Faction Thread 2: Vampire Counts

Some tricky units here, since I am not 100% how best to handle ethereals. It may just be a case of giving htem a very high defence and no hit-points to speak of ... or it may just be too difficult to adapt things to use them effectively. time and playtesting will tell here!

Units:

1) Zombies

2) Skeletons

3) Skeleton Warriors

4) Grave Guard

5) Wights

6) Ghouls

7) Spirit Host ( issue as above )

8) Wraiths ( issue as above )

9) Dire Wolves

10) Nightmares and skeleton horses for mounts

11) Blood Dragons ( various )

Generals would be either Vampire single models or Necromancers

Right, a few points on this one.

Zombies and ghouls are fine.

I presume by warriors you mean skeletons with spears, and normal ones with swords/axes/whatever. Also good. I’d advise you include archers as well. Although they aren’t in the main army list, they are included in the army book, as a specific blood dragon army unit. I’m sure, for sake of balance and variation if nothing else, you could include them. They would have to be rubbish though. I mean, really poor quality troops, barely able to hit at ten foot, let alone normal shooting range.

Wrights and Grave Guard… well Grave Guard are wrights. They’re simply one type of unit of them. You could also split Grave Guard into two types if you wish; sword and shield (basic), or a halberd (elite?), as they use both. Black Knights, the other non-character variety of wright, are obviously the heavy cavalry here. Only the one type of them possible I think, though there are slight grounds in which you could split them into 'heavy cavalry' and 'very heavy cavalry' branches.

For ethereal units… not sure how you could do them. Very high defence could work, I guess, but it doesn’t really do them justice. Either way, is there a method of creating morale damage from a unit’s presence? I think there was in RTW, but not sure about this one. Either way, they should, as in the TT version they cause terror.

My Blood Dragons, do you mean the type of vampire? Surely units of vampires, considering even a weak vampire is a powerful hero, are a bit much? If this isn’t what you mean, please explain, because I’m not on the right page.

Hum, if you're planning to have Skeletons, Skeleton warriors and Grave guards, may I propose you to use those models as the Warriors, and those as the Grave Guards.

Simply because the first ones (current grave guards figures) really look like dead soldiers (actually, dead bretonnians knights), while the old Wight figures (second pic) have more of a grave guards "feeling". They're not simply dead soldiers raised to serve a new lord, but they have their own (undead-ish) equipement.
That would mean getting rid of the Wight unit, but from what I understood, Wight describe all kinds of not-totally-braindead-skeleton (and thus, include Grave Guards and Black Knights, aswell as the now discontinued Skeleton characters)

Overall, I think leaving out non- Blood Dragon Vampires themselves is a pity. I don't know what is the smallest unit size possible in MTW2, but wouldn't it be possible to have squads of like, 4 or 8 Lamhian, Strigoi or Nercrach vampires ? Yeah, that would be overpowered, but one could say they're newly born vampires, and give them a huge upkeep.

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Originally Posted by Bob the Spork

Also good. I’d advise you include archers as well. Although they aren’t in the main army list, they are included in the army book, as a specific blood dragon army unit. I’m sure, for sake of balance and variation if nothing else, you could include them. They would have to be rubbish though. I mean, really poor quality troops, barely able to hit at ten foot, let alone normal shooting range.

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I don't think you can change the range of the archers, though you can reduce the number of arrows they have and give them poor moral.

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For ethereal units… not sure how you could do them. Very high defence could work, I guess, but it doesn’t really do them justice. Either way, is there a method of creating morale damage from a unit’s presence? I think there was in RTW, but not sure about this one. Either way, they should, as in the TT version they cause terror.

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For the Wights you could increase their hit points to make them harder to kill (they would need to take more damage before they died). It is possible to make units that can fighten infantry and / or mounted units.

Mounts have a 'fear' effect ... never tried it with footsoldier! anothe rtest fo rthe weekend!!!!

Theres lots of units that cause fear isnt there?

In RTW it was possible to give any unit fear-causing ability, I´m not sure about M2TW, though.
But if you´re refering to "Vampire Counts", does that mean you´ll try and include all of the bloodlines, or will you emphazise the Carstein line? If the former, you´d probably need more factions in the Vampire "culture". However, I wouldn´t know how to simulate the Strigoi, Blood Dragons and Necrarchs adequately on a campaign map, they don´t hold territories, so the best I could imagine woud be rebel units.

Bwian,how will be the zombies?i think it would be best to make themin man size or from other races with ripped clothing and with full of blood(and also ripped faces).how will they be used in the game and how will they kill the enemy,i mean by eating him?will you include in the vampire counts the rule from the warhammer that if they are far away from the necromancer,they cannot be control?it is possible?:egypt:

Zombies could fight with the weapons they had when they were alive, for example peasants would have crude weapons.

