You also have to march on corrupted land to avoid suffering attrition, and it’s through this blight that you can start to corrupt and disrupt the public order of your enemies. You have to recruit from your own territory, and can produce only so many units per turn. On the campaign map, the rules are similar to bolstering your forces with other races. Except that you’ll almost certainly want to be able to raise the dead and bolster your forces with his dark magics. If facing humans, the Spirit Leech abilities are ideal for sapping morale in the face of undead hordes, but you can also bolster Manfred’s own combat abilities. In addition to being able to equip him with armour, weapons and items, Manfred has a deep skill tree that you can use to tailor his dark magic and abilities to suit your style of play. One strength of Total War: Warhammer is that your leaders and agents take a very active role in the world and in battle. Needless to say, I made little progress with enemies on all sides. In fact, the neighbouring Vampire decided that they wanted my land and declared war. I tend to struggle with Total War games as I acclimatise to them, and my early encounters didn’t go too favourably. Of course, my brief time with the Vampire Counts didn’t exactly go to plan. Naturally, there are plenty others who stand in your way, and you’ll most likely want to try to unify with the neighbouring Vampire Count factions, as well as push back the Greenskin and Dwarves nearby. Led by Manfred von Carstein and expanding from His home in Castle Drakenhof, your plans are naturally to try and spread you influence, and dominate the human Empire to the south, in particular. You have fell bats and winged humanoid vargheists who can be used to harass and tie up enemy cavalry, or dire wolves to act as their own cavalry and vargs to smash into the ranks of infantry. Naturally, with necromancy in play, your forces will be made up of a lot of zombies and reanimated skeletons, but there are more than just shambling hordes. It’s something that puts an interesting spin on how you recruit forces and build your empire. The vampire’s dark magics allow them to raise armies out of the ground and command them.

Of course, that’s largely down to them being the undead – rigour mortis doesn’t exactly make archery easy.

Total war warhammer vampire units