Toothless army

I’ve always been a fan of the undead. I love the idea of the dead rising up from their graves, of screeching spirits who can rob a man of it’s soul, of creatures so dark and evil that their names are not spoken. So it’s not wonder that a last year I started building a vampire counts army. Now a year later the army has grown to a respectable size and I’ve started playing a few games only to find out what I was suspecting when I was reading the army book, the vampire counts army has no teeth !!!

Sounds weird saying that about an army where you general might actually have some of the meanest teeth of all the game (with the exception of a few chaos generals maybe) but what I’m saying is that vampire counts have no punch, no uber units that can smash aside all oposition. I’ll get to characters later but if you look at the other units you can see that they are inferior or equal to mostly everything else in the game. Zombies and skeletons ain’t good for much, dire wolves turns to dust at the slightest gust of wind and the wights (Black knights and grave guard) are only a real threat to other ‘’normal units’’ and will get butchered by any kind of elite units. Sure they cause fear… but compared to their actual combat prowess and the fact that fear doesn’t have the same impact in the game anymore than it used to have, you can’t count on them to accomplish much on their own.

Put characters in your units!!! I hear you say. After all the army was designed with this set-up in mind after all. Even the strategy section at the end of the book says so. And I did have characters in most of my games so why am I strugling ? I think I’ve finaly found the answer in the way I tend to use characters. Normally when I play I use characters as a way to tip a few critical battles my way. They stay a bit at the back and join in whatever fight I need to win or they go to plug a hole in my lines or stop a unit from breaking through.

Now this works really well with armies where the units can fend for themselves a few turns if need be and where they don’t need a character to accomplish something. With VC that ain’t the case and I need to learn to use my characters foward and to actualy win the battle with some backing of my units, not the other way around. So anyone has experience with this kind of setup that can give me a few pointers ?