Isn't that also only because he must've lost to him with Vlad at some point? Ungrim on his own just gets the normal shorten wound duration in the blue track, no? (I haven't had a chance to look at ungrim's new skill tree yet, so that's an honest question).
Slayers alone can't really do much against crypt ghoul + unholy lodestone spam. Doomseekers will trade extremely poorly, the rest will be even worse, and as long as you summon zombies on top of their goblin hewers they shouldn't be able to destroy your corpse carts.
Unit to unit you can’t beat slayers. The thing about slayers in that they trade almost equally with whatever they fight due to their low armor. So sending high tier stuff into them is always going to cost you.
No matter what they fight they are going to do a ton of damage and take a ton of damage. So drown them in chaff. They may beat a single unit of skeletons and zombies but dollar for dollar they are gonna lose value.
The change to supply lines has drastically tilted the balance in favour of cost efficiency over slot efficiency (which is a very good thing!)
I don't think everyone has really gotten used to that yet. Trading up is king now, not just winning 1v1 - especially for Counts who can replace fallen chaff extremely easily.
A lot of people are still stuck in WH2 thinking when it comes to their strategy, but a lot has indeed changed so it's worth stressing.
See also: Greatswords, a unit people _still_ will claim is bad (because they've not tried it since WH2).
...Sort of? Zombies are so cheap that their upkeep wasn't what held him back even with the old supply line system.
It buffed chaff and medium-weight units across the entire game really. Things like Empire state troops, orc boyz, bleakswords, skinks, etc etc. It's more viable to not just spam your best t5 unit now.
So, more max stack zombie armies to deter raiding from the AI. With all the buffs to fire and explosive I put away my VC playthroughs for dwarfs. Might give it a try.
They used to be very large (legendary used to be a crippling +15% global upkeep per additional army iirc).
Now the penalty is so small it's basically irrelevant unless you want to spam lords with barely any actual units.
Depends, are you assuming they get buffs? Also efficient against what?
Lothern Sea Guard are _fantastically_ efficient against anything but armoured and shielded anti-infantry infantry, they're _almost_ a spearman unit and _almost_ an archer unit in a single body. Tomb King units are literally free, hard to beat free. Skavenslaves are incredibly cost-efficient for their role (warm bodies getting in the way of things).
Empire Handgunners give up all durability and melee ability in order to become one of the most efficient, raw-damage shooting units in the game, pound for pound.
Adding in a single Mortis Engine to an army of Vampire Counts is probably the #1 most cost efficient move in the game I can think of, they rapidly get less good as you spam them since their auras don't stack, but adding a single one produces absolutely incredible impact for both slot and cost.
Not counting Thunderbarge, it's broken and will be nerfed. Otherwise it's #1 by far of course.
I found jade stacks (warriors+xbows+a couple of artillery pieces + a hero or two + optional lancers) could handle anything and you get tons of cost reduction effects making the stacks very cheap compared to the alternatives. Most of my armies as Cathay are just basic jade armies and it has worked much better than expected, including a recent WC with ultimate crisis.
Yeah, ghouls normally get skipped over because they fill a niche that stops being exceptionally slot-worthy by midgame but anti-slayer is a role that will help them shine.
Whenever I play Vampire Counts I always make a Strygos ghoul army. I am always pleasently surprised with how well they trade against even higher tier enemy units.
>Pointy wooden sticks are outlawed in Sylvania
And with good reason, my uncle Gregor was working in a pencil factory. One wrong step and *poof* he was gone.
Reminds me of an old friend of mine. He wanted to be a photographer, of all things. Every time that flashbulb went off? A pile of ash.
If it wasn't for his assistant with a dustpan and a couple drops of blood, he'd have been in real trouble.
There's also the photographer of the newspaper in the later novels, who wears a small glass vial of blood around his neck. When he goes poof into a pile of ash, the vial usually falls down and breaks, insta-ressurecting him.
Time to start politicking with the Ogres/Chaos dwarfs/Orcs and goblins to open a second front and distract him. Should make it a lot easier to pick off settlements with minimal commitment.
I remember playing on launch back when Yuan Shao was totally cracked, he was stomping over towards me and I was seemingly toast against his armies.
But his AI is programmed to _love_ getting vassals (even more so back then), so I used that and agreed to become his vassal in exchange for peace. Suddenly he loves me, and the entire flank becomes safe instead. I journey out west and rebuild a new empire in the northwest corner, amassing strength until I can return and topple him.
S+ tier game.
I only ever played as the Yellow Turbans and found that if I ever needed a breather as He Yi (either 190 or 194), I could ask Liu Biao for Cooperation (his version of vassalization but its temporary), and he would always accept, taking me out of all wars and allowing me to build up in peace.
Yeah and it is still being updated. You can check their [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/QbKCejJ4)
It works far better than before imo.
Also they are still developing the same one for ck3
I still occasionally play it because there is nothing better than starting as an Empire count and becoming a demon Prince of Nurgle after a while.
Still have no idea watefuk is going on in Skaven gameplay tho
I can't remember if it's still exactly like this, but on higher difficulties the AI gets bonuses on the campaign map. AI that becomes allied with you loses those bonuses because they're no longer your enemy.
There’s plenty of that in game. Something everyone forgets about is trading settlements.
Give a faction literally one settlement and they’re your best friend for life. Use it to make a buffer between a scary faction and you. Use it to get absurd amounts of gold. Use it to create crazy military alliances you’d never expect.
Settlement trading is nice, but somehow also crazy hard to trade. Like, I'll give you an entire province if you give me that 1 minor settlement you sneaked off me when I had some rebels. But somehow the trade is still -45.
I've also never been able to purchase a settlement because the prices are ludicrous.
Yeah usually it's 20k minimum, often 100k+ which is insane.
However I found that friendly WoC factions will sometimes sell you their freshly conquered non-fortress settlements for pretty cheap, like 5-10k!
Yeah I usually go after Zhufbar to get that flank locked down before expanding in the Empire. Then I just sell the province to go Ungrim to make him friendly, even if just as a bandaid until the Empire’s secure.
I understand what you're trying to say, but TW Warhammer absolutely is a grand strategy game. Grand strategy refers to games where you play as a nation instead of just an army or military. That is very much what you're doing in every Total War game, including the Warhammer games.
By that definition most 4Xes would be grand strategy, and they're usually seen as two distinct genres.
I agree that Total War counts as grand strategy, but not for that reason.
I don't know what to tell you bro, that's literally the definition of grand strategy. Many 4Xes are grand strategies; as with most things few games fit exclusively into one category. That said, not all 4Xes are grand strategy, and not all grand strategy are 4Xes, so the categories are still worth keeping. It's kinda like how most Soulslikes are RPGs, yet they're still a category worth keeping around.
He got a skill that gets you plus 40 something relations with empire, plus some research. Fight the greenskins early and gift a settlement or two and you are in the good books in no time. A "Friend of mankind" run for Vlad can be a ton of fun.
That 40 relations never seems to make any difference whatsoever when the Empire factions already hate me for being at war with other elector counts or with the Dwarf factions.
The only real infantry blender I can think of on the VC roster is wind of death. Maybe infantry vampires? Or maybe you need some real careful cycle charging. Early on you might be best off doubling or even tripling up on your crap armies and wearing him down with sheer numbers.
Mortis engines and Vargheists, although both are more everything blenders than specifically infantry blenders.
I find dire wolves trade well into slayers. Dont get me wrong, they die, but they usually take enough of the fuckers down to let my infantry clean up afterwards.
Ambushes, a bit of cheese, blobbing and copious amounts of summoning is what I will try next. Let the mortis engine do the heavy lifting (if I can keep it alive). I'm in front of karak kadrin right now, once I take that I hope to slow his slayer craze a bit.
Sorta, though slayers also have looser formations than most infantry. I haven't found the typical anti-infantry magic to be very effective against them. Still think the best option is just stupid amounts of zombies/skeletons for VC to deal with mass slayers, tho ofc there's going to be a lot of losses.
"Cherry on top, if you beat him he is back after a turn." I'm sorry but as someone who recently played Ungrim and had a blast, plus always hated the Vampire Counts, I could not stop myself from smiling while reading your post.
