great mod can you update this to warhammer 2 ME ?

I really had a problem to defeat Vampire armies with Empire, this mod really breaks the game in late game as ethereal and monster units of vampires are simply immortal. I always had to attack with 2 full stacks to defeat 1 vampire stack ottherwise no chance. I think this mod needs a nerf for some units.

Please, Please make this for total war warhammer 2. best vampire mod i've ever had.

using with Ancient Vamp Tec (above) so can now have a proper Skeleton army early, mid & hopfuly late game :)

Great mod :D must have for every playthrough, player or AI, make undead what they should have been, no fear, run all night and fight a battle at the end.

I would love to see this ported but without requiring SFO. It made the Vampire Counts proper undead hordes IMO.

Hey, yes it is. Unfortunately it's going to require a rewrite. No timeline yet with the holidays, etc. I haven't had a chance to really crack open tw2 yet

So, is this gonna be ported to the sequel? i tried to, but apparently i'm too nooby

Thanks dude, really appreciate that. Yeah we'll figure out some sort of replacement trip :)

Hey congrats man. I wish you both a happy wedding and a long and happy marriage. Too bad abouth the caribbean but you can always take the wife there for a trip later. :)

Well I don't want to totally remove morale bonuses since they are useful for bats, ghouls, horrors and necro heroes. I'll have to think on it for awhile to come up with something good. I am a bit busy right now though. My wedding in the Caribbean was cancelled due to the hurricanes so I have a month to plan a new one locally. When things calm down I can work on this again. Please continue to leave feedback as it will all be taken into consideration when I continue work on the next major update.

What was i thinking, yeah you def should try to come up with something for that Nick. Right now there are both research and skills from lord trees that feel pretty useless unless you are running a ghoul/horror army. Lke the skill that give morale when attacking, the one that inncreases aura size and the one that give individual undead units more morale.

I guess its either come up with something special or simply replace all said morale related bonuses with something more appropriate than morale. Like melee def/speed/hp whatnot.

Also maybe you could remove the wight king from the garrisons now that you have the vampire lord instead - to keep it in line with the rest of the Steel Faith factions. Two heroes are a bit op.

If you can come up with something good, then sure. But no need to try to force something into an allready very well designed system.
I did feel that the ancient undead mod made undead fairly OP myself, so probably not going to play with it, have to have a challenge hehe. Some races have really strong research bonuses while others are really lackluster. I guess undead are abouth average? With the mod they become top tier though, which might be a bit too much given their allready usefull mechanics like raise dead.

It will probably be as is just because I have users who play ancient undead and not ultimate undead. If you aren't running this mod, the morale bonuses are very useful in delaying crumbling.

Perhaps I could add some tech effects into this mod to make tech that only does leadership useful with this mod.

Excellent idea Nick. :)
Not that i have any problem with your grave spears and skellie horsemen, they fit perfectly with VC. This system you have made should really be implemented by steel faith. It is imo much better than the original one. Much more plausible.
Are you going to uppdate your ancient undead to fit more with this mod's morale changes or will it be as it is?

And yeah definitely don't want to go the route of Radious. I am thinking about splitting off all my new units into a pack, making them optional.

The morale bonuses are not meaningful when combined with this mod. It was designed to be a stand alone mod and was actually made before this one.

Excellent mod. I was always slightly annoyed that they took the easy route with VC and just made everyone undead. As for the greater crypt ghoul, i guess that dont sound too bad. Just be carefull of going the path of making alot of variation of the same unit, in there lies the path to radious... the path to damnation. :O
Also please no grave guard archers. Damnation... Damnation...
I tried out your ancient undead tree, i noticed that some bonuses was too morale, are they really meaningful given your new system? It looked like it would make VC really powerful, maybe a bit OP?

@AndKat Hey Dude, just published the Beta for what we were talking about. Check out the link in the description. drop the .pack file your total warhammer Data folder and enable it (disable the live mod). Let me know what you think.

