lilcal20 said:
1. Shopping list I have £300.00 budget for the army - what should I buy, looking at 1500-2000 point army.
That size army is difficult to pull off with that budget. Where will you be playing? Will the venue allow non-GW models? Mantic offers less expensive alternatives to a number of models, particularly in the infantry range.
2. Pros and cons of vampire counts
pro: powerful vampires, decent magic, 'scream' attacks (banshees, terrorgheist, mortis engine, scabscrath - short range shooting attacks that can be used in close combat, target leadership, and ignore armour), ethereals (banshees, wraiths, hexwraiths, spirit hosts - can only be hurt by magic), psychology (all cause fear or terror, multiple tools to weaken enemy fear tests), unbreakable (never run from battle), good '
chaff' options (cheap units to fill deployment slots & block charges, including dire wolves, fellbats, and spirit hosts), decent tar pits (skeletons and especially zombies), decent melee options (ghouls, grave guard, crypt horrors, cav, heroes & wraiths), good discount hero options (necromancers, wraiths, wights), decent support options (corpse cart, mortis engine), decent deathstar options (grave guard, black knights, maybe blood knights - though the points restrictions on rare hurt).
The most notable vampire strength, imo, is strong internal balance. Almost everything in the book is at least acceptably decent at what it does (possible exceptions including the black coach that's just overpriced and outclassed by other options in its army slot & battlefield role, and special characters Konrad and Isablella who are meant for melee but lack the defenses necessary to survive in close combat). Otherwise, there's nothing in the book that doesn't have legitimate uses or dovetail well with some other option to produce significant synergy. This lets you field a wide range of equally viable options, or just pick units based on what models you like and you'll still probably end up with something workable.
Cons: heavy reliance on the inherently unreliable magic phase (zombies are great tar pits... if you can get invocation off, grave guard are great melee fighters ... if you can get dance or vigor off, etc), vulnerability to enemy magic, vulnerability to enemy war machines (we have a lot of support options that are good, but can be picked out by artillery), can't march outside of the general's aura, limiting deployment options and maneuverability, army crumbles with death of the general, further limiting what your tactical options. Reliance on expensive characters can limit the points available for other options, core tends to be somewhat weak. Instability means vulnerability to enemy melee elites, and makes combined charges inadvisable - again limiting strategic options during the game.
3. what they excel at / etc
The typical vampire configuration is an infantry
horde - with a big block of grave guard as an anchor supported by skeleton and zombie tar pits peppered with a variety of characters, with multiple
chaff and support units helping out. Such a list can be relentless - plodding up the board, replacing casualties in the magic phase, and gumming up key enemy units with
chaff & tar pits while the melee blocks eat the rest of their army. When everything's working on all cylinders the army feels invincible, victory inevitable. Downside is it's all quite reliant on a very fickle magic phase. A few bad phases where you aren't able to replenish or buff your units and everything just melts away - a whole lot of bluster for nothing.
The other problem with the typical strategy is model cost. GW infantry are expensive, and this army asks for tons of them - likely hundreds of zombies, over 50 skeletons if you're fielding them at all, and 30 to 40 grave guard in games of 2 to 3k points. Discount sites can help with that, but then you aren't supporting the local stores where you actually play the game. Non-GW models can help with that, but if you play at a GW store they aren't allowed.
Fortunately, the good internal balance of vamp counts means there's a lot of other configurations you can try. Black Knight death star, Screamspam, fearbomb, Mortis Engine + low level wizard spam and/or crypt horrors, etc. Lots of options, some less reliant on magic, some less cost intensive - though your core is pretty much always going to be magic-reliant infantry - there's only so many dogs you can fit in a list - which can make it feel somewhat superfluous in some lists (cavstar in particular).
All that said, we're still looking to find where the new book excels. The 8th ed rules really took a hammer to what had been the traditional undead battle plan by dramatically reducing the impact of psychology, by preventing high initiative characters from killing those adjacent before they could strike back, by shifing the balance of combat reasolution heavily towards active wounds and away from static resolution, and by making the magic phase in general far less reliable.
So far under the new book, anecdotal results have been mixed. Some seem to win every game, some can't win at all. In general we agree that beasts, orcss and brets are easy match ups, but we have trouble with artillery heavy dwarf or empire armies, armies like lizardmen that can shut down our magic phase even with good winds of magic rolls, and armies like chaos warriors that can beat down our better melee units even after we've buffed them up, leaving us little in the way of win conditions. Tournament results have been poor overall, but that doesn't preclude the possibility that hardcore lists might yet emerge.
However, with strong internal balance and a range of cool units, the book is a lot of fun to work with, resulting in an overall positive reception. More positive than that of the Tomb Kings book, perhaps. That book's poor internal balance leaves it with several dud choices, and it has several frustratingly counterproductive or counter-intuitive special rules. As a result, writing lists for that book is a chore, even if the books power lists might have more in the way of valid competitive value at tournaments then ours.
