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Hey Dakka,

I'm not too flash of a dwarf player, so I could use your help against my friend. We play aroundabouts 1000 points, we don't have much more, and he initially played a powerful vamp sorcerer, a weaker vamp combat hero and 2 big ghoul units, and a medium zombie unit. First game we realized (post-game) his points percentage was just so very off (the whole max 25% thing for lords and what not). But I think despite this, I would have found it a difficult game, and I was right, as I've found it a difficult army to play. My usual set up (because the other player in our triumverate is a HE player) is (from memory);
Runesmith with Balance, Spellbreaking and a GW
around 28 GW warriors
Another 26 or so GW warriors
2 Grudge Throwers, one with RoAccuracy and RoPen, the other with RoAccuracy, RoPen and RoBurning

The numbers in warrior units are a kinda estimate as I forget how many I manage to fit, but they won't be off by more than a few.

My variations have included changing one of the units to a smaller one of quarrellers with GW, making a unit of warriors smaller and turning the larger one into longbeards, and dropping a GT for an Organ gun and a cannon at different times. What are your opinions?

Anything that adds combat res hurts.
Best way I have found to kill vamp lords it so simply put enough hits on his unit that combat res makes him crumble.

I don't know about 1k points but I know from bitter experience that at 2.5 dwarves can completely and utterly shut down VC magic. You have some sort of dispel scroll that after being used on a 4+ makes the wizard forget the spell, you *need* that to make him forget raise dead. Taking as many extra dispel dice items/I think runepriests or something add them too is useful.

If longbeards are the ones that throw hammers at things charging them then they tear up ghouls quite nicely.

Generally speaking, your list looks fine.

Are you focusing fire with your Grudge Throwers? They should be putting the hurt on those Ghouls and Zombies, big time. By hamstringing your opponent's character bunkers you should be able to kill him by making him lose combat.

Yeah, you concentrate fire on the general's bunker to deplete it, keep him from using magic to regrow it, then hit it in close combat and kill the general. Once he dies, the rest of the army goes bye-bye.

I waould say swap out Spellbreaker for Spell eater; in fact, you could try dropping Balance altogether for some combination of Spelleaeter and Spellbreaker.

If you have the models, then try a little gunline; shoot the crud out of them then charge in.Shut down his raising as much as you can.

My only other thing is to have a list in mind that includes a Thane/Dragon Slayer with a runic weapon, just in case of Ethereals.

I would also recommend a hero with a magic weapon (even/especially a cheap one) to deal with ethereals once they get in to combat.

Thanks a bunch guys, I hadn't even considered what I'd do vs. ethereals, never had to face them before. That would have seriously hurt!

Your 2 most important runes for shutting down VC magic are;
a) Master Rune of Balance.
I HATE! this rune with a passion! As a VC player, it's expected and it gives the dwarf player an overall 2 dice advantage in the magic phase! Add to this the dispel dice your runesmith generates naturally and there's litterly no reason a VC player should ever gain a dice advantage over you.

b) Master Rune of Spellbinding.
This is angry - especially in lower pts games where the VC player is hard pressed to try and bring a lord level caster. Combined with the above, it's plain rude and will have the VC player in tears.

The spellbreaking rune is fine for higher pts games, but spelleater is a terd now... VC armies will have multiple characters capable of using invocation because our own lore is so critical to the army's success. Paying 25 skavenslaves for just a 50% chance to remove something like Vanhel's Danse is wastefull when compared the above 2 runes, and at 1500+ pts, you can bet your nether regions the VC army will have multiple sources of the danse!

Other things to consider;
- Rune of Fire/Speed/Striking is a cheap and effective way to put magical attacks into units. Again, at only 1000pts, taking ethereals is highly risky because those units are alot of pts and every single army has easy access to counters. (though hexwraiths are painful for dwarfs to deal with at lower pts)

- By that same token, a runic cannon and/or grudge thrower will end almost any ethereal unit. Considering the vast amounts of regen VC can pack into their lists, always, always, always put the burny rune on your machines!
With the thrower, aim for his blocks. Snipe his general with the cannon. Mean, yes, but then VC can be just as evil with our own tricks!