PS: I couldn't work out a mod to make the AI have an invisible skill, so keep an eye on that in your testing and see if its ever an issue.

Fair enough, I suppose it does say something alluding to that in the lore:

"The Grave Guard, or Wights as they are sometimes called, are the Undead corpses of long-past heroes and warlords that have been arisen from their graves with a partial flicker of the original soul trapped within, allowing the Undead to fight the enemies of the Necromancer that raised them with the skills and tools of his former life"

begs the question of why the VC can't field archers though. That is supposedly due to the VC being unable to raise undead with the sentience neccessary to properly aim a bow. Seems to me this tidbit would allow for Grave Guard archers

Alright, fair enough.
And also in regards to the matter of discussion, it says in the lore that the grave guard are actually even more ancient than regular skeletons, but were warriors or renown from the past and thus they have more sentience, which is what makes them better troops.

Reverted animations should be live now.

If its that much of a bother to you I can split the different animation styles into their own sub mod since others may like the vanilla animations, too. I will update the mod to take out the animation changes shortly, and post a sub mod for those who like the less awkward animations later.

as a matter of discussion though, I don't think grave guard have any more individuality than any other of the skeletal/zombie units. The shuffling of skeleton warriors/spearmen is a testament to their more decomposed/shoddy state at the point of reanimation compared to grave guard/knights who were raised from protected tombs. While I get that and its valid, I don't particularly like the weird stride. That is a matter of taste, nothing to be be done about that. However, he VC aren't like the tomb kings where the units have a smidgeon of a sense of self - they truly only raise mindless undead.

Kind of both, but moreso skeleton spearman than skeleton warriors. Personally I find that the grave guard having a more refined animation set makes sense as they're using more dark magic and have more individuality than skeleton warriors.

Are you taking issue with skeleton spearmen or skeleton warriors?

The whole point of the skeletons is to have an awkward stride though, because they're reanimated bones that are being driven forwards by dark magic. That doesn't really allow for much fluidity of movement. It'd be nice to just leave the skeles with their default animations as it makes them more unique to look at in a fight between them and humans. It'll be very odd seeing skeletons jumping around.

The Skeleton Warriors use grave guard animations, the spearmen use empire spearmen because there is no grave guard equivalent for spears. They were, after all, human. The grave guard units use a more human animation and I wanted the skeletons to be like that. Grave guard are basically skeleton units with better gear. I personally hated the awkward stride of the skeleton animations.

I have not tested it without ATT, so it might not work. Best thing to do is try to run it without it. If it doesnt crash on startup it will be fine (no adverse effects). I do suspect that it will crash without it though. If not, Cheers!

@Nickamus
I'm sorry, but WHY do skeletons now use the animations of empire troops? They looked just fine before with their skeleton animations. Now they look too human.
Also, is All Tabletop Lords absolutely necessary like the required mod lists suggest?

Wow, thank you for finally fixing Ghouls so they aren't qualified as Undead!

Great, I'll cook something up and get you a link to the beta .pack file when it's ready. I might have time to work on it this weekend.

If I can get the AI to use their cheat ability and make it unavailable to player, I'll draft up a beta version of the mod with the effects we are talking about here.

Varying radii depending on Lord type
Hero versions of Lord of the Undead
Possible different bonus effects based on Lord type
Possible on-use abilities to make lords feel more unique.


Would you be willing to test it?

Sure!

I could probably make an ability that is invisible to the player that needs to be activated and set an AI usage group for it so the AI will use it out of the gate but players will be unable to. I will look into it.

It will kind of suck to have the AI beholden to different rules though.

And yes I absolutely want to find some ways to make the different types of lords standout. I may not approach it through the Lord of the undead ability (I may), but it's on the to do list. I am sort of leaning toward on use battle abilities that fit their theme.

Physical differences might need to be exaggerated a little more; after all Ghoul Kings are melee monsters, a Blood Dragon is a vastly more proficient warrior than a typical Von Carstein, etc..



