are vampire counts the worst faction to play with?

[provokastoras]

Si,ply put there is a number of reasons i found the vampire counts campaign as the hardest of the ones i tried.
For starters the starting troops are trash, skellies zombies spearmen skellies they all die by the kilogram and inflict no casualties whatsover. they are slow and hard to manouver on top now I remember that in warhammer fantasy they caused fear... that meant that the enemy would at least auto run if they ever lost a round... here you ca't even give them credit for that,even the crapiest of the crap of sigmars children stood and fought to the last man? I saw swordsmen cutting down like 200 or 300 each per battle whether i dance macabre them or not. I remember their life leech could at least kill enemy heroes... now the damage it does is funny you are better off summoning another unit of zombies instead. the only use of the early troops is to literally botch the enemy army down and then wait to see who kills what first... will your lord solo their whole army or will your troop vanish and your lord will then vanish too. the wolves are a passable cavalry except that it looses to every other cavalry in the game including the missile cavalry.
to make matters worse everyone h8s you with passion from the start and you cant do a trade deal except with the other vampire factions who are also getting their butts hard kicked. After you confederate the other vampire factions you literally can find no trading partner anywhere even with very high reliability which reduces your income to half.
then you have to play every single battle at least till you get to the tier 3 units otherwise you will auto loose every engagement.
if for a 100 rounds you persevere playing every battle yourself and beat the annoying spawn fest ( i mean the empire that merges with new vassal whenever they are at the end of the rope then the chaos comes and since you destroyed the empire, not that you had a choice cause they kept attacking like mad dogs, now you have to beat the chaos and rebuild your map seriously usually i finish the game within 200 stg turns it took me 300 turns to rebuild everything and finally push for a short victory. tier 2 and 3 troops are ok but getting to them was a real pain.
i guess the idea is that you go with the first book (instead of the last book) on research and get the free zombie armies then spam 5 or 6 lords and fill them with zombies and have them gank up on people hoping you can autowin a battles though playing the said battle is probably boring.
and is not like the lords of the vampires are the best warriors around neither... chaos lords are better, the dwarves rip them a new one, karl franz wont do bad
In all if i compare them with the high elves which i played earlier than won half the battles before the enemies closed up in melee the vampire counts feel somewhat neglected... its not like malfred crushes tyrion like a little baby nether in fact i am not sure i like manfreds chances in a duel neither.

[IntrepidH]

They’re the most nerfed faction since tww1

I wouldn’t play them vanilla unless it was for challenge or bragging rights I guess
First it was invocation of nehek and spirit leech/ fate bjuna
Then summoning units
Then the Regen cap
Then invocation (again)
Then raising the dead

All multiplayer changes in a single player (mainly) game

Edit sorry people are being so rude to you for trying to learn a new faction
Pretty lame tbh
They just have such. Different play style and require stacking trash army lords or to be carried by one powerful lord which is usually a lagfest that kills your frames for most of the campaign that I just don’t enjoy them or Skaven for the most part myself. No need for all these petty useless comments


Old vampires count faction didn’t NEED to stack extra lords since they could just reanimate without penalty in mid-battle which was more fun imo

[Cacomistle]

Strength of the vampire counts is a few things.

First is the free skeletons (although as you said fighting battles with those can get kind of boring, its pretty samey when you've got like 6-7 armies of them).

Second is they do have more powerful lords. Its the bloodlines lords, not the regular ones. Blood dragons especially will kick most other lords asses (including mannfred, I honestly think he's worse than bloodlines lords cause you don't have the points to actually give him 2 lores of magic).

Dwarf lords absolutely do not beat vampire lords, I think you have a misunderstanding of the game if you think that. Maybe on foot if you compare like grombindal to mannfred without magic but why would you ever make that comparison when every vampire lord except vlad/isabella gets either a dragon or terrorgheist mount.

You can also start as isabella, and then you get like 6 vampire heroes by turn 3 or so who all have +10/+10 and +25% weapon strength so they kind of just kill everything.

I think their playstyle is unintuitive. Like everyone else you just build units and your units win you battles. Vampires spam tons of free units with powerful lords/heroes. If they try to play just regular units they aren't that impressive.

Also while high elves can win battles without the enemy army reaching you, vampires can heal their army to full at the end of each battle. I'm not gonna lie, I think high elves are a bit stronger. But by the point you start actually hitting the regen cap on vampire counts, high elves ranged spam stacks are forced to engage in melee which means they can start taking losses.

Better than dwarves though (everyone may hate you, but at least they don't start at war with you, and at least they're not greenskins who get waagh armies fast confed seem to hit strength rank 1 every game).

TLDR: they're mediocre. Nothing special, when you consider all the powerful mechanics WH2 factions get.

[wrought82]

free skellies are mighty powerful, thanks to VC low income and hostile start position it only makes them mediocre but its enough.

