Faction Thread 2: Vampire Counts

If you wanted to unify the vampires into a single faction, could you turn the bloodlines into traits? So, if they are 'born' from a faction leader, they have 100% chance of getting that trait, and if they are randomly spawned, they have equal chance of becoming one of the 4-5 clans ? Each could come with anti-traits of the other clans, preventing multiple bloodlines from appearing on one character. This way you would have a Kingdom comprised of multiuple vampire families, although i'm not sure if this makes sense Lore-wise.

Otherwise, the Von Carsteins do sound like the natural choice for the Vampire faction from what you ahve described.

The Lords would be the general units. I don't really see them as a 'unit' in their own right, since they would be far too few in number to actually form up a large unit. It would also be the only way we can have a unque model for the Vampire leaders. to show up against the rank and file.

As far as the magic goes, I am also nervous about making units of magic throwing warriors. There is a minimum unit size, and this would be a problem. There would be a handful of Necromancers at most in a an army...more would look wrong. If I can find a way to mess about with things to get around this, then I will.

I managed to fool RTW into letting me use a human skeleton in an elephant unit ( with invisible riders due to the lack of a saddle bone ) and this worked well for me. It greatly reduced the size of the unit. There were some issues...and I could not make the archers on the back fire ... but it's an avenue I can explore for magic firing units.

Having a massed rank of these is out though... just looks silly and unrealistic.

Originally Posted by DrZoidberg:
Lhamian vampires do not live in Lhamia any longer. They where expeled and queen Nefarata and her court resetled in Silver Pinnacle in the Worlds Edge mountains. She has built herself a palace and from there she sends out spies and vampire agents to infiltrate the courts of the Old World plotting her return. She has a vast army of Zombies that she uses for protection and all her generals are hot chicks. It's all on pages 6 and 7 in the Vampire Counts army book.

Hence why they should be in IMO :D They could just have the same unit as the other Vampire faction (Von Carstein ?), but with female generals.

Which would require their own culture, which are in short supply.

Originally Posted by Bwian:
The Lords would be the general units. I don't really see them as a 'unit' in their own right, since they would be far too few in number to actually form up a large unit. It would also be the only way we can have a unque model for the Vampire leaders. to show up against the rank and file.

As far as the magic goes, I am also nervous about making units of magic throwing warriors. There is a minimum unit size, and this would be a problem. There would be a handful of Necromancers at most in a an army...more would look wrong. If I can find a way to mess about with things to get around this, then I will.

I managed to fool RTW into letting me use a human skeleton in an elephant unit ( with invisible riders due to the lack of a saddle bone ) and this worked well for me. It greatly reduced the size of the unit. There were some issues...and I could not make the archers on the back fire ... but it's an avenue I can explore for magic firing units.

Having a massed rank of these is out though... just looks silly and unrealistic.

Maybe I'm totaly wrong here, but isn't Vampire Thralls just plain vampires, but belonging to the bottom rungs of vampire society. But they're not core units so we could drop them without losing the WH feel. My only real beef here, (and it is minor) is that it would be nice with a vampire faction where we've actually got some vampire units in battles we can play with.

Otherwise we're in full agreement. If we can't make something in the Warhammer world work well in the MTW2 engine, we should drop it.

Vampire thrall are single characters, theres no actual unit of vampires in the tabletop game, core or otherwise. The very most you could do without making stuff up is include them as officers but given the amount of unit models to be made that would be low priority.

Originally Posted by Casuir:
Vampire thrall are single characters, theres no actual unit of vampires in the tabletop game, core or otherwise. The very most you could do without making stuff up is include them as officers

But Warhammer battles are as a rule skirmishes. Tiny encounters between small numbers of troops. I think you'll have to scale it up a bit for MTW2. I could very well imagine units of Thralls in major battles. A Thrall is worth 10 times more points, (80p) than the common foot soldier, (8p). So it wouldn't be such a stretch to put them in squads of 20 and jack up the price.

It all comes down to what play style we want to have for the undead. Me personally I'd like to see a combination of crap and gold. Where the job of the garbage is to make sure the powerful units aren't outflanked or ganged up upon. As it is now the only powerful units Vampire Counts have are Blood Dragons and the general Vampire Lord. I'd rather have Vampire Thralls included into a von Carstein army than Blood Dragon. Just by looking at the story of Warhammer, it makes more sense.

Yes, I agree Blood Dragons look cooler.

Originally Posted by Casuir:
but given the amount of unit models to be made that would be low priority.