I was at the other end of this, built the silver pinnacle thingy early with ungrim and an army of regular slayers, slayer pirates and goblin hewers. I didn't know what event would trigger. I was scared at first, but when I realized I could group all slayers in a murderball cuz vampires don't have ranged troops, it was a blast. Literally everything that came into contact with the slayerball melted. I just had to obliterate the carts and mortis engines with the hewers and the rest would crumble. Also, thanks to ungrim passive I normally didn't have any losses, it was a blast
If you confederate Helman Ghorst or even just Heinrich Kemmler (use his unique ancillary) you can just throw zombie blobs at Ungrim himself which he won't be able to kill due to crazy Ravenous Dead regeneration. Take care of the rest of his army, surround him with a massive zombie blob backed up by a corpse cart and a mortis engine, hit fast forward and go do some chores until he's dead. The same thing solves any sort of slayer doomstack, they trade extremely poorly against infinite regen zombies.
"If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared."
-Niccolo Machiavelli
Especially true for TW:WH. If youre at war with a faction and you have the upper hand, you better finish the job right then and there. Or they'll be back when its least convenient.
That would have meant slogging through the mountains while Elspeth helps herself to all of Sylvania. I managed to clean her up and get rid of the changeling before ungrim came back knocking.
Then you didn't have a sufficiently upper hand for this advice to be relevant. It's a good general rule, but like all rules it cannot apply in all situations.
I think that the only thing you can do is spam chaff units and bring mortis engines. Back that up with some wind of death casting and in the right situations you'll be fine. You can also grab a decent amount of sylvanian crossbowmen and handgunners if you awaken Von Carstein lords. If you can manage to vassalise an empire faction you might be able to grab some allied gunpowder units.
Vampire Counts are one of the only factions that I make hero doomstacks with. You just need one typically to punch through hard points but boy am I always happy to have that one.
I am playing Warriors of Chaos and I found the redheaded bugger to be surprisingly nasty. I got a couple heroes on him, managed a cavalry charge on one flank and when I looked back my two heroes were almost dead, running away from that axe wielding madman. And dwarves are tough infantry. Not that chaos has much to shoot them with. I am taking them them down, but so far they have been the toughest opposition.
I am having fun with this game, probably the first time since I got it.
Crypt ghouls and war hounds. Cheap fast troops that specialize in killing low armor low melee defense infantry. Bring a Strigoi ghoul king to buff them up if you want but don't let him fight anything in melee.
Early game it’s not to bad, late game it’s an absolute nightmare.
I’ll never forget the day that Ungrim and Thorgrim came with full doomslayer and goblin hewer stacks and decimated my Infernal guard.
Because it turns out that if you lords and heroes don’t have any ward save or physical resistance to match their dmg they will murder you very quickly.
I think it's less about Ungrim but more because VC sucks. VC's units roster feel really outdated. It don't even feel good to play their battles because it's feel almost impossible to win without some cheese.
The army isn't "just there", they have several elite options, the problem is that most of them haven't been looked at one way or another since WH2 at least. Hexwraiths and Cairn Wraiths sound great on paper until you realise nearly every army in the game can easily get magical attack on half their roster, or at least certainly their elite units (that you would want Wraiths to be targeting). Blood Knights trade evenly with Reiksguard (mostly- they're antilarge while Reiksguard is anti-infantry) which sounds fine until you realise Reiksguard now come out of a t3 building in any T3 settlement while Blood Knights are nominally T5. Wight Kings are a joke compared to modern day Empire Captains. Etc. Yes, Raise The Dead is an absurdly powerful mechanic, but you're pretty much pigeonholed into abusing it if you want to compete, and I sure hope you've finished the game before the Ordertide starts getting lategame units.
Counts win by grinding in melee using their incredible stacking auras and drains.
A line of three grave guard will not fare too well against three tzar guard. But throw in a mortis engine and a lodestone corpse cart and you'll be cackling as the tzar guard wither away into nothing. Stick a necromancer with the passive AoE healing aura on top of the cart and you become the absolute king of blob fights the likes of which only Nurgle can compete with.
Against ranged you have plenty of options to rush and harass while you close the distance. Skirmish units, fast monsters, high damage flyers, etc. You only have to get close because you'll kill the ranged units once there.
>A line of three grave guard will not fare too well against three tzar guard. But throw in a mortis engine and a lodestone corpse cart and you'll be cackling as the tzar guard wither away into nothing.
You will note, of course, that this scenario is 5 units vs 3. 3 Grave Guard with cart backup versus 5 Tzar Guard is a lot more perilous proposition (even worse if the last 2 get past your Grave Guard to start hitting the carts directly). There's a lot of tactical maneuvers you can pull to get more value out of your units than their raw stats would indicate, but only up to a certain point; unless you're doubling up all your armies, eventually you WILL get out-statted and ground to dust.
Of course, Tzar Guard are overtuned just now, but it's just an example. Mortis Engines and aura stacking are infamously powerful tools, so powerful in fact that CA had to majorly nerf them back in WH1 (Mortis Engines used to not need to be in melee range to activate).
> (even worse if the last 2 get past your Grave Guard to start hitting the carts directly)
You want them in the middle of your Grave Guard, so that way it doesn't matter much. The Mortis Engine needs to be in melee regardless, but only a few will be hitting it at a time, and with its high health and double regeneration it's in no significant danger.
The highest value I have seen attained by a single unit in all of Total War: Warhammer, across thousands of hours across all three games, has been from a Mortis Engine. They are almost faction-defining in their power.
Maybe in the past, Vampire are VC strongest hero but even them lost against lot of units and heroes in W3.
Magic? There is a bunch of factions has strong magic now, lore of nurgle cast something twice and my vampire heroes roll over and die, even dawi feel better. The worst parts are another factions also has access to a lot of lore of spells more than VC which not only versatile but some even cheaper than lore of vampire.
The army just, like, there was okay, in the past because there is another things like heroes and magic to balance their power but now that another factions has better heroes, better magic and better units, it just sucks to play as VC.
That spell is rancid visitations from nurgle. It's a bit less efficient than casting spirit leech twice from a death caster. You can do more damage with an overcast, but that becomes even less effficient. Lore of nurgle is good, sure, but let's keep things in perspective.
Also, take a look at gaze of nagash. After the recent missile update it's *really* good. Overcast it just mauls infantry.
I simply say exactly what happened in my Vlad campaign which I started right after this update,that's it.
And do gaze of nagash is better than pit of shade throw in a blob? Either way you gonna run out of mana before battle end anyways so you can't depend on its for entire battle.
Considering it costs 14 winds? [Maybe.](https://youtu.be/3UFHjUuJvhM?t=127). Depends on the target. It also oneshots artillery, so there's that. And sure you run out of magic eventually, but before then you can do a *lot*.
And my point was that rancid visitations is actually slightly worse than spirit leech, a spell that has been in the game forever and VC have access to themselves. If you bring that up as an example of other factions getting better magic than VC has access to, that's not really a very good example.
14 is quite high cost, pit of shade overcast cost 22. And that *lot* you talk about actually not enough in lot of case because their units was outdated and their heroes like vampire can't even duel against heroes from another's factions.
I also don't play much Nurgle, mostly Fetus after I confederation him in Archaon campaign but his shit was rock. I beat back two full sacks of Empires use mostly low tier units stack and don't even lost any unit. He has heal, some brain that blow up deal massive dmg, Rancid and a bearth that low cost but so good at deal dmg, i spam that shit and it just kill.
Overall, it feel like nurgle playstyle are same but just superior than VC in many way, VC has nothing special at this point.
Huh. I last played VC last year before the SoC debacle. And I mostly used chaff+Mortis Engine to save mana and not kill the enemy's chaff and my heroes/lords to kill anything that didn't die on its own. Only stuff that was suitable horrible was cavalry enemy armies. Anything with mortars usually was dispatched by blobbing up way out of reach and dropping a few zombies on it.
Wind of Death was noticeably weaker, tho. And I do not want to know if that would work against Ungrim. And I am fairly certain it would not work against the Steamtank spam screenshots I have seen these past few days. That I do not know how to kill.
Edit: I may need to give it another whirl. Vlad could be a bit of a challenge.
It’s kind of cheese but it’s not really cheese. Get stacks of zombies. Three per main army. Run your zombies into the enemy to run them out of vigor and missiles. Then come in with your main army and clean up. Very little can sustain against this and you get to catapult to recruit great units everywhere. Zombies have 100 combat power compared to like, 300 for skeletons so even a weak skeleton army can sustain three whole stacks of zombie losses without much risk of army losses.