- Upgrading one of your warrior units to longbeards is a solid choice. The +1WS is *really* mean to undead in general as the army's 'average' WS is only 3 or 4 outside of rare units/characters. It also means that the VC rares like blood knights or vargulfs go from hitting you on 3's to needing 4's to hit, drastically reducing their killing power and leaving them open to static res + dice flubbing = mass crumble.
The other big advantage, longbeards can take the Rune of Courage to completely negate fear/terror. A big help if you don't have a BSB handy for those re-rolls.

I'm no expert on Dwarves but wouldn't it be better if you had more guns and/or HW + shield instead of GW?

Thinking about it, this might be the one time where surviving might be more important that killing. When fighting VC, your goal is to survive until you get a shot at the General, then kill him. Once the general goes down, victory is all but assured.

When I'm running a gunline, I drop Grudge thrower shots onto the general's bunker, then throw in the volley guns and all other BS shooting that can reach. Hopefully by the time that is over, I will be able to Cannonize the general...

Vulcan wrote:Thinking about it, this might be the one time where surviving might be more important that killing. When fighting VC, your goal is to survive until you get a shot at the General, then kill him. Once the general goes down, victory is all but assured.

When I'm running a gunline, I drop Grudge thrower shots onto the general's bunker, then throw in the volley guns and all other BS shooting that can reach. Hopefully by the time that is over, I will be able to Cannonize the general...

Killing the VC general isn't an auto-win anymore...

Killing the general is painful yes, but far, far from being a 'game over' for the VC's! Well, unless the VC player is an idiot who's still insisting on playing the pile of terd 7th book!

Experiment 626 wrote:

Vulcan wrote:Thinking about it, this might be the one time where surviving might be more important that killing. When fighting VC, your goal is to survive until you get a shot at the General, then kill him. Once the general goes down, victory is all but assured.

When I'm running a gunline, I drop Grudge thrower shots onto the general's bunker, then throw in the volley guns and all other BS shooting that can reach. Hopefully by the time that is over, I will be able to Cannonize the general...

Killing the VC general isn't an auto-win anymore...

Killing the general is painful yes, but far, far from being a 'game over' for the VC's! Well, unless the VC player is an idiot who's still insisting on playing the pile of terd 7th book!

Or if he just run one Wizard of LoV (Lore of Vamps).

Haven't had a game against the new book yet...are they much better?

In some ways we got better and in a few others we got worse. I would say in turns of power scale we moved sideways isntead of up or down

I think you have a great start on a your army, just maybe your tactics may need a little adjusting. I don’t know how you have been playing, but as a VC player I notice a lot of mistakes which are common for newer players.

The first mistake newer players make in all games is that they do not identify where they expect to get their points in a game and against VC this is a must. When deploying you should have expectations on how you should be getting your points and that is what you are going to have to focus on. You cant play against VC like any other army, you cannot do the standard dwarf tactics of shooting at all of the opponents units to weaken them before the combat and then break them in combat. No the only way you are going to get points is to destroy entire units in combat. You need to focus all of your fire against a single target turn after turn until it is weak enough not to be a threat or be IoN’d back to full strength. That way you can be sure that in combat your warriors will be able to crumble his units to earn you points.

2nd common mistake is that people use the dispel scroll way too early. If he is getting off a big spell early in the game most likely it will not be game changing and so you don’t need to use a scroll. It might be bad, but you have to think will it be even worse next turn or later, usually the answer is yes and I wont use a scroll.

3rd mistake against most VC is that people focus way too much on the lord. The army you are playing with doesn’t really have the tools to take out a lord (which he couldn’t take at that points level anyways) and so you should focus your firepower on the points in the army which you can get points off of. You are going to need to focus a lot of stuff on single units to ensure that he will not be able to bring them back and when you focus anything on his characters you lose this capability. As dwarfs your anti magic is good enough that what his characters should be doing, which is supporting his army by casting spells, will be nullified.

Overall I think that VC is a very good matchup for dwarfs and with experience you will be surprised how well equipped dwarfs are to deal with a lot of good armies.