Ah, yes reality. What a nuisance it is :)

Well I think its better to wait until the armies are done and playtested before we start deciding they need units because they're unbalanced. Adding special characters as units is imo a bad idea unless its absolutely needed, you do it for one particular model and theres no excuse for not doing it for the rest. As for the scale thing, warmaster doesnt include thralls as a unit so I'm guess gw doesnt feel theyre needed either.

@ bwian, I notice Black Knights arent on the list, this intentional or an oversight?

Originally Posted by Casuir:
Well I think its better to wait until the armies are done and playtested before we start deciding they need units because they're unbalanced. Adding special characters as units is imo a bad idea unless its absolutely needed, you do it for one particular model and theres no excuse for not doing it for the rest. As for the scale thing, warmaster doesnt include thralls as a unit so I'm guess gw doesnt feel theyre needed either.

@ bwian, I notice Black Knights arent on the list, this intentional or an oversight?

Since we've got Wights in the list and Black knights simply are Wights on horses, (Nightmares) it does make sense to include them.

If by chance they will be included I threw together a Black Knight unit card description. I won't start crying if this doesn't get used.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

12) Black Knights

In the ancient times heroes where buried in mounds of earth and stone, in full battle gear and all their worldly wealth. These are raised with powerful magic and are called Wights. The spells to make them rise are so powerful that once they have risen they can last for many centuries. Even though they have more capacity of independent thought than skeleton warriors they are still the slaves of the vampires. Occasionally they are led by Wight lords.

The wealthiest of these ancient buried heroes where sometimes buried with their warhorses and together they are known as Black Knights.

They wear well crafted heavy bronze armor, as is their heavily armoured skeletal warhorse. They are armed with exquisite enchanted long swords and shields.

What we must bear in mind is that the number of actual models we can have in the game is limited. As is the number of unit variations.

The stock MTW2 units, as in all the Ca games, use the same model with a different texture as often as possible. This allows them to get the maximum number of units for the minimum expenditure of PC resource.

We are more restricted in this approach. You can re-use an orc mesh for a few things, I can use the same chaos units for the different factions with different skins ....but we can't do what the stock game does, which is to use...for example .... the same peasant mesh for multiple factions.

We have to be economical with the units wherever possible if we are not to find ourselves restricted later on. Once we have a solid core for each faction, we can start adding in 'fancy' units!

Theres 800+ odd variations in the _unit folder, even allowing half of these to be leftovers from the unit creation process you're still left with more than enough models. What worries me more is texture usage, 2 1024*1024 dxt5's take up a lot of memory. Not counting faction variants theres under 40 unit textures in the stock game, unless we're very careful with how textures are shared between units we could have resource problems.

Edit - *cough, cough*

Originally Posted by Casuir:
Which would require their own culture, which are in short supply.

Aren't generals (both on the campaign and battle maps) defined by their factions and not culture ? Or do they have to share a single model for each culture ?

If that's so, well, that would be a shame, a female-oriented faction would have been trully great IMO. Let's hope CA allow us to mod more culture in a futur patch.

Yes, portraits arent though.

Originally Posted by Casuir:
Yes, portraits arent though.

We could have a drag king thing going. Would be a hoot to have a guy with a beard called Selena :)

You could just replace the general's portrait with a princess' portrait and use the princess' strat map icon instead of the general's. However she would speak like a man on the map and in battle.

Changing the protraits requires a seperate culture, theres a limit of 7 which isnt enough for the factions we have. Using one for a faction which is a bit player at best is not likely to happen.

Originally Posted by DrZoidberg:
I'm writing the unit descriptions for the Vampire counts and doing some research. There are distinct blood lines of vampires which all are completely different and above all they don't fight or even get along together, (except for the Blood Dragons occasionally). And they all count as Vampire Count armies.

I think we should decide which of the blood lines to make a faction for and stick to it. We've got the Von Carsteins, Nechrarchs, Blood Dragons, Strigoi and Lhamians.

All of them use the same kind of units.

Nechrarchs aren't really into empire building, they just want to kill everything living, so they aren't very suitable for a faction.

The Strigoi are insane creatures living in gutters and deep forrest with ghoul followers. Not really empire builders either.

Blood Dragons are only into it for the fighting. No empire either.

Next we've got Lhamians and Von Carsteins who both very much are into empire building and both would be very suitable for factions. Also they have living human subjects which makes them all the more suitable for the MTW2 engine. But Lhamians are from Khemri and will have quite a similar look to them as the Tomb Kings. We really don't need two factions that look the same.