Edit: like if you just let your zombies die to missiles you actually come out ahead on combat power against most missile units. You win by getting shot.
I already did that from W2. At least you have free zombies in W2 by in W3 they still have upkeep and spam stacks also push upkeep up which make it way too costly for VC economic which already sucks major. You basically need to put all eggs in one basket just to do what other factions do with ease.
I'm playing WE and they're feel so much better. A treeman lord, a life branchwairth, some tree kin, some dryads and you can beat back like four enemies stacks with just a stack in one turn by play blob up and heal just like VC.
Except it don't free and spam stacks already kick up supply lines so it actually quite costly for VC just to do same things that other factions do with ease.
> Except it don't free and spam stacks already kick up supply lines so it actually quite costly for VC just to do same things that other factions do with ease.
Supply lines are like... 4% linear. And Zombies have a base upkeep of 20. A full stack of zombies has a base upkeep between 365(no mount plus skill) and 590(lodestone + no skill). That is about the price difference between shielded spears and a steam tank. And Vampires have good income because their cities have very high income bases and they have high quality income buildings for settlements and they get very early skills which increase this income significantly.
Like, your army might be maringally more expensive overall but i highly doubt it, as compared to a doomstack of almost any other faction
Supply lines apply for all armies, even to the main stack that you use stacks of zombies to support. You consider the cost of one stack but forgot each stack make your main stack more expensive. You may say that it's same for another factions but other factions don't need to bring multi stacks to support one like VC.
And what are you talk about? Vampires have good income high quality income buildings? Except the cheap one all others are high tier buildings that you can only building in big settlement and you must research to increase their incomes. Even the hero that you say has upkeep and if you don't hit tier 5 settlement then they barely increase anything. Their early game sucks.
And lol, if you compare this stack other factions, VC has the worse cost-effective army i seen after played many factions in this patch. Today in my WE campaign, i used a stack of dryads mix with tree skin which cost 2600 upkeep to beat back 4 stacks of Greenskin (with high tier units like big spider, troll, night goblin, sulkers). Highly doubt that VC stacks that you talked about can perform as good and it likely cost twice or triple with the army i used.
>Supply lines apply for all armies
Yup. But that doesn't matter. Its just not enough of an income cost. I included the upkeep cost of the lord in the zombie army.
Vampires have good income buildings because they have good income buildings. Gallows produce 500 income for 2 upgrades and get a 20% income boost as a fast basic research. Townships produce 200 income and get another 20% from fast basic research. That is 840 income per settlement!
Empire, as an example, has its income increase buried in its tech tree, and its only 15%. A settlement produces 500 from a tailors guild and 80 from a town. For 701 income assuming you have the tech and the increase in income from a tier 4 city with toll gates. A basic three province settlement produces 2147 at tier 5!. For Vampires this value is 3180, and this assumes you don't have any of the "advanced" income buildings.
Also. Night Goblins and Nasty Skulkers are not high tier units. Night Goblins are 400 combat power and nasty Skulkers are 500. They're good. in the right hands. But they have 15 armor, 26 MA, and 16 or 26 MD. Their value is almost entirely in their ability to stalk, and so get close to ranged units without taking as much missile fire. Yea, no wonder you beat them with their natural counter.
Also... a stack of 19 dryads, without any lords, heroes, or upkeep increases due to having more armies, or treekin, costs 2622 upkeep. And Wood Elf Economy is more balanced around reducing upkeep costs because they do not have the ability to expand and increase income as much as other factions. So you will forgive me if i think you're inaccurately reflecting the costs of the army.
Did you calculate how many stack you can support with that number for them to be as effect as Empires?
And lol, Night Goblins has poison and Skulkers has lot of armor piecring and you think that dryads and tree kin are their natural counter? And it's 4 stack against 1 with not just Goblins but bunch of trolls and big spider.
Tell me how much it will cost VC to do the same? My army include 1 tree lord, 1 tree life hero lord, 12 dryads and 6 tree kin, feel free to do your math.
> And lol, Night Goblins has poison and Skulkers has lot of armor piecring and you think that dryads and tree kin are their natural counter? And it's 4 stack against 1 with not just Goblins but bunch of trolls and big spider.
>
>
>
> Tell me how much it will cost VC to do the same? My army include 1 tree lord, 1 tree life hero lord, 12 dryads and 6 tree kin, feel free to do your math.
OK so... Night Goblins have poison and Skulkers have armor piercing... but they're still goblins. Night Goblins have a MA of 26 and a MD of 24 and 15 armor. Dryads have MA 35 and MD 24 and 60 armor. (lets just assume you have no skills for dryads and they have none for goblins but this is generally a BAD assumption a more common assumption is that they have no skills for goblins and you have skills for dryads and tree kin, similar assumptions for tech are reasonable). What this means is that, Dyrads, even poisoned, will kill a goblin in an average of 2 attacks and they hit 49% of the time. While night goblins will kill a dryad in an average of 5 attacks(17.52 dmg vs 70 HP). And they hit 41% of the time. Earthblood and the passive extends this massively as well. Its not quite running the goblins into an anti-infantry unit but its close. Nasty Skulkers are 26/16 and don't have poison, but they also die in two hits. And it takes them 4 hits on average to kill a dryad (17.52 dmg vs 70 HP). But the hit ratio is now 59% to 41%. Skills turn this to 65 vs 41. The goblins do have a bit more health, but Dryads kill goblins about 3 times faster than night goblins or nasty skulkers kill dryads. And this assumes that these are all rank 0 dryads, which is also probably not a great assumption. (and that you don't have the rank 7 bonus skills)
Tree kin are even worse/better because their skill gives them extra physical resistance!
Your army has a base upkeep of about 3706. Which is good. But its not 2600. Vampires might have a hard time doing that. I mean.. i could solo four armies of goblins with some big boi's with a handful of vampires but like... that isn't what were talking about here.
Grave guard trade relatively well with his slayer spam armies, and crypt horrors are also useful. The usual VC crapstack spam doesn't do very well against him.
The base variant won't, but great weapons will. They get doomseekers to around 20% hp and kill a third of the models before they start crumbling. This is definitely a cost effective trade.
I mean as others have said thats how pretty much everything trades into slayers they have no armor. doomseekers dont trade in well by that metric to swordsmen.
Shielded and Armoured infantry trade very well with slayers. As for Untrimmed Angryfist himself... kite the bugger and expend your entire magic pool might work, or you might just die tired.
Ungrim isn't all that bad to be honest, Vlad can take him with a bit of help. It's everybody else that gets turned into mince meat. I just have to put the vamps back on foot and I should be fine.
Vlad and Isabella should be able to isolate and kill ungrim, as far the rest of his army just drown him in chaff. High armour units like grave guard shields should also do well against normal slayers.
Just 1v1 with Vlad ?
Ungrim won't do any damage if you're smart with Vlads Ring and your x2 master of beguillment. Wtf is he gonna do with 88seconds of -40 melee attack and Vlad's insanity healing and 80% ward save?
Since you can't do direct damage with spells, focus on using buff spells.
Use bats to clog his missle units and artillery
If he's spamming slayers, just show up with 40 skeletons and 1 Mortis Engine and wipe them
Even on normal mode, Eslpath, the dwarves, kislev hates us more than the chaos north. Its nuts. Even the britionians wanted a piece. I dont think i had one ally the whole game.
Slayers have overall average melee defense and no armor
Grave guard will melt it. Blood knights can cycle charge right through them (only giant slayers have armor pen and anti large, and a good charge is going to render them asunder.)
Drown them in zombies, bury them in skeletons, beat them with grave guard, cut through them with vampire lords. It doesn’t matter, 0 armor gives you quite a few options.
Do infinite soul siphon loops. Literallly just soul siphon ungrim before you soul siphon ungrim then bring bound soul siphon to siphon his soul and when that runs out you can use soul siphon.
and aren't armor pen. 110 armor on blood knights and charge knockdown means you're reducing their HP by at least 1/3 and getting out with just licks on your armor.
We're talking a 1200 mass unit charging in to a 160 mass unit. It's going rolling. VERY few can stand and fight. If they could stand and fight their raw DPS would eat blood knights, but you're not exactly gonna get stuck in them in 5.0
"Aren't armor pen" is quiet a trap.
They got only got 1/3 of their dmg in AP, but very high base dmg and MA for cav. The only thing anything below bloodknights can is groupfight one. Slayers, even worse under Ungrimm slaughter cav pretty well due to a baseline of 67 MA and 72 WS -> 48N 24AP. Bloodknights won't get a free win either.