Though a unit can be made to run amok this will occur regardless of how close they are to their necromancer, so out of control zombies can be difficult to code.

Also how will this faction function. Since the Tomb Kings use soldiers made from the preserved dead they only have low levels of soldiers but since Vampire Counts use undead that are far more available they should have greater numbers. A possible handicap is to only allow this faction to start with weak undead units, with strong units available at the end of the tech tree (no middle level units). This would encourage early attrition until this faction has worked its way up the tech-tree.

We can play around with the tech tree as much as we want. The source books have no info at all on the technology they use to raise the dead. Or even how it works. We could have small squads early and larger later. We could also have their most elite units only available through guild houses. To keep down their number.

In Warhammer the undead army is charecterised by being a mix of total and complete crap and very strong elite units. By making skeletons and zombies easily available everywhere and making elite units hard to produce we can keep that dynamic. It's easy to do with the TW tech-tree and buildings.

They raise the dead using necromancy, which is a magic art the vampires have a near instinctive control over. It stems from death magic, so whenever the wind of death is strong, so is necromancy. Although only more powerful vampires can raise large amounts of the undead, as in units or armies (maybe only allow places with a general to recruit, if possible), the ones that are powerful can reanimate corpses basically at will, and as many as are available in an area. In the warhammer world, any given place is likely to have plenty of skeletons, even zombies, available.

What are these ‘source books’ that everyone keeps mentioning?

The army books I guess, there a bit lacking in info though. Theres pretty good source books in the WFRP 2nd edition, they only cover a few area though.

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Originally Posted by Bob the Spork

What are these ‘source books’ that everyone keeps mentioning?

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Yeah, Army books. I've got them all. Even some of the older ones. It was 15 years ago I played any of this so I'm having great fun looking through the books again. Even though, back in the day I played mostly WH40K and WHFRP. Anyhoo.

:book:

That's strange. You see, a second ago someone said there wasn't anything about how the raised the dead in them, yet the army book, which I also have, quite clearly explains that it is the power of necromancy, and where this magic originated from. So unless people are tearing out some of their pages, that doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by Bob the Spork

That's strange. You see, a second ago someone said there wasn't anything about how the raised the dead in them, yet the army book, which I also have, quite clearly explains that it is the power of necromancy, and where this magic originated from. So unless people are tearing out some of their pages, that doesn't make sense.

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I suggest we focus on helping each other fill the gaps or fix errors and save on the smart comments aimed at making fellow modders look dumb. :thumbsdown:

I checked the books again. It really doesn't say how they do it. Only that they can do it. It says nothing of buildings, artifacts, books, discoveries or preparations needed. All I could find was fragments of dead raising spells. So I do think it's up to us to decide which buildings are required.

If somebody has read the Warhammer fiction book "Necromancer", it might give us some insights :)

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Originally Posted by DrZoidberg

I suggest we focus on helping each other fill the gaps or fix errors and save on the smart comments aimed at making fellow modders look dumb. :thumbsdown:

I checked the books again. It really doesn't say how they do it. Only that they can do it. It says nothing of buildings, artifacts, books, discoveries or preparations needed. All I could find was fragments of dead raising spells. So I do think it's up to us to decide which buildings are required.

If somebody has read the Warhammer fiction book "Necromancer", it might give us some insights :)

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Ha funny co-incidence i'm reading that book now.

To be honest ... units like skeletons and zombies should, quite possibly, be considered to be 'mercenary' units recruitable by the leaders. This way, the troops can be 'raised' without the need for any kind of building. Only a faction 'general' would be able to raise them. If we can tie their availability to a hidden resource ( shallow graves? ) then that gives us all we need.

Incidentally....having been watching Shaun of the Dead again, I have been inspired to start work on a zombie model :skull:

Could we give a General a Necromancer trait so that they could recruit the undead (traits are not my speciality)?

They should all have the ability to raise undead troops. They are the 'peasants' and the basic levy troops for the faction. Special things may be needed to raise the more potent forces.... but not the cannon fodder....which, I suppose was cannon fodder before it was raised as cannon fodder .... poor devils. Sometimes life's a bitch :beam:

I think Mercs sound like a good way to go for undead factions, have 0 or minimal population in their home countries, have their income come from special buildings etc. Is there a way to restrict mercs to one faction, or are they always available to all?

Perhaps a script could be used to add mercs to undead 'home' regions when an undead faction leader is present. Then the act of hiring them would be the act of raising them. The main problem would be other factions raising armies of zombies which weren't recruited by the undead factions...

What Myrddraal said is possible and does occur in M2TW, for example the Welsh Spearmen can only be recruited by the English in England. This is because the export_descr_unit.txt can restrict which factions can recruit which units.

