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Hello there. I played my first test battle of old world today, and i had a 500pts vampire count list.

Vampire thrall, beguile power and lvl 1illusion
Cairn wraith
3x10 skeleton warriors (one unit has a banner)
5 dire wolves
3 bat swarms.

Now in the first scenario I faced a gunline of elves, and by deployment, we were a minimum of 24" apart. Undead are not allowed to march and skeletons have a movement value of 4, joining skeletons with characters does not cure this in this new edition of the rules.
I barely managed to cross the midline 12" up the board before the game was over and only managed to kill one single elf.

I realised this was an issue, so for the next game i changed my spell into vanhels dance instead. But since I was lvl 1 only succeded casting twice, and only rolled results of one inch extra movement both times (maximum is three) so it barely got my units further up.

My questions:
Are level 1 mages useless?
How do you solve the slow movement problems as undead, preferably vampire counts.
Seems almost like i would need 2 supporting necromancers per skeleton block, just to get regular marching speed with vanhels dance and hellish vigour. But any dispells and you are screwed. Am I missing something here?

 Gitdakka wrote:
Hello there. I played my first test battle of old world today, and i had a 500pts vampire count list.

Vampire thrall, beguile power and lvl 1illusion
Cairn wraith
3x10 skeleton warriors (one unit has a banner)
5 dire wolves
3 bat swarms.

Now in the first scenario I faced a gunline of elves, and by deployment, we were a minimum of 24" apart. Undead are not allowed to march and skeletons have a movement value of 4, joining skeletons with characters does not cure this in this new edition of the rules.
I barely managed to cross the midline 12" up the board before the game was over and only managed to kill one single elf.

I realised this was an issue, so for the next game i changed my spell into vanhels dance instead. But since I was lvl 1 only succeded casting twice, and only rolled results of one inch extra movement both times (maximum is three) so it barely got my units further up.

My questions:
Are level 1 mages useless?
How do you solve the slow movement problems as undead, preferably vampire counts.
Seems almost like i would need 2 supporting necromancers per skeleton block, just to get regular marching speed with vanhels dance and hellish vigour. But any dispells and you are screwed. Am I missing something here?

Yes. You're playing a legacy army that GW has deliberately gimped to get you to buy Tomb Kings instead.

Okay, probably not quite THAT level of tinfoil hat insanity. But Vampire Counts isn't part of TOW beyond the legacy list, and so there was a lot less incentive to ensure it was balanced, much less competitive. Odds are things just got overlooked, and you've found one of them.

Part of it is the inherent problem of the Vampire rules, yes.

A (much) larger part of it is that the game doesn't really function below 1500 points. Small games can work, but they require a scenario, special lists, or a gentleman's agreement to work properly. If you're playing the rules out as written, with no modifications, 1500 is the minimum.

Level 1 mages can work, but work best if they can hang in the rear, out of dispell range, and cast Cost 6 or less spells. In general, Level 4 mages are vastly more capable than lower levels (one of the major design flaws of the rules).

You "solve" the slowness of Vampires by playing larger games with more powerful mages and a few fast, hard-hitting units to complement your shambling hordes.

Ok. It just seems odd to me, but one of the missions I played had only victory points from killing enemies. There was no incentive for the enemy to aproach my army. And since vampires have no shooting, i must come to them....

Even if i had 2000pts army, all my infantry would be unable to cross dead mans land and would not help in the game. Great paper weights though... So I would have like half an army in the fight in such scenarios, vs their full force.

Do tomb kings have similar issues? I read their army book and they have an ability to add d3 movement to units as a command skill with their leaders. This is slighly more reliable than vanhels dance spell. But it still seems slow.
How do tomb kings use their infantry offensivly?

Seems odd to design a game for 72"x48" tables
with about 6 game turns where undead can only walk 4" per round minus maneuvers.

The obvious mistake is that you are casting the wrong spell. Dense Macabre provides one unit with +D3" movement, whereas Hellish Vigour provides multiple units with a second movement phase (IE- +4-8"). It doesn't help that they've mixed up the spell effects from how they worked in prior editions.
Tomb Kings are much the same in that their movement is dependent on casting Desert Wind. There is an obvious discrepancy in casting values between the 2 factions but otherwise, its not really a Legacy issue as much as a magic issue.

It's mostly a question of scale; Vampires need Hellish Vigour to get anywhere, and the casting value means you need a Lord-level wizard. The simple truth is that 500pts is a really bad game size for a faction that needs half of that to even function.
In larger games, Dark Vitality and Flying help enormously to move your flanks along so you only really need a single caster to get your centre moving.

EDIT: There is also the option of minimising your reliance on Skeletons/Zombies and instead going for Ghouls and Dire Wolves. Both of these have Reserve Move by default so don't need any magical encouragement.

Wait are the casting values for hellish vigour missprinted? For the casting values it says 9+/12+. But if you read the text on the spell the values are 7+ and 10+, wich is far more reasoneable if you compare with the tomb kings variant.

Could it just be an error? I guess we will never know, since gw said they would never adress those legacy pdfs again.

The general consensus seems to be to use the lower values because the TK equivalent is (IIRC) 6+/9+.

Vampires and TK have very slow infantry that require spell support to shuffle up the board at some speed. If your list is only these blocks of infantry, you're going to have a miserable time against anything that's faster or uses ranged weapons.

And this is also why both factions have some other stuff that's incredibly fast. Bat swarms, fell bats, vargheists, spirit hosts, blood knights, dire wolves, hex wraiths, coven throne, mortis engine, black coach, zombie dragon, terrorgheist, and the vargulf all have fly, dark vitality, reserve move, or swiftstride (or a combination). The game plan was always to control the middle with a dumb tarpit while jamming the flanks with super-fast chaf and shock units to follow up. And to summon zombies on frustrating angles to skunk charges.

As others have said, super low points of fantasy don't tend to work well. It's extremely rock paper scissors, and filling the compulsory slots tends to force you into one of those categories. Everything's open to be used in fantasy; mass ranged, ethereal spam, death stars, leadership bombs, monster mash, wizards, etc... You gotta have some sort of solution to all sorts of potential problems.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Baragash wrote:
The general consensus seems to be to use the lower values because the TK equivalent is (IIRC) 6+/9+.

6/10

 Gitdakka wrote:
Ok. It just seems odd to me, but one of the missions I played had only victory points from killing enemies. There was no incentive for the enemy to aproach my army. And since vampires have no shooting, i must come to them....

Lack of scorable scenarios is (and used to be) a problem and a cause for fairly static, boring gameplay. Put some zones in the middle, like in Warmachine and the game instantly becomes more about positioning and maneuver.

You can also look at ASOIAF for inspiration.

What game would ASOIAF be?

 Gitdakka wrote:
What game would ASOIAF be?

KLIK