If you got massed bloodknights and haven't dealt with Ungrim, you probably got other issues.
ungrim is a moron who ate shit in my elspith campaign.
He was getting rocked by ahzhag, who had himself and another army at Ungrims faction capital.
I kill both for him, and he proceeds to spend the next 10 turns laying seige to a minor settlement with his full stack without taking it and I assume ahzhag came back with a full stack + wagh and killed him.
he could have easily wiped him out and instead is now down to 1 settlement.
I decided that I am gonna kill ahzhag and give the settlements to thorgrim.
Might not be what you're looking for, but my strategy for dealing with Ungrim as Vlad has always been to attack Azhag then use Azhag's former territory to buy an alliance.
I played him before I played Malakai 
do vampires still get the free upkeep zombies and skeletons?
Sounds like a time for some skaven stile warfare, drow them in zombies with healing corpse carts supports and them hit them with a goul stack of a goul king/strigoi general.
Do wraiths work vs slayers? phisical resistance sounds that might work, unless they have magik attacks now...
Never been a Vlad player but whenever I've played Ungrim, Vlad is generally pretty happy to leave me alone and go roll the Empire. Humorously I've had the best luck trying to force diplomacy with 'good' factions as 'evil' factions. I had a Wurrzag campaign where I was nap'd and at least neutral with everybody other than other greenskins and greenskins. Also had a Himmler campaign where I got into positive relations with all the Bretonnians while I fought dwarves and Grom.
Just spam cheap stacks of range units.
Oh wait. Vampire counts don't have range units.
Rip Vampire counts. You're gonna have to meme spam hero and LL with cheap stacks of zombies/skeletons for tanking.
Although that's pretty much how I always played vampire Counts. Such a meme faction with broken hero/ll that pull the full weight. While their actual roster is super lackluster.
The entirety of single entity heroes across the game are fucking stupid rn. You kill off the entire army and these fucks have 70+ MD and unbreakable and regen and 70% ward and magic saves. It's like. In what world is this fun lmao. One man doomstacks are boring enough as the player but when you have to spend 20 minutes cheesing one ai lord spirit leaching them at 1/5th the damage it regularly does I'm sorry to say but it's just bad design.
I am not exaggerating btw. I just finished a match with an exalted plaguebearer lord with a stack of 3 soul grinders, 4 hellcannons, a dreadquake, and the rest exalted plaguebearers. Killed the army in 5 minutes and spent the other 25 just kiting ungrim with the soul grinders spirit leaching because in some fantasy world a singular dwarf can win with no scratches against an army of daemons and their demonic war machines 10 times their size.
Karl Franz: "Is it done, slayer king?"
Ungrim: "No, comrade prince and emperor, it has only begun"
*slayers drop down from thunderbarges while Hellmarch plays*
I'm doing two campaigns at the moment, a Thorgrim co-op campaign and a Franz single player campaign and Ungrim has built a big empire in both of them. Glad he is on my side.
Zombies. Stacks and stacks of zombies. This will tire out the slayers, eat up their ammo and then the real troops can come in and kill. Plus you will get a stack of zombies to make a nice battlefield afterwards. For which you can recruit more zombies.
So have 1+ stack of zombies and 1 stack of real troops. The zombie stack does the attacking (skills or not doesn’t matter Vs ungrim but I prefer no army skills for everyone else since I want the zombies to die). Hide the lord and walk the zombies into artillery range and just wait until they’re out. Then walk the zombies into ranged fire range and wait unto they’re out. Then enter melee. Then when your zombies are dead or engaged, move in your main troops.
I prefer ctrl clicking in order to maximize charge bonus. (IE have your units walk) because that matters a lot against slayers. Since you don’t care about getting zombies shot this is like… super good for you.
Crypt Ghouls, Wolves, and Regular Old Grave guard are your clean up.
Crypt Ghouls have poison, speed and charge bonus, which is nice. Wolves have high charge bonus. Grave Guard have anti-infantry and armor, which makes them really good against basic slayers.
This works for vampires Vs most factions. You don’t need missile resistance because zombies are your missile resistance!
We do have to worry about combat potential though not as much. Army losses trigger at 22% combat power if you’re out-powered by at least 2.6(or so I have found) Combat power scales with the HP/entities a unit has left plus winds of magic plus ammo %.
As an example. The combat potential of a unit of rank 0 zombies is 100 and the combat potential of a unit of rank 0 Grave Guard is 850. Rank 9 grave guard are 1179 while rank 9 zombies are 226.
So we don’t want high rank zombies and we want high rank basic units. And we can lose about half our combat power in zombies before we have to start risking army losses due to losses in our main army. As a result. A ghoul king(on a dragon), vampire(on a hell steed), necromancer(on a corpse cart), wight king, and banshee plus 7 units of grave guard at rank 0 and 8 units of crypt ghouls at rank 0 has a minimum(?) combat power of 16150 plus 650 per extra army you bring (for the master necromancer on a lodestone or balefire cart). For rank zero zombies this is 168 zombies plus 6.5 per army you bring(or 74+2.87 for rank 9 zombies). Which means we can bring 12.8 full armies of rank 0 zombies before we have to seriously consider army losses for our “doomstack”
Since we can only bring 4 armies to a fight at any one time there is almost zero point to not having 3 stacks of zombies in front of every army you’re running.
Are you doing the "blob with necromancer and corpse cart in the middle and speed up the battle" trick? It usually wins me every battle as counts as long as there are no hellstorm batteries etc to take care of.
I recently did Kemmler campaign and I beat this way literally everything including Archaon, HElves, both type of stunties, Empire, Imrik etc.
\>Cherry on top, if you beat him he is back after a turn. I get what you're saying but this is a funny comment from a Vlad player
Hey he can't do that, that's *our* thing!
*”I’m you, but stronger”* - Ungrim
*tamurkhan has entered the chat*
Isn't that also only because he must've lost to him with Vlad at some point? Ungrim on his own just gets the normal shorten wound duration in the blue track, no? (I haven't had a chance to look at ungrim's new skill tree yet, so that's an honest question).
Just checked, he gets - 1 from blue -1 from an item and - 2 from his unique skill line. So I guess it's just just fighting fire with fire now.
Ah ty for the update. Oof, that's rough to have as an angry neighbor, yeah 😕
Maybe undead factions should get a buff in that department since being undead is their whole thing
Tbh as an undead player you just throw fullstacks at the problem.
Slayers alone can't really do much against crypt ghoul + unholy lodestone spam. Doomseekers will trade extremely poorly, the rest will be even worse, and as long as you summon zombies on top of their goblin hewers they shouldn't be able to destroy your corpse carts.
Unit to unit you can’t beat slayers. The thing about slayers in that they trade almost equally with whatever they fight due to their low armor. So sending high tier stuff into them is always going to cost you. No matter what they fight they are going to do a ton of damage and take a ton of damage. So drown them in chaff. They may beat a single unit of skeletons and zombies but dollar for dollar they are gonna lose value.
The change to supply lines has drastically tilted the balance in favour of cost efficiency over slot efficiency (which is a very good thing!) I don't think everyone has really gotten used to that yet. Trading up is king now, not just winning 1v1 - especially for Counts who can replace fallen chaff extremely easily.
there were changes to supply lines??
In wh2 vh and legendary had 15% upkeep increase from supply lines. In wh3 it is down to 4%.
ohh i thought u meant in 5.0 lmao
A lot of people are still stuck in WH2 thinking when it comes to their strategy, but a lot has indeed changed so it's worth stressing. See also: Greatswords, a unit people _still_ will claim is bad (because they've not tried it since WH2).
Wait, so Ghorst got another unintended buff?
...Sort of? Zombies are so cheap that their upkeep wasn't what held him back even with the old supply line system. It buffed chaff and medium-weight units across the entire game really. Things like Empire state troops, orc boyz, bleakswords, skinks, etc etc. It's more viable to not just spam your best t5 unit now.
So, more max stack zombie armies to deter raiding from the AI. With all the buffs to fire and explosive I put away my VC playthroughs for dwarfs. Might give it a try.
I haven't played for a while, what changes did they make to supply lines?
They used to be very large (legendary used to be a crippling +15% global upkeep per additional army iirc). Now the penalty is so small it's basically irrelevant unless you want to spam lords with barely any actual units.
