Total War: Warhammer II – Tips for VC Strategy

There are many different VC strategies which people will avail you of, I’m going to explain the cheese, just to get it out the way.

VC Strategy Tips

There is a tech you can see in the tree on the top right branch that gives 100% upkeep reduction to skeletons. This means that VC can spam huge numbers of skeleton armies for just the cost of the lord. While these armies are not going to do much damage, they can do some. However the main damage comes from the lord, specifically the wind of death spell. There are a few key points to this:

1. Quickly get to the free skeletons tech.
2. While getting there set up a “sack city”, the skaven and dwarvern minor settlements to the south are good candidates. This means that you get a lord with a number of skeletons, and you sack the city, then wait outside either raiding or camping. Next turn, sack it again. Repeat for many turns, your lord will gain a level most turns. This way you can safely train a vampire lord to lvl20 where they’re immortal and have WoD. Even better is if you can pick the final settlement of a faction for this, as the faction leader will res every 5 turns and give you a blood kiss for defeating them.
3. Build up armies of skeleton spearmen, they are way better than the sword variety because they hold for longer, your skeletons are not there to damage they are there to delay. You want to get a load of valuable enemy units lined up for a good WoD while you skeletons hold them in place.
4. Consider blobbing up your formation carefully. If the enemy has artillery or a caster with an area spell then do no do it as you’ll massively increase the effectiveness of these. However if they lack these things then try to lay out all your skeletons on top of each other. This causes the AI to group all its units around yours making them prime candidates for WoD.
5. Make sure you have a necromancer hero or 2 in your army with the healing aura this greatly increases the lifetime of the blob. Try to get them with the knowledgeable trait, once you’ve got some