Another vampire neophite trying to make his army

[aquenaton]

Hi! How are you? Hope you all an amazing new year! Mine will be focused on starting a new army I wanted to try since the 7th edition of Warhammer Fantasy: Vampires. I want to make a Mousillion style army (I know I am not very original, but I have found out that every one of my armies so far is red, so I wanted to try something different), and was thinking about the best way to start playing with my new toys.

Currently, I have purchased the following stuff:

-A Flesh eater courts start collecting, so a VLoZD (could be Vhodrai) and maybe some Vargheists

-the soulblight gravelords start collecting (I really wanted the whight king mini and the black knights seem like a good place to savage heads to add variety to my other skeletons)

-the soulblight gravelords battleforce from last year (blood knights, 20 skellies, 40 zombies and a vengorian that got converted into a walking Lauka Vai and a vampire mounted on a big monster)

-the crimsom court (not playing on official tournaments so they could perfectly be used as foot vampires if needed)

-a necromancer that is missing his head but could get a new one to look around

-the cursed city box, because I wanted different zombies and skeletons

 

With all that, I think the first question would be to choose a Dynasty. Even as I think Kastellai would be the most fitting for an army focused on vampires, I think I am lacking some blood knights to make numbers and make those buffs count. Legion of Blood also seems quite tempting, as still buffs vampires but without making useless the other options. From reading this forums, it seems Vyrkos is considered one of (if not THE) best dynasty, but I do not want to focus on wolves and that stuff (I even removed the big bearskin hat from Radukar).

As my local club is not very competitive, we are not much into grand strategies, headhunters and that stuff, so we tend to play for scenario objectives and the likes. With the models I have (or maybe a couple additions) what would you recommend to start testing the army?

I was thinking about this, for example:

Kastellai, (looking into 2000)

Vhodrai, Vengorian Lord (general), Wight King

5 blood knights

40 zombies

30 skeletons

20 grave guard

 

I have 200 points to play around. I could place Duvalle and his court, who could become monsters if getting their hands on an easy target. A necromancer would be very good to move behind my slow undead legions. Would you upgrade the vengorian into Lauka? I think she gets much more for little points, but she also loses so much from not benefitting from the dynasty.

Also I should try to get into a 1500 list at some point, so I can start playing before painting SO MANY MODELS

Thank you very much for everything!

[Sception]

1) you don't ~need~ to commit to a particular dynasty.  Doing so can be fun, and can help guide your purchase choices, but keeping your options open and switching bloodlines from list to list and game to game can help you adjust to changing matched play seasons, your shifting pool of opponents, and your own evolving gameplay preferences.

That said, you've got a sort of mixed arms, bit of everything collection going.  If you do want to commit to a particular subfaction, I find Vyrkos or maybe Legion of knight complement that style best.  And you do already have a bunch of Vykos stuff from the cursed city box, though the most useful bloodline-specific unit in that pile ime is Goreslav, and Goreslav works just the same in any bloodline as long as the army is running one or more big zombie blocks.

One kind of unit I'd strongly recommend looking into that you don't currently have much of is fast chaff.  Soulblight has several good options here - Dire Wolves (battleline, deadwalker, lots of bodies/wounds for the points cost, specific synergies in vyrkos), Fell Bats (very fast, flying, cheap per unit), and Black Knights* (can deal a bit more damage than the other two - though not by much, you already have some, battleline in legion of blood).  All of these units are fast, cheap, summonable, and expendable.  They are ideal units to capture midfield objectives early, keep enemy units off of gravesites, block out areas from enemy deep strikers, screen your other units from enemy charges, charge in before your real melee threats to absorb 'unleash hell' reactions or lock units in to prevent dangerous consolidation, sneak around flanks to harass weaker ranged units or objective campers or backfield support heroes or capture unattended backfield objectives.  Heck, they can often turn games when 'thrown away' as sacrificial speedbumps by parking them 3" in front of a non-flying enemy unit and forcing them to waste a turn of movement going around or charging in to clear them out.

The tactical uses of fast chaff are practically endless, and imo are a key factor in the success of any soulblight build.

....

With your current list you could add a necromancer (use a spare zombie head, or see if you can find a cities player with spare heads from their college wizard kit in their bits box) and a unit of fell bats.  Or a unit each of black knights and fell bats.  Or you could downgrade prince vhordrai to a generic VLoZD and pick up a unit of dire wolves and one of fell bats.