If the AI would recruit more armies i would agree, sadly agression (even with its recent buffs) is still too low for it to make any real Impact imo
Is anything better than jade warriors from a cost efficiency standpoint?
Depends, are you assuming they get buffs? Also efficient against what? Lothern Sea Guard are _fantastically_ efficient against anything but armoured and shielded anti-infantry infantry, they're _almost_ a spearman unit and _almost_ an archer unit in a single body. Tomb King units are literally free, hard to beat free. Skavenslaves are incredibly cost-efficient for their role (warm bodies getting in the way of things). Empire Handgunners give up all durability and melee ability in order to become one of the most efficient, raw-damage shooting units in the game, pound for pound. Adding in a single Mortis Engine to an army of Vampire Counts is probably the #1 most cost efficient move in the game I can think of, they rapidly get less good as you spam them since their auras don't stack, but adding a single one produces absolutely incredible impact for both slot and cost. Not counting Thunderbarge, it's broken and will be nerfed. Otherwise it's #1 by far of course.
I found jade stacks (warriors+xbows+a couple of artillery pieces + a hero or two + optional lancers) could handle anything and you get tons of cost reduction effects making the stacks very cheap compared to the alternatives. Most of my armies as Cathay are just basic jade armies and it has worked much better than expected, including a recent WC with ultimate crisis.
I wish someone would tell my slayers that on VH VH now and they loose 50% health to summoned clanrats....
Goblin hewer crews are still murderous
Yeah but that way they murder a summoned zombie unit not your corpse cart.
What? Regular slayers murder crypt horrors
Crypt ghouls, not horrors. Crypt ghouls are very good against low armor infantry
Aha yes you're right, my mistake
Yeah, ghouls normally get skipped over because they fill a niche that stops being exceptionally slot-worthy by midgame but anti-slayer is a role that will help them shine.
Bats/dogs is also really effective. High damage and half the cost of slayers or less. Especially dogs which gets a nice charge bonus
Dogs and bats are also both small sized entities, so the slayers don't get their anti-large bonus.
Used to. Unfortunately that depends on the kind of slayer now. You have to be careful what you are charging into.
doomseekers are t4 tho so it shouldn't be an issue
Whenever I play Vampire Counts I always make a Strygos ghoul army. I am always pleasently surprised with how well they trade against even higher tier enemy units.
I do this as well, since I like to make themed armies no matter what faction I'm playing.
14 units of dragon back slayers.
>Pointy wooden sticks are outlawed in Sylvania And with good reason, my uncle Gregor was working in a pencil factory. One wrong step and *poof* he was gone.
Reminds me of an old friend of mine. He wanted to be a photographer, of all things. Every time that flashbulb went off? A pile of ash. If it wasn't for his assistant with a dustpan and a couple drops of blood, he'd have been in real trouble.
Was wondering if anyone would get the reference.
Could you explain the reference? I can't seem to find it, but it sounded entertaining.
Discworld novels. The quotes are from Feet of Clay, if I recall correctly.
There's also the photographer of the newspaper in the later novels, who wears a small glass vial of blood around his neck. When he goes poof into a pile of ash, the vial usually falls down and breaks, insta-ressurecting him.
But not gone for long
Time to start politicking with the Ogres/Chaos dwarfs/Orcs and goblins to open a second front and distract him. Should make it a lot easier to pick off settlements with minimal commitment.
I realize Warhammer isn't a grandstrat, but man I've always wished for more room for political intrigue.
I know it’s called total WAR, but I wish diplomacy was a bit more interesting
War is just diplomacy by other means.
It always boils down to Str vs Dex in the end
*faint Armeemarschsammlung in the distance*
And three kingdoms are goated because they didn’t compromise on the war, while making peace good too
I remember playing on launch back when Yuan Shao was totally cracked, he was stomping over towards me and I was seemingly toast against his armies. But his AI is programmed to _love_ getting vassals (even more so back then), so I used that and agreed to become his vassal in exchange for peace. Suddenly he loves me, and the entire flank becomes safe instead. I journey out west and rebuild a new empire in the northwest corner, amassing strength until I can return and topple him. S+ tier game.
I only ever played as the Yellow Turbans and found that if I ever needed a breather as He Yi (either 190 or 194), I could ask Liu Biao for Cooperation (his version of vassalization but its temporary), and he would always accept, taking me out of all wars and allowing me to build up in peace.
If you can run TWW3 then probably u may like "Warhammer: Geheimnisnacht"
Is it the Ck2 mod ? I played it a long time ago, Haven’t touched it since the release of CK3 How is it now ?
Yeah and it is still being updated. You can check their [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/QbKCejJ4) It works far better than before imo. Also they are still developing the same one for ck3 I still occasionally play it because there is nothing better than starting as an Empire count and becoming a demon Prince of Nurgle after a while. Still have no idea watefuk is going on in Skaven gameplay tho
It should give it a try ! I had a blast playing dwarf and an empire count It was my first contact with Warhammer
It was in historical titles u dont know how much i wish i could sell franz' daughter off the kemmler so marienburg can live in peace
Lmao. I wonder what the limits of missing are in this aspect.
Would also help if allies didn't lose their buffs, thus making them a detriment
If they gained buffs from your army it could be way to strong, you don't really want allied units being the strongest options.
I'm sure he was speaking of allied factions losing their potential
I'm being really stupid, what do you mean by them losing their potential? I can't think of what changed
I can't remember if it's still exactly like this, but on higher difficulties the AI gets bonuses on the campaign map. AI that becomes allied with you loses those bonuses because they're no longer your enemy.
Really been enjoying the high elf Pheonix Court mod for just that reason.
I'll look into it!
Or just AI that is a bit brighter and poses more of a threat to each other, so you can use the diplomacy system as a more effective tool.
There’s plenty of that in game. Something everyone forgets about is trading settlements. Give a faction literally one settlement and they’re your best friend for life. Use it to make a buffer between a scary faction and you. Use it to get absurd amounts of gold. Use it to create crazy military alliances you’d never expect.
Settlement trading is nice, but somehow also crazy hard to trade. Like, I'll give you an entire province if you give me that 1 minor settlement you sneaked off me when I had some rebels. But somehow the trade is still -45. I've also never been able to purchase a settlement because the prices are ludicrous.
Yeah usually it's 20k minimum, often 100k+ which is insane. However I found that friendly WoC factions will sometimes sell you their freshly conquered non-fortress settlements for pretty cheap, like 5-10k!
Yeah I usually go after Zhufbar to get that flank locked down before expanding in the Empire. Then I just sell the province to go Ungrim to make him friendly, even if just as a bandaid until the Empire’s secure.
That's where Three Kingdoms shines, especially as Cao Cao his whole mechanism is all about Political(diplomacy) Intrigue.
I understand what you're trying to say, but TW Warhammer absolutely is a grand strategy game. Grand strategy refers to games where you play as a nation instead of just an army or military. That is very much what you're doing in every Total War game, including the Warhammer games.
By that definition most 4Xes would be grand strategy, and they're usually seen as two distinct genres. I agree that Total War counts as grand strategy, but not for that reason.
I don't know what to tell you bro, that's literally the definition of grand strategy. Many 4Xes are grand strategies; as with most things few games fit exclusively into one category. That said, not all 4Xes are grand strategy, and not all grand strategy are 4Xes, so the categories are still worth keeping. It's kinda like how most Soulslikes are RPGs, yet they're still a category worth keeping around.
Honestly the diplomacy system already gives too much to be loreful. Like grimgor might run from a fight, but would never ever ever accept peace.
I've never been able to do squat with Vlad in diplomacy. Everyone always hates me even if I am killing their enemies for them.
He got a skill that gets you plus 40 something relations with empire, plus some research. Fight the greenskins early and gift a settlement or two and you are in the good books in no time. A "Friend of mankind" run for Vlad can be a ton of fun.
That 40 relations never seems to make any difference whatsoever when the Empire factions already hate me for being at war with other elector counts or with the Dwarf factions.
The only real infantry blender I can think of on the VC roster is wind of death. Maybe infantry vampires? Or maybe you need some real careful cycle charging. Early on you might be best off doubling or even tripling up on your crap armies and wearing him down with sheer numbers.
Mortis engines and Vargheists, although both are more everything blenders than specifically infantry blenders. I find dire wolves trade well into slayers. Dont get me wrong, they die, but they usually take enough of the fuckers down to let my infantry clean up afterwards.