The issue w VC is they're boring to play, not that they're weak.

last campaign i used a mod that doubles income and skipped the free skellies, that way they play like a normal faction

[provokastoras]

you do have a point with the bloodline lords they did seem to be stronger than malfred. though manfred was higher level so i ended up using him instead plus you wont get one till around turn 20 so he will be a fair 12 levels behind from everyone else. tbh i did not prioritize the blood dragons cause i had like 5 legendary lords and i went for the crossbow men so i can trade back some ranged too that covered my armies till turn 200, so id di not see that maybe i ll try them if i get the stomach to retry the whole thing. the idea though of doing again every siedge manually is quite disheartening.
in a duel of heroes i am not sure the mount is that useful, it does give you more hp and damage but the dwarf lords also do loads of damage, i remember i used to kick the vampires butt with dwarves but that was a long time ago . it most probably been rebalanced so thats the reason i remember dwarves to be stronger..
in either case though reducing their income to half with no trade deals and making the enemy troops to fight till the last man is real blows to the vampire counts roster not sure if they were even intentional.
also i remember dwarves used to be the easiest faction to play by far, i am not playing them in regards of how easy they were. Did they nerf them that hard? I still see them conquering the whole map without any help, and to make things even easier for them chaos spawn on the green skins so if you are not kicking their butts as you should for some reason, chaos spawns will do it for you, they will also wreck the north tribes to give you nice free real estate to expand if for some reason you are not owning half the map already. they also make an allience with the empire and bretona plus the high elves easily so after a while noone ven dares to attack you. except the greenskins that will get wiped from the map anyway even if you ignore them.

[Doomier Guy]

1. Install a mod that removes the crap "supply lines" mechanic. It's ♥♥♥♥.
2. Research (no) upkeep tech
3. Drown your enemies in bodies.
4. Have access to T5 units at turn 30 thanks to the battlefield raise mechanic.
5. Profit.

[ArchAnge1LT]

Laughs in *instant armies, wind of death, Invocation of nehek and free chaff*.

[Jagore]

The worst campaign? Eh I don't think so.

Chaos warriors

Beastmen

Skarsnik

Norsca (simply for the reason that EVERYONE wants to fight you constantly and you are constantly invaded)

a lot of factions and subfactions have it rough. Not to mention several lords of decent and good factions can still have hard starting spots.

[eRe4s3r]

Yeah, I find them the EASIEST faction to play .. that's not helping OP much but Isabella+VLAD and UNGRIM are legit my fav campaigns in this game, they have some of the most fun starts, lots of different enemies and .. WIND OF DEATH, easily the most satisfying spell in the game. (Hence why you want Isabella, the god-tier mage you get for basically free, unless you start as Manfred, who cantfred sadly)

I actually have the start for Isabella down to the point where I can squash Manfred by turn 9 AND unite the region. AI is very predictable in those first turns and once you know how your starting empire enemy behaves you can easily use Vlad to crush em. Vlad should have full skelly army, and Isabella 5 flying monster squads + 2 vampires and skellies. Recruit from battle markers obviously the carts any single entity monster, and if you can get it a mortis engine.

Don't even need a mod for it, but for optimal vampire pwnage Normal campaign DIF is helpful (because yeah, supply lines.....)

[jonoliveira12]

No, they are actually one of the strongest.
VCounts armies are not about good units, but good Casters. You can have, by far, the most amount of armies in the game as VCounts, and just autoresolve the entire map with numbers. It is just that those armies are almost exclusively going to be Mass Skeletons with Necromancers.

Most factions try to go for Doomstacks, but VCounts do "Crapstacks" instead. Their advantage is numbers and really strong Magick.

[Milk4Khorneflakes]

Vcount campaign is one of the strongest, if not the strongest by all accounts. They aren't the strongest, but, still, above average in multiplayer.

[Darth Wadewilson]

Stop looking at factions from the traditional empire building lens. If you want to build all provinces to level 5 and have the top tier units recruited etc go play Karl franz. You don't need any of that BS when you play as vampire counts. You can win the campaign without ever recruiting an actual unit. (Other than raise dead)

The only thing that matters for vampire counts are the vampires themselves. As long as the vampire lord is standing at the end of the battle it's mission accomplished. Everything else in the army is there just to keep enemy in check while the vampire lord/heroes deal tons of magic.

Also why would mannfred go and melee Tyrion? Thats not a proper comparison. They are good casters who are also pretty good at melee. You don't need to be best in everything. You play tonyour strengths and take advantage of enemies weakness.

[jonoliveira12]

Originally posted by Darth Reyns:

Stop looking at factions from the traditional empire building lens. If you want to build all provinces to level 5 and have the top tier units recruited etc go play Karl franz. You don't need any of that BS when you play as vampire counts. You can win the campaign without ever recruiting an actual unit. (Other than raise dead)

The only thing that matters for vampire counts are the vampires themselves. As long as the vampire lord is standing at the end of the battle it's mission accomplished. Everything else in the army is there just to keep enemy in check while the vampire lord/heroes deal tons of magic.

Also why would mannfred go and melee Tyrion? Thats not a proper comparison. They are good casters who are also pretty good at melee. You don't need to be best in everything. You play tonyour strengths and take advantage of enemies weakness.

In all honesty, VCounts Lvl 5 Towns get you a lot of money and high level Heroes/Lords, so you are encouraged to get as many Lvl 5 Settlements as you can.

Library + Vampire building at max upgrade and with the very decent economy techs, will net you a lot of money.

[Cazador]

Lol so many people complaining about weird things... Like VC is super good and quite fun. Every faction plays so different and I feel like some people try to play them all the same instead of to their strengths.

If you think VC (or dwarves from other threads lol) has it rough please give beastmen/norsca/chaos a try and get back to us lol...

Hell I think tomb kings and wood elves for the most part are worse off too.

[Lenny]

Magic is strong of course. Their army strategy I would describe as a sea of animated bodies and a small number of elite monsters swimming around in that sea, getting to where they need to be. Breaking the dams.

Crypt horrors, cairn wraiths, blood knights and mortis engine is very strong IMO, and you can get your hands on a few of them incredibly early with just a bit of luck.

[Jäveln]

just use grenade throwers and you will not have any problem at all the first 50 turns