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Firstly, actually both armies rely very much on their characters to accomplish stuff mainly via magic but in combats too. The Tomb Kings are almost always a magic heavy army no matter what troops you take, and the vampire too rely on magic although they don't necessarily need to have that much of it. It's good to notice too that almost all the characters you can take in these armies are mages to begin with so you'll get some wheter you like it or not (only the wight kings on vc list and icon bearers on tk list are not spellcasters and the latter choice is pretty pants anyways). One important mechanic with both armies is also the crumbling which occurs if your general/hierophant dies (in vc/tk respectively), which basically means that troops start to make ld checks and take wounds if they fail. As the basic troops have poor leadership this means that the base grunts will lose their number fast in both armies. The more elite stuff and leftover characters don't mind this that much as their are either immune to crumbling or have good ld, but keeping the general/hierophant alive is very important to both armies nevertheless and failing this usually means a lost game.
About the base mechanics, both undead armies are completely unbreakable, immune to psychology and cause fear/terror, although when a unit loses combat, it will take wounds depending on how many points it lost (ie, lost combat with 3, take 3 wounds with no saves allowed except for ward/reg with vc). This means that you don't have to worry about passing panic checks and such usually and the troops will hold in combats but they will often be grinded to the ground eventually as the basic troops at least (in both armies) aren't very good fighters. Vs many armies the fear is also a key factor, as it will mean that if the opponent loses combat they may auto-break due fear if the undead side has enough models in combat. The Tomb Kings also have a tunneler-mechanic around which means some of their troops emerge to the table later in the game at (or around) a spot which was determined after the deployment.
As I said in the first paragraph, magic is indeed very important, and both the vc and tk spells do similiar things altough the Tomb Kings magic works differently than any other lores in whfb. Both armies have healing magic that will restore casualties on wounded units or bring the dead back, and the vc can actually boost the units bigger than they started in certain situations (mainly if the vampire has the right bloodline powers). Also both armies have dangerous movement magic that can be used to make nasty charges in magic phase or just to move stuff around faster. Both have also some magic missiles to deal ranged damage. Regarding the differences the counts have the ability to summon new zombie units which means that if the spell succeeds you can place new unit of d3+4 zombies on anywhere within 12" of the caster although they can't start in combat. You can then grow the unit with "healing" spells if you like. The vampires also have difficult-to-cast damage dealing spell that creates spirit hosts for the undead in a similiar manner and their starting size depeds on how many wounds the spell did. Also, this magic works mostly like any other lore, so the vamps are awfully vulnerable to miscasts albeit the basic healing and raise dead are castable on one dice. Also the same caster can recast these spells as many times as he likes if he just has dice to do it. The main difference with the TK magic is that the spells always succeed. Basically you use dice just to tell the opponent the power level of the spell (similiar to bound spells), and then the opponent decides if he wants to dispell it. This means that the tk magic is very reliable and unrelenting.
Regarding how many extra models you need in addition to the normal army, the TK usually needs none. They do have an option to get an expensive banner to bsb which can summon an single unit of skeletons but it get's taken very very rarely as the guy wielding it is just pants and guts your magic phase as he can't cast. The vampires on other hand do need some. Pretty much every counts army needs at least extra patch of at least 20-30 zombies so they have something to represent the summoned guys. Also a few bases of spirit hosts are needed to represent the possible casualties to the wind of death-spell. Depending how your arm your vampires, you might need reinforcements to the existing ghoul/skele/wolf/bat-units if you take the powers that enables you to grow those via the healing, but generally you just need a lot of extra zombies and a few bases of spirit hosts. In the end the vc army is rarely much larger than it started unless you really plan going super-magic heavy.
You can browse through the armylist forum to look through some sample lists. In 2k-2250 the armies often follow this kind of formula:
800-1k on characters
300-500 on cheap, crappy core units
the rest (500+) is filled with various support/elite units (for example bats,knights and varghulf for the vc or skeleton chariots,tomb scorpions and catapult for the tk)
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