Mercs can be limited by religion at least. Having a population of 0 though doesnt neccessarily mean you cant produce troops, recruitment doesnt decrease the population in mtw2. Theres other factors involved here though, giving them no populaion would limit income and you'd never be able to upgrade your cities, you'd need to balance the economy which would get thrown out as soon as they took a city with some population.

You don't need to limit the population to zero... the idea of having Vampire Counts recruiting base units as mercs would make them able to raise armies in a different way. The other 'core' units would still be recruitable in the cities, but they would require special bildings or upgraded cities. You can't restrict the growth as such, since this would prevent expansion.

I saw this more as a way of making the recruitment for this faction a little different and unusual.

I recently started a Russian Grand Campaign, and noticed that you can loosley interpret the characters' accents as a sort of sly transylvanian. I havn't tried many other factions, but does anyone else think this would be a good voice set for the Vampire Counts?

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Originally Posted by Jargon

I recently started a Russian Grand Campaign, and noticed that you can loosley interpret the characters' accents as a sort of sly transylvanian. I havn't tried many other factions, but does anyone else think this would be a good voice set for the Vampire Counts?

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Unless we've got some kick-ass voice actors on board, I'm assuming that the standard MTW2 are staying. I don't know of any other Warhammer computer game made that we can steal fitting sounds from.

Voices will initially be the stock ones. If we can find people abtle and willing to record new ones, then I would love to have custom sounds.

This is something to think about for future releases.

Using someone elses sounds form a commercial game is a definite no. It is a breach of copyright, and if GW or the owner of the copyright material took offence, we would find ourselves closed down very quickly.

GamesWorkshop is very generous in it's policy towards use of it's IP for mods like ours, and I respect that. Use of material copyrighted by companies who had licensed to use GW's IP for a commercial game are far less likely to be forgiving! Safest to avoid any risk and do our own, or use the ones that shiiped with MTW2.

Nobody will be stealing anything from any game.

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: ).

The Lhamians also do not fit on the map. There has been much juggling and thought about the map and what parts we can fit onto it, and Lhamian territory does not fit.

Additionally...there is no need to worry about whether a faction has human subjects ... it's not an issue.

Lastly ... as has already been stated ... the Tomb Kings are in. They are also STAYING in. They have a unique look, make an attractive spectacle, and offer some interesting challenges. They also have a significant proportion of their units complete and in game, and with what I know can be done with skeleton/animation routines, we can also do all the exotic units they need too.

On the faction front, I think you have pretty much covered the essentials there.

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Originally Posted by Bwian

The Lhamians also do not fit on the map. There has been much juggling and thought about the map and what parts we can fit onto it, and Lhamian territory does not fit.

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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.

Unless the Worlds Edge mountains have been bumped from the map which would be a shame :) I maintain that they would work great as a seperate faction. If we want and need them that is. Just because we can use something doesn't mean we should. Off-course.

But I got the message. Lhamians will have to wait and the von Carsteins are included.

I've got a question. Shouldn't we have vampires as units? They're not in the army list now, but I think they should be. We can have them as super elite and one of those units with only 20 men in them. Since we are including the Blood Dragons units, it makes no sense not to include the regular von Carstein blood line vampires. In Warhammer Battle the vampires thralls do plenty of fighting. Not only the vampire lords.

Another unit which are central to the vampire counts are the necromancers that's been omitted. Could it be possible to make then use some sort of invisible cannon and make the projectile fired to be a huge skull or something. It's pretty much what they do.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Casuir

but given the amount of unit models to be made that would be low priority.

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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?

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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?

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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*

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Originally Posted by Casuir

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Casuir

Yes, portraits arent though.

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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.

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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: ).

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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....

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Originally Posted by Born in lust for blood

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Born in lust for blood

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

From what I understood, you're going with the Von Carstein as the VC faction. If that's so, I guess using Imperial names for the characters is the best thing we could come up with, no ?

As far as recruiting goes the idea of mercenary units for the basic troops is a good one. This covers also that there are graveyards/battlefields all over the map.
As for special units you could do these as buildings in a loose sense of association. Instead of building them it would mean that the burial mounds / graveyards where these units are normally recruited (re-animated would be a better word) are discovered by the faction.
Probably a good building for choice would be the church as it is razed if a region is conquered by a different faction.

Just got an idea for these guys, would it be possible to recruit better units at the site of a famous battle. It would make sense due to the lose of lives there.

Not sure to what extent you can control the mercenaries in a particular area ... but it is an idea.

It is possible to control what mercenaries can be recruited in one area but this has to be set at the start of the game and cannot be changed during it (unless a mercenary needs a particular event to occur before it can exist, such as gunpowder discovered).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by uanime5

It is possible to control what mercenaries can be recruited in one area but this has to be set at the start of the game and cannot be changed during it (unless a mercenary needs a particular event to occur before it can exist, such as gunpowder discovered).