I suggest that we only use the Von Carsteins as the vampire faction and have the Blood Dragons as an expensive mercenary unit that they can occasionally reqruit.

If we want the Lhamian vampire faction I suggest puting them in some future release, or replacing the Tomb Kings with them all together, and have the Tomb Kings as horde, (but that's allready been voted down:egypt: ).

Blood Dragons could be mercanaries as well as the occansion rebel war band here and there

Nechrachs could start off as some seriously nasty rebels in a certain terriortory, and then become a emergenant faction some point in the game (I wouldn't see why a large number of Nechrah lords would attemp to make a empire)

Strigoi will have to be seriously nasty rebels and just that, rebels

Lhamians we could have the units have some simularities, but not the same as tomb kings

Um isnt the Lahmian faction suppose to seduce other humans into marring them and then taking over? So you could have a trait "pale wife or odd wife" or something and that will reduce the general's loyalty so that he would rebel against the faction. It is very common for Empire and Bretonian generals to bring home damsels of "undescribed pale beauty" and then go wrong.
I would suggest that you let the Wights go and introduce the Black Knights. They are far more tied to the Vampire counts theme. Also the idea of grouped necromancers isnt that bad. If you look at warmaster(the epic version of warhammer) there is a necromancer unit.

Which is still a single character

No not really. There are 12 of them in each unit. Concentrated. I think....

Originally Posted by Born in lust for blood:
No not really. There are 12 of them in each unit. Concentrated. I think....

There are 20 men units in MTW2 so I think it's totaly doable. The problem is that there's a roof on how many models there can be in the game in total. Next problem is that we haven't found a way to make any form of wizardry look cool or be useful of the battlefield. This coupled to that we don't even know what kind of magic they should be able to do. Using the WH spell lists is naturally out of the question.

To sum it up. Wizards are not priority units, they will require more work than all other units and on top of that there still is problems that need to be solved before we could even begin to implement them.

But this doesn't stop small groups of Vampires or Bloor Dragons in the game. That would be smashing.

Originally Posted by Born in lust for blood:
No not really. There are 12 of them in each unit. Concentrated. I think....

No theres not, the army list entry is for a necromancer. Singular. Nor are there any minatures for a unit. I dont know where you're getting this info from, please source it.

Originally Posted by Casuir:
No theres not, the army list entry is for a necromancer. Singular. Nor are there any minatures for a unit. I dont know where you're getting this info from, please source it.

Aren't you being a tad anal now? Just because in WH these units are deployed only one at a time mean we can't have to do it. If our choices are multiple units or not at all, then I'm all for bending the WH cannon.

Or we could deploy them as siege weapons. One necromancer, (the cannon) and a group of bodyguards, (the cannoneers). The siege weapons have hit points. The only silly thing is that they can't shoot unless the bodyguards are there, but that's a minor issue.

But this is all academic since we're still not sure if we even can have them in the mod.

Siege units as people do not work. You have to use the siege weapon skeleton, cannot animate movements correctly, and you get a crew pushing them around....Also...if you get an infantry rush..the crew run off and fight, and the gun stops working.

Sorry...but I just don't see how this would be believable.

Also, when it comes to powerful single characters ( and I agree with Casuir here ) I cannot see how there would be a unit of them in the sort of size battles we would be having. It's like having an army of Chaos Lords. You might summon one to a battle... but not many. Units in MTW2 scale up..and 20 men is not 20 men on HUGE unit size.

You then have to cope with the other problems of massed missile firing:

1) Always volley fire.
2) Limits on targets. Infantry cannot fire at walls etc.

Necromancers would make potential general units for the Counts, able to raise armies ( literally ) and command troops in the field.... but not as a general combat unit. They are not listed as such in teh army books, and I don't feel comfortable trying to find a reason to fit them in.

Maybe then a unit with skeletons and a necromancer(eg like captain) to look like that.
Speaking of the necromancer how do you expect to rise troops in battle?
Or are you not?

Raising troops in battle is impossible. There is no provision for this in the game engine.

I guess the only way to raise troops would be to convince the game that there was another army nearby and that it could enter the battle. However I have no idea how to do this or if it is even possible.

Hiring the undead as mercenaries would be a better way of 'raising' an army.

I think officers have the same stats as the units they're with so dont see them being included that way, you'd either have a unit of skeletons or a unit of necromancers.