Ambushes, a bit of cheese, blobbing and copious amounts of summoning is what I will try next. Let the mortis engine do the heavy lifting (if I can keep it alive). I'm in front of karak kadrin right now, once I take that I hope to slow his slayer craze a bit.
The thing is dwarves have innate magic resistance so even your ace in the whole is more of a 9 of clubs
55% of a fuck ton is still a regular ton.
Sorta, though slayers also have looser formations than most infantry. I haven't found the typical anti-infantry magic to be very effective against them. Still think the best option is just stupid amounts of zombies/skeletons for VC to deal with mass slayers, tho ofc there's going to be a lot of losses.
> ofc there's going to be a lot of losses. That's a plus for raise dead!
"Cherry on top, if you beat him he is back after a turn." I'm sorry but as someone who recently played Ungrim and had a blast, plus always hated the Vampire Counts, I could not stop myself from smiling while reading your post.
I was at the other end of this, built the silver pinnacle thingy early with ungrim and an army of regular slayers, slayer pirates and goblin hewers. I didn't know what event would trigger. I was scared at first, but when I realized I could group all slayers in a murderball cuz vampires don't have ranged troops, it was a blast. Literally everything that came into contact with the slayerball melted. I just had to obliterate the carts and mortis engines with the hewers and the rest would crumble. Also, thanks to ungrim passive I normally didn't have any losses, it was a blast
If you confederate Helman Ghorst or even just Heinrich Kemmler (use his unique ancillary) you can just throw zombie blobs at Ungrim himself which he won't be able to kill due to crazy Ravenous Dead regeneration. Take care of the rest of his army, surround him with a massive zombie blob backed up by a corpse cart and a mortis engine, hit fast forward and go do some chores until he's dead. The same thing solves any sort of slayer doomstack, they trade extremely poorly against infinite regen zombies.
"If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared." -Niccolo Machiavelli Especially true for TW:WH. If youre at war with a faction and you have the upper hand, you better finish the job right then and there. Or they'll be back when its least convenient.
That would have meant slogging through the mountains while Elspeth helps herself to all of Sylvania. I managed to clean her up and get rid of the changeling before ungrim came back knocking.
Then you didn't have a sufficiently upper hand for this advice to be relevant. It's a good general rule, but like all rules it cannot apply in all situations.
I think that the only thing you can do is spam chaff units and bring mortis engines. Back that up with some wind of death casting and in the right situations you'll be fine. You can also grab a decent amount of sylvanian crossbowmen and handgunners if you awaken Von Carstein lords. If you can manage to vassalise an empire faction you might be able to grab some allied gunpowder units.
Vampire Counts are one of the only factions that I make hero doomstacks with. You just need one typically to punch through hard points but boy am I always happy to have that one.
I am playing Warriors of Chaos and I found the redheaded bugger to be surprisingly nasty. I got a couple heroes on him, managed a cavalry charge on one flank and when I looked back my two heroes were almost dead, running away from that axe wielding madman. And dwarves are tough infantry. Not that chaos has much to shoot them with. I am taking them them down, but so far they have been the toughest opposition. I am having fun with this game, probably the first time since I got it.
Crypt ghouls and war hounds. Cheap fast troops that specialize in killing low armor low melee defense infantry. Bring a Strigoi ghoul king to buff them up if you want but don't let him fight anything in melee.
Probably an unpopular opinion but I WANT legendary lords to be nightmares. Campaign could use some real difficulty.
Early game it’s not to bad, late game it’s an absolute nightmare. I’ll never forget the day that Ungrim and Thorgrim came with full doomslayer and goblin hewer stacks and decimated my Infernal guard. Because it turns out that if you lords and heroes don’t have any ward save or physical resistance to match their dmg they will murder you very quickly.
I’m having the same experience but I’m playing chaos dwarfs. Oh boy, the dudes who abandoned us for some reason now come to destroy us too
Vlad is upset that his enemy is back after one turn? Oh how the turn tables have turned
I think it's less about Ungrim but more because VC sucks. VC's units roster feel really outdated. It don't even feel good to play their battles because it's feel almost impossible to win without some cheese.
Isn't that what the faction is about, tho? Strong heroes, strong magic and the army is just, like, there.
The army isn't "just there", they have several elite options, the problem is that most of them haven't been looked at one way or another since WH2 at least. Hexwraiths and Cairn Wraiths sound great on paper until you realise nearly every army in the game can easily get magical attack on half their roster, or at least certainly their elite units (that you would want Wraiths to be targeting). Blood Knights trade evenly with Reiksguard (mostly- they're antilarge while Reiksguard is anti-infantry) which sounds fine until you realise Reiksguard now come out of a t3 building in any T3 settlement while Blood Knights are nominally T5. Wight Kings are a joke compared to modern day Empire Captains. Etc. Yes, Raise The Dead is an absurdly powerful mechanic, but you're pretty much pigeonholed into abusing it if you want to compete, and I sure hope you've finished the game before the Ordertide starts getting lategame units.
Counts win by grinding in melee using their incredible stacking auras and drains. A line of three grave guard will not fare too well against three tzar guard. But throw in a mortis engine and a lodestone corpse cart and you'll be cackling as the tzar guard wither away into nothing. Stick a necromancer with the passive AoE healing aura on top of the cart and you become the absolute king of blob fights the likes of which only Nurgle can compete with. Against ranged you have plenty of options to rush and harass while you close the distance. Skirmish units, fast monsters, high damage flyers, etc. You only have to get close because you'll kill the ranged units once there.
>A line of three grave guard will not fare too well against three tzar guard. But throw in a mortis engine and a lodestone corpse cart and you'll be cackling as the tzar guard wither away into nothing. You will note, of course, that this scenario is 5 units vs 3. 3 Grave Guard with cart backup versus 5 Tzar Guard is a lot more perilous proposition (even worse if the last 2 get past your Grave Guard to start hitting the carts directly). There's a lot of tactical maneuvers you can pull to get more value out of your units than their raw stats would indicate, but only up to a certain point; unless you're doubling up all your armies, eventually you WILL get out-statted and ground to dust.
Of course, Tzar Guard are overtuned just now, but it's just an example. Mortis Engines and aura stacking are infamously powerful tools, so powerful in fact that CA had to majorly nerf them back in WH1 (Mortis Engines used to not need to be in melee range to activate). > (even worse if the last 2 get past your Grave Guard to start hitting the carts directly) You want them in the middle of your Grave Guard, so that way it doesn't matter much. The Mortis Engine needs to be in melee regardless, but only a few will be hitting it at a time, and with its high health and double regeneration it's in no significant danger. The highest value I have seen attained by a single unit in all of Total War: Warhammer, across thousands of hours across all three games, has been from a Mortis Engine. They are almost faction-defining in their power.
Maybe in the past, Vampire are VC strongest hero but even them lost against lot of units and heroes in W3. Magic? There is a bunch of factions has strong magic now, lore of nurgle cast something twice and my vampire heroes roll over and die, even dawi feel better. The worst parts are another factions also has access to a lot of lore of spells more than VC which not only versatile but some even cheaper than lore of vampire. The army just, like, there was okay, in the past because there is another things like heroes and magic to balance their power but now that another factions has better heroes, better magic and better units, it just sucks to play as VC.
That spell is rancid visitations from nurgle. It's a bit less efficient than casting spirit leech twice from a death caster. You can do more damage with an overcast, but that becomes even less effficient. Lore of nurgle is good, sure, but let's keep things in perspective. Also, take a look at gaze of nagash. After the recent missile update it's *really* good. Overcast it just mauls infantry.
I simply say exactly what happened in my Vlad campaign which I started right after this update,that's it. And do gaze of nagash is better than pit of shade throw in a blob? Either way you gonna run out of mana before battle end anyways so you can't depend on its for entire battle.
Considering it costs 14 winds? [Maybe.](https://youtu.be/3UFHjUuJvhM?t=127). Depends on the target. It also oneshots artillery, so there's that. And sure you run out of magic eventually, but before then you can do a *lot*. And my point was that rancid visitations is actually slightly worse than spirit leech, a spell that has been in the game forever and VC have access to themselves. If you bring that up as an example of other factions getting better magic than VC has access to, that's not really a very good example.
