.

[Gamefever]

I level my Vampire Hero's up before putting them into Isa army....You can use any hero for the Blood Kiss points so Necromancers do work.