Warhammer Total War 2 - Vampire Patch

[LCP]

So what's everybody's thoughts on Vampire Coast?

They are really strong with a couple units being borderline OP - Mornghoul Haunter in particular has a ridiculous pool of base HP (6.5k base HP?) and has both a speed-reducing aura, The Hunger, AND Terror, AND can pick up Frostbite at level 2, and with skills can get 10 physical resist, a 5 ward save, and 10k hp. Any other hero that can even approach that kind of combat tankiness is mounted on HUGE mounts like Carnosaurs or Dragons, which makes them extremely vulnerable to missile fire. Haunter is only large-sized with an extremely low profile, so he is only slightly more vulnerable to arrows than a hero on foot.

It's pretty telling that most of the Vampire Coast armies in their tournament right before the patch were taking multiple Haunters.

I was actually one of the players in that tournament, & I can at least confirm that Haunters got a reasonable price increase compared to the tournament build. They still seem very strong vs. factions that are limited to largely using infantry like Dwarfs and Skaven, but the fact that so much of their MA is locked up in their bonus vs. infantry makes them not too strong vs other large creatures.

I'd say the most OP thing in Vampire Coast at the moment is Deck Droppers with Handguns. Flying, unbreakable, healable Outriders for the exact same price as Outriders. There are a fair few factions (e.g. Chaos, Norsca) that don't really have any way to shoot them down, so unless you can contest the air they just get free rein to kill anything they want - and contesting the air is pretty difficult against a faction with Terrorgheists.

[Olinser]

So, the new Vampire Coast patch is easy. Like, really, REALLY easy compared to the Eye of the Vortex campaigns.

Without massively expanding or early beelining for multiple big +10 ritual item towns (which is then extremely tough to hold on higher difficulties), its tough to beat the campaign before about turn 150. Taking and holding 12-14 full provinces with 3 +10's gives you an income of about 50 ritual items towards the endgame and will let you win about turn 130-150 if you expanded early.

Without even really trying and with a relatively small area of control (7 provinces), I had the Infamy to beat the Harkon campaign on turn 70, and that was WITH spending 4000 infamy on all 4 Legendary pirate lords. The only reason it went past turn 100 only because I went out to kill all the pirates for the achievement and a couple were WAY off on opposite sides of the world.

Which, incidentally, is a big negative. They took the already bad Loyalty system and succeeded in making it EVEN WORSE. You get no actual bonuses for high Loyalty, and every single normal Lord loses loyalty FAST, like they'll rebel in just a few turns if you don't constantly farm loyalty for them. But then it doesn't even matter because the Legendary pirate lords (purchasable for only 1k loyalty each which is incredibly easy to get with just a couple Coves), HAVE no loyalty and can't rebel.

Pirate Coves give way, WAY too much infamy relative to how much you need to beat the campaign, are almost completely safe to establish because a Captain can do it on their own for a couple thousand gold, and are 100% safe and secure because nobody can get rid of them. Just 5 pirate coves with the +60 gives you 300 infamy a turn when you only need 12k for the max win.

And the attacks at each level are significantly weaker than their Eye of the Vortex counterparts. On normal it's a single 20 stack pirate for all 3 levels, when also on Normal the final Ritual attack is 2 different groups of 5 20 stack armies.

Not sure if the other Vampire Coast campaigns are different (I'm playing Cylostra right now - DAMN that ghost paladin is ludicrously OP), but the Harkon campaign was insanely easy.