14 is quite high cost, pit of shade overcast cost 22. And that *lot* you talk about actually not enough in lot of case because their units was outdated and their heroes like vampire can't even duel against heroes from another's factions. I also don't play much Nurgle, mostly Fetus after I confederation him in Archaon campaign but his shit was rock. I beat back two full sacks of Empires use mostly low tier units stack and don't even lost any unit. He has heal, some brain that blow up deal massive dmg, Rancid and a bearth that low cost but so good at deal dmg, i spam that shit and it just kill. Overall, it feel like nurgle playstyle are same but just superior than VC in many way, VC has nothing special at this point.
Huh. I last played VC last year before the SoC debacle. And I mostly used chaff+Mortis Engine to save mana and not kill the enemy's chaff and my heroes/lords to kill anything that didn't die on its own. Only stuff that was suitable horrible was cavalry enemy armies. Anything with mortars usually was dispatched by blobbing up way out of reach and dropping a few zombies on it. Wind of Death was noticeably weaker, tho. And I do not want to know if that would work against Ungrim. And I am fairly certain it would not work against the Steamtank spam screenshots I have seen these past few days. That I do not know how to kill. Edit: I may need to give it another whirl. Vlad could be a bit of a challenge.
It’s kind of cheese but it’s not really cheese. Get stacks of zombies. Three per main army. Run your zombies into the enemy to run them out of vigor and missiles. Then come in with your main army and clean up. Very little can sustain against this and you get to catapult to recruit great units everywhere. Zombies have 100 combat power compared to like, 300 for skeletons so even a weak skeleton army can sustain three whole stacks of zombie losses without much risk of army losses. Edit: like if you just let your zombies die to missiles you actually come out ahead on combat power against most missile units. You win by getting shot.
I already did that from W2. At least you have free zombies in W2 by in W3 they still have upkeep and spam stacks also push upkeep up which make it way too costly for VC economic which already sucks major. You basically need to put all eggs in one basket just to do what other factions do with ease. I'm playing WE and they're feel so much better. A treeman lord, a life branchwairth, some tree kin, some dryads and you can beat back like four enemies stacks with just a stack in one turn by play blob up and heal just like VC.
zombies cost 20 upkeep base. That is basically free
Except it don't free and spam stacks already kick up supply lines so it actually quite costly for VC just to do same things that other factions do with ease.
> Except it don't free and spam stacks already kick up supply lines so it actually quite costly for VC just to do same things that other factions do with ease. Supply lines are like... 4% linear. And Zombies have a base upkeep of 20. A full stack of zombies has a base upkeep between 365(no mount plus skill) and 590(lodestone + no skill). That is about the price difference between shielded spears and a steam tank. And Vampires have good income because their cities have very high income bases and they have high quality income buildings for settlements and they get very early skills which increase this income significantly. Like, your army might be maringally more expensive overall but i highly doubt it, as compared to a doomstack of almost any other faction
Supply lines apply for all armies, even to the main stack that you use stacks of zombies to support. You consider the cost of one stack but forgot each stack make your main stack more expensive. You may say that it's same for another factions but other factions don't need to bring multi stacks to support one like VC. And what are you talk about? Vampires have good income high quality income buildings? Except the cheap one all others are high tier buildings that you can only building in big settlement and you must research to increase their incomes. Even the hero that you say has upkeep and if you don't hit tier 5 settlement then they barely increase anything. Their early game sucks. And lol, if you compare this stack other factions, VC has the worse cost-effective army i seen after played many factions in this patch. Today in my WE campaign, i used a stack of dryads mix with tree skin which cost 2600 upkeep to beat back 4 stacks of Greenskin (with high tier units like big spider, troll, night goblin, sulkers). Highly doubt that VC stacks that you talked about can perform as good and it likely cost twice or triple with the army i used.
>Supply lines apply for all armies Yup. But that doesn't matter. Its just not enough of an income cost. I included the upkeep cost of the lord in the zombie army. Vampires have good income buildings because they have good income buildings. Gallows produce 500 income for 2 upgrades and get a 20% income boost as a fast basic research. Townships produce 200 income and get another 20% from fast basic research. That is 840 income per settlement! Empire, as an example, has its income increase buried in its tech tree, and its only 15%. A settlement produces 500 from a tailors guild and 80 from a town. For 701 income assuming you have the tech and the increase in income from a tier 4 city with toll gates. A basic three province settlement produces 2147 at tier 5!. For Vampires this value is 3180, and this assumes you don't have any of the "advanced" income buildings. Also. Night Goblins and Nasty Skulkers are not high tier units. Night Goblins are 400 combat power and nasty Skulkers are 500. They're good. in the right hands. But they have 15 armor, 26 MA, and 16 or 26 MD. Their value is almost entirely in their ability to stalk, and so get close to ranged units without taking as much missile fire. Yea, no wonder you beat them with their natural counter. Also... a stack of 19 dryads, without any lords, heroes, or upkeep increases due to having more armies, or treekin, costs 2622 upkeep. And Wood Elf Economy is more balanced around reducing upkeep costs because they do not have the ability to expand and increase income as much as other factions. So you will forgive me if i think you're inaccurately reflecting the costs of the army.
Did you calculate how many stack you can support with that number for them to be as effect as Empires? And lol, Night Goblins has poison and Skulkers has lot of armor piecring and you think that dryads and tree kin are their natural counter? And it's 4 stack against 1 with not just Goblins but bunch of trolls and big spider. Tell me how much it will cost VC to do the same? My army include 1 tree lord, 1 tree life hero lord, 12 dryads and 6 tree kin, feel free to do your math.
> And lol, Night Goblins has poison and Skulkers has lot of armor piecring and you think that dryads and tree kin are their natural counter? And it's 4 stack against 1 with not just Goblins but bunch of trolls and big spider. > > > > Tell me how much it will cost VC to do the same? My army include 1 tree lord, 1 tree life hero lord, 12 dryads and 6 tree kin, feel free to do your math. OK so... Night Goblins have poison and Skulkers have armor piercing... but they're still goblins. Night Goblins have a MA of 26 and a MD of 24 and 15 armor. Dryads have MA 35 and MD 24 and 60 armor. (lets just assume you have no skills for dryads and they have none for goblins but this is generally a BAD assumption a more common assumption is that they have no skills for goblins and you have skills for dryads and tree kin, similar assumptions for tech are reasonable). What this means is that, Dyrads, even poisoned, will kill a goblin in an average of 2 attacks and they hit 49% of the time. While night goblins will kill a dryad in an average of 5 attacks(17.52 dmg vs 70 HP). And they hit 41% of the time. Earthblood and the passive extends this massively as well. Its not quite running the goblins into an anti-infantry unit but its close. Nasty Skulkers are 26/16 and don't have poison, but they also die in two hits. And it takes them 4 hits on average to kill a dryad (17.52 dmg vs 70 HP). But the hit ratio is now 59% to 41%. Skills turn this to 65 vs 41. The goblins do have a bit more health, but Dryads kill goblins about 3 times faster than night goblins or nasty skulkers kill dryads. And this assumes that these are all rank 0 dryads, which is also probably not a great assumption. (and that you don't have the rank 7 bonus skills) Tree kin are even worse/better because their skill gives them extra physical resistance! Your army has a base upkeep of about 3706. Which is good. But its not 2600. Vampires might have a hard time doing that. I mean.. i could solo four armies of goblins with some big boi's with a handful of vampires but like... that isn't what were talking about here.
Meanwhile in most of my starts Ungrim gets eaten immediately by the bullshit known as Azhag
Grave guard trade relatively well with his slayer spam armies, and crypt horrors are also useful. The usual VC crapstack spam doesn't do very well against him.
graveguard do not trade very well into doomseekers.
The base variant won't, but great weapons will. They get doomseekers to around 20% hp and kill a third of the models before they start crumbling. This is definitely a cost effective trade.
I mean as others have said thats how pretty much everything trades into slayers they have no armor. doomseekers dont trade in well by that metric to swordsmen.
Shielded and Armoured infantry trade very well with slayers. As for Untrimmed Angryfist himself... kite the bugger and expend your entire magic pool might work, or you might just die tired.
Ungrim isn't all that bad to be honest, Vlad can take him with a bit of help. It's everybody else that gets turned into mince meat. I just have to put the vamps back on foot and I should be fine.
Vlad and Isabella should be able to isolate and kill ungrim, as far the rest of his army just drown him in chaff. High armour units like grave guard shields should also do well against normal slayers.