The AI already suffers from tending to suicide its Lords in various contexts (especially Sieges); ideally there'd be a way to given the VC AI a large LD cheat (short of a 'use this if you aren't playing VCs' submod) so that it doesn't throw totally battles on Lord positioning.

I like your thoughts about the strigoi fitting more naturally with ghouls with a smaller radius. Feels thematically right. There would need to be something to balance that though or people won't pick the ghoul king.

However one big problem with having a set radius is when you are fighting the VC. The AI will not adjust for the mechanic. I'll have to think about what I can do to pull it off.

That's killer feedback Andkat! I'll have to stew on it a bit to draft a plan. I did at some point want to make a few different versions of the Lord of the Undead ability based on lord type that did different things depending on Lord type. Seems to be more engaging that way. I like the ideas about heroes having the ability, but a toned down version radius and effect wise. It would also be an absolute requirement if effect size was reduced. The hero version would need to not have any effects except the unbreakable, as if I make different versions of the ability they will begin stacking on each other (which could make some fun things happen with reinforcing lords).

I think this would also help balance the changes a bit; while Lord loss is very all or nothing and while the performance degradation with damage are decent mechanics, I think at the end of the day loss of crumbling etc. winds up being a quite considerable buff to the VCs.

2. Heroes: By extension, I feel that Heroes should share the 'Lord of Undeath' (or whatever the name is) unbreakable aura ability, but with a smaller radius than Lords. Again, by scaling to hero type, you distinguish, say, Blood Dragons from Necrarchs in terms of baseline capacity for Necromantic support, give some incentive to just ladle in cheap necromancers, etc. Moreover, combined with the above, Lords of weaker necromantic proficiency are strongly incentivized to bring along powerful necromancy-focused or able heroes who can allow them to coordinate armies across a wider tactical range; by contrast Necrarch, Master Necromancers, etc. would be far more likely to bring along specialists with little or (for Wight Kings and Banshees) no Necromantic ability.

A few comments and suggestions:

I think your mechanic is a lot more fitting and entertaining than the 'morale by any other name' crumbling system. However I think there are a few things that could use tweaking:

1. Lord map-wide ability; I don't think the unbreakability should be map-wide; it's too trivial to bury your lord in a forest if there's a real risk of assassination; the radius should be huge, but still enough that the has to have some degree of exposure. Moreover, this would be a fantastic opportunity to distinguish the different lord types in the all TT heroes mod as well as the different LLs- perhaps Necrarchs might have map-wide or so large as to be nearly map-wide radii, but Strigoi and Blood Dragons should have uncomfortably small radii that limit how flexibly they can deploy their undead forces (which fittingly induces Strigoi to rely more on ghouls).

That sounds like a lot of fun - And yes that's the idea!

Close battles though :)

Have to say this has made for some really fun battles with vlad vs the empire, full army of zombies and skeletons just holding the enemy in a clump for vargheists and blood knights to run rampant.

I used Mannrfed and i found that when i went up against another vampire caster lord he killed my ledader with 2 spells. I later used him in a custom battle and a generic empire lord was 1 hit from killing him and he had the support of 2 skeletal warriors.

I uploaded some photos showcaasing some of the mods main points - no-undead ghouls, and the various abilities/debuffs added to units.

I really want to make this the best it can be, thanks much for your time testing and providing feedback. It is immensely useful.

@KampfWagen254 That's fantastic thanks! I did buff their health by 25% of Steel Faith values. It sets them at least 1000 health above most others of their type before considering mounts. In your testing did you feel that that was not enough? Which lords specifically, or all of them? Would you mind testing with only this mod and it's required mods installed?

The lords seem a little squishy but that may well be one of my other mods but apart from that the changes have really balanced out the faction. I really would recommend this mod to everyone, undead actually feel like undead. Thanks man for a great mod! :)

Awesome man let me know how it goes.

Just checked back on the mod to see the changes and it looks awesome man... Of to check out the changes now will let you know how balancing seems.

Seems reasonable, vampires should have a good time dueling other lords now :)