Goreslav is the same price as a unit of fell bats (at least for now, that could change soon), so you could sub him out for the bats in any of the above piles as well to threaten to revive half your zombie unit once it's wiped out.  But again, the main thing I think your current list is missing is fast chaff, so I'd start by looking to field some bats, wolves, or black knights.  I generally consider 1 unit of such per thousand points to be a bare minimum investment.

 

*I don't personally think Black Knights /should/ be fast chaff, both for lore reasons and because the faction already has dire wolves and dire bats in the same role, but since the initial release of AoS the devs have consistently made black knights way too weak offensively and defensively to serve as the sort of semi-elite medium cavalry that imo they should be, and by lowering their points over time until they actually became worth fielding they kind of ended up as a decent fast chaff unit by accident.

[aquenaton]

Thank you very much! I think I have never gotten to read such a fine explanation regarding the uses of that type of unit. I just saw "dogs are good", but I can finally understand why. Thanks a lot for all this advices! I totally agree about the black knights, even if they have a role, that one seems so sad for them. The wight king on horse is a lovely model, but I have seen that is not considered particularly useful (and I can see why), so maybe could be replaced with a necromancer and free more points for moving chaff. I think I have models to fulfill that role on my collection and can be a good excuse to get some wolfs for my imminent dip into vyrkos. I really like this faction, and find that every dynasty has so much to offer (even the weakest seem full of character). As I come from trying to play Mortal Khorne, this is a huge change. I think I have many options!

[Sception]

the mounted wight king is such a fantastic model, my favorite in the entire line actually, so it's hard to recommend /not/ running him...  but I honestly havent found much real point to him.  they used to be worse, cheaper, non-spellcasting vampire lords, but then they changed the command ability so now they're not even that.  At least they look good?

but that's kind of discouraging to say, and i don't want to be discouraging to a new player, you know?  expecially when its not really needed.  sure we have a couple dud units, but so does every book, and we have far fewer than most AoS factions despite having more total units to choose from.  our internal balance is good, subfaction balance is decent, lots of build variety, competitive win rate in events is right around 50%, which is where you want it to be - high enough that you know you can earn some victories once you get good, low enough that those victories won't feel cheesed.

it is a tricky faction to learn though.  tons of units, lots of build variety, our damaging units tend to be fairly fragile, lots of tricksy special abilities to get to grips with, from healing and summoning to deployment shenanigans, lots of auras to keep in mind when positioning, etc etc.  have patience & give yourself time to absorb it all.  be prepared to lose a bunch of games while you're learning, including for frustrating reasons like forgetting key abilities until the moment it's too late to use them.

i find it helps to ham it up a bit.  we're the bad guys after all.  and not even there serious business bad guys, we're the cartoon villains with faceless minions that the heroes can smash without remorse led by smug, sneering bosses that the audience loves to see get taken down a peg before they disappear into the night swearing to get revenge next week.

playing the heels, drawing some heat, and then taking a dive so the baby faces can pull some cheers from the cheap seats is all part of the job.  Nobody does that job better than we do, and a few losses under the belt make the eventual victories all the greater.

....

anyway, re fast chaff again, it's a tricky sort of unit to get the hang of, because they're not typically dealing damage, nor are they tanking much damage & surviving.  they tend to die and die fast even when used well, and while you're learning to use them it can be hard sometimes to know whether you spent their lives well or just wasted them to no benefit.  just stick with it, & you'll get the hang of them.  watch some battle reports, play some games, etc.

i also fear i may have undersold the effectiveness of black knights in this role due to my personal opinion that they should be designed to do other things.  they're significantly tougher than fell bats while still being a good deal cheaper than dire wolves per unit, which matters a lot for chaff.  their full command can be useful as well, helping avoid failed charges & spreading a small bravery debuff.  most notably they have that magic minimum unit size of 5 for maximum flexibility.  fell bats with unit size 3 can't cover as much frontage when screening or blocking off enemy movement, while dire wolves at unit size 10 have to deal with the more hasslesome double coherency rules, and can sometimes take up too much space, making it hard to thread them around and between other units & terrain pieces to get them where they need to be.

used to be that dire wolf minimum unit size was 5, for around the cost of a modern dire bat unit, & they were so good then (still battleline even!) that you'd never think to run anything else in the role.  now there's a lot more give & take between these units, which is a good thing.