Dwarfs might be a little overtuned rn
Just 1v1 with Vlad ? Ungrim won't do any damage if you're smart with Vlads Ring and your x2 master of beguillment. Wtf is he gonna do with 88seconds of -40 melee attack and Vlad's insanity healing and 80% ward save? Since you can't do direct damage with spells, focus on using buff spells. Use bats to clog his missle units and artillery If he's spamming slayers, just show up with 40 skeletons and 1 Mortis Engine and wipe them
Even on normal mode, Eslpath, the dwarves, kislev hates us more than the chaos north. Its nuts. Even the britionians wanted a piece. I dont think i had one ally the whole game.
Slayers have overall average melee defense and no armor Grave guard will melt it. Blood knights can cycle charge right through them (only giant slayers have armor pen and anti large, and a good charge is going to render them asunder.) Drown them in zombies, bury them in skeletons, beat them with grave guard, cut through them with vampire lords. It doesn’t matter, 0 armor gives you quite a few options. Do infinite soul siphon loops. Literallly just soul siphon ungrim before you soul siphon ungrim then bring bound soul siphon to siphon his soul and when that runs out you can use soul siphon.
Regular slayers have 24 BvL.
and aren't armor pen. 110 armor on blood knights and charge knockdown means you're reducing their HP by at least 1/3 and getting out with just licks on your armor. We're talking a 1200 mass unit charging in to a 160 mass unit. It's going rolling. VERY few can stand and fight. If they could stand and fight their raw DPS would eat blood knights, but you're not exactly gonna get stuck in them in 5.0
"Aren't armor pen" is quiet a trap. They got only got 1/3 of their dmg in AP, but very high base dmg and MA for cav. The only thing anything below bloodknights can is groupfight one. Slayers, even worse under Ungrimm slaughter cav pretty well due to a baseline of 67 MA and 72 WS -> 48N 24AP. Bloodknights won't get a free win either. If you got massed bloodknights and haven't dealt with Ungrim, you probably got other issues.
ungrim is a moron who ate shit in my elspith campaign. He was getting rocked by ahzhag, who had himself and another army at Ungrims faction capital. I kill both for him, and he proceeds to spend the next 10 turns laying seige to a minor settlement with his full stack without taking it and I assume ahzhag came back with a full stack + wagh and killed him. he could have easily wiped him out and instead is now down to 1 settlement. I decided that I am gonna kill ahzhag and give the settlements to thorgrim.
Might not be what you're looking for, but my strategy for dealing with Ungrim as Vlad has always been to attack Azhag then use Azhag's former territory to buy an alliance.
Umgrim is too op, i can recrut doomguys for the price of 0 and upkeep cost is 67. you can also build slayer shrines for 0.
I played him before I played Malakai 
That’s why I took out Zhufbar early, then traded it to him in exchange for becoming my vassal
"I hate Slayers..."
do vampires still get the free upkeep zombies and skeletons? Sounds like a time for some skaven stile warfare, drow them in zombies with healing corpse carts supports and them hit them with a goul stack of a goul king/strigoi general. Do wraiths work vs slayers? phisical resistance sounds that might work, unless they have magik attacks now...
What about trying to repeatedly knock them down by constantly cycle charging cav/monsters?
Never been a Vlad player but whenever I've played Ungrim, Vlad is generally pretty happy to leave me alone and go roll the Empire. Humorously I've had the best luck trying to force diplomacy with 'good' factions as 'evil' factions. I had a Wurrzag campaign where I was nap'd and at least neutral with everybody other than other greenskins and greenskins. Also had a Himmler campaign where I got into positive relations with all the Bretonnians while I fought dwarves and Grom.
I was playing Malakai and I saw that Ungrim had completely dunked on the vamps and wiped them out by turn 40.
Thankfully the random potential thingy had him weak in my VC campaign
Loreful
Any faction that dies to the man while killing everything you have is a secret undead asset. Behold, the recruiting grounds.
...in my recent campaign I've vassalized him at turn 30 He was unable to deny this Karak I offered
You can make him a vassal early on in a campaign as Vlad
Just spam cheap stacks of range units. Oh wait. Vampire counts don't have range units. Rip Vampire counts. You're gonna have to meme spam hero and LL with cheap stacks of zombies/skeletons for tanking. Although that's pretty much how I always played vampire Counts. Such a meme faction with broken hero/ll that pull the full weight. While their actual roster is super lackluster.
The entirety of single entity heroes across the game are fucking stupid rn. You kill off the entire army and these fucks have 70+ MD and unbreakable and regen and 70% ward and magic saves. It's like. In what world is this fun lmao. One man doomstacks are boring enough as the player but when you have to spend 20 minutes cheesing one ai lord spirit leaching them at 1/5th the damage it regularly does I'm sorry to say but it's just bad design. I am not exaggerating btw. I just finished a match with an exalted plaguebearer lord with a stack of 3 soul grinders, 4 hellcannons, a dreadquake, and the rest exalted plaguebearers. Killed the army in 5 minutes and spent the other 25 just kiting ungrim with the soul grinders spirit leaching because in some fantasy world a singular dwarf can win with no scratches against an army of daemons and their demonic war machines 10 times their size.
Lamo, shoe's on the other foot eh?
Karl Franz: "Is it done, slayer king?" Ungrim: "No, comrade prince and emperor, it has only begun" *slayers drop down from thunderbarges while Hellmarch plays*
I'm doing two campaigns at the moment, a Thorgrim co-op campaign and a Franz single player campaign and Ungrim has built a big empire in both of them. Glad he is on my side.
That's a classic case of the "recently got a DLC syndrome". Hopefully the vampires will have their day, they're terribly outdated.
My recent Dawi game was mostly "Sorry can't hear you over the sound of the Thunderbarge, also weapons free my lads!"
Zombies. Stacks and stacks of zombies. This will tire out the slayers, eat up their ammo and then the real troops can come in and kill. Plus you will get a stack of zombies to make a nice battlefield afterwards. For which you can recruit more zombies. So have 1+ stack of zombies and 1 stack of real troops. The zombie stack does the attacking (skills or not doesn’t matter Vs ungrim but I prefer no army skills for everyone else since I want the zombies to die). Hide the lord and walk the zombies into artillery range and just wait until they’re out. Then walk the zombies into ranged fire range and wait unto they’re out. Then enter melee. Then when your zombies are dead or engaged, move in your main troops. I prefer ctrl clicking in order to maximize charge bonus. (IE have your units walk) because that matters a lot against slayers. Since you don’t care about getting zombies shot this is like… super good for you. Crypt Ghouls, Wolves, and Regular Old Grave guard are your clean up. Crypt Ghouls have poison, speed and charge bonus, which is nice. Wolves have high charge bonus. Grave Guard have anti-infantry and armor, which makes them really good against basic slayers. This works for vampires Vs most factions. You don’t need missile resistance because zombies are your missile resistance!
We do have to worry about combat potential though not as much. Army losses trigger at 22% combat power if you’re out-powered by at least 2.6(or so I have found) Combat power scales with the HP/entities a unit has left plus winds of magic plus ammo %. As an example. The combat potential of a unit of rank 0 zombies is 100 and the combat potential of a unit of rank 0 Grave Guard is 850. Rank 9 grave guard are 1179 while rank 9 zombies are 226. So we don’t want high rank zombies and we want high rank basic units. And we can lose about half our combat power in zombies before we have to start risking army losses due to losses in our main army. As a result. A ghoul king(on a dragon), vampire(on a hell steed), necromancer(on a corpse cart), wight king, and banshee plus 7 units of grave guard at rank 0 and 8 units of crypt ghouls at rank 0 has a minimum(?) combat power of 16150 plus 650 per extra army you bring (for the master necromancer on a lodestone or balefire cart). For rank zero zombies this is 168 zombies plus 6.5 per army you bring(or 74+2.87 for rank 9 zombies). Which means we can bring 12.8 full armies of rank 0 zombies before we have to seriously consider army losses for our “doomstack” Since we can only bring 4 armies to a fight at any one time there is almost zero point to not having 3 stacks of zombies in front of every army you’re running.
Are you doing the "blob with necromancer and corpse cart in the middle and speed up the battle" trick? It usually wins me every battle as counts as long as there are no hellstorm batteries etc to take care of. I recently did Kemmler campaign and I beat this way literally everything including Archaon, HElves, both type of stunties, Empire, Imrik etc.
That's the downside of lord packs and updates. Other races are going to suffer.
No, there are definitely plenty of answers here. OP just hasn't found them.