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And I do think we should use this feature toward making the game more interesting rather than WH cannon correct. Just my personal opinion.

Warhammer Canon is what we are aiming for, unless the game cannot function correctly with it applied. There is no reaosn to think Warhammer Canon won't be fun....and I certainly don't see why we should re-invent the Warhammer Universe when we don't need to. The intention is to make a Warhammer Mod, not a mod loosly based on Warhammer.

We will change what we have to, but we intend to stay as true as possible to the tabletop wargame.

I think we should just limit them to factions. I mean a vampire can raise dead(which are virtualy everywhere) out of his territory.

I'm curious... what's warhammer canon..? Is it like normal gunpowder canons you guys are talking about?

That had better be a joke Dogman .... or I'm going to climb on my soapbox and give a boring speech about the shocking state of education these days. Then I might resort to biting sarcasm and finish off with a suggestion that someone go out and buy a decent dictionary.

I'm turning into a grumpy old man .... and I'm not even that old!

Methinks you sound like an old man! :afro:

But lemme check... :book2:


Searching....:study:


Aha! :idea2:

Canon: A secular law, rule, or code of law.
Hmm... didn't help much! Oh well!

Anything produced by Games Workshop staff is canon. There are different levels to it, for example all Warhammer Army Books may be the first level of canon, while website info, novels, and world wide campaigns are the next level down. The lowest form of canon would be things like a Warhammer computer game or MMORPG. These lower levels must have input by the creators of Warhammer, but in the end it wasnt actually made by them and so are less likely to be taken seriously.

Fanfiction is a perfect example of non-canon. It has no official relation to the official game world. I got in trouble in the Skaven section for using non-canon information, so it can be a problem.

Dogman ..this old man keeps his soapbox handy at all times :clown:

Nice smilies .... and a fine dictionary definition! A dictionary is such a useful thing to own. Paperweight...fly-swatting ... levelling a rickety desk...myriad of possible uses. Now define secular....

Ahh...how I laughed at the Life of Brian 'romans go home' scene.

But..alas...I am digressing and I have precious little time to waste... I got Dwarves to build :whip:

Aye Aye Captain! And thanks for helping explain Canon, Jargon!

Hey everyone !

first post here. I was looking for a nice fansite because i just recently got MTW2 and i saw this post about a warhammer mod. I really like warhammer and i have a good suggestion, but i dont know if it can be done gamewise.


Instead of having necromancers as units, why not make a priest be a necromancer. This way you could send a necromancer(priest) to one of your areas and make it so that as long as the necromancer stays in that certain area or city,that at each end of the turn a city or cities in a region would receive a group of undead. Or an army spawns for your faction in that area consisting completely from undead soldiers.


i hope you guys understand what im trying to say, english isnt my original language. (im Dutch)


anyways awesome you make this mod and i hope my suggestion helps

Quote:

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Originally Posted by overkill1991

Instead of having necromancers as units, why not make a priest be a necromancer. This way you could send a necromancer(priest) to one of your areas and make it so that as long as the necromancer stays in that certain area or city,that at each end of the turn a city or cities in a region would receive a group of undead. Or an army spawns for your faction in that area consisting completely from undead soldiers.

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I hate to rain on your parade but I'm fairly sure this isn't possible to do in the MTW2 engine.

The closest thing to that is generals being able to recruit mercenaries. This costs money but requires no population to form the pool. If we are to have undead troops raised, then the only way to do it would be to have them as mercenaries.

Now...the problem there, is making sure that only those factions that should be using them are able to recruit them. I cannot imagine having an Empire army using skeletons as troops....

Mercenaries can be assigned to a particular religion. Therefore we just have to ensure that only the Vampire Counts, and possibly the Tomb Kings, belong to that religion while all other factions belong to a different religion.

Did anyone said something about Mordheim? I think that is a place that fits to a vampire city because it is ''cursed'' city so it is intersted to be(for the von carsteins right?).What do you think?......

Mordheim was destroyed by a two-tailed comet during the Imperial Civil War after it became corrupted in many different ways. Most citizens in the Empire saw this as Sigmar smiting the city for its sins. Mordheim no longer exists and is not in anyone's memory, as the city's ruins were utterly razed and destroyed by Magnus the Pious's armies after the victorious Great War against Chaos. After the destruction of the ruins, Mordheim was removed from all Imperial history. 'Modern' Empire citizens would have never heard of Mordheim.

The city/province you are thinking of is Sylvania, the cursed lands where the Von Carsteins first made their rise. Castle Drakwald is the specific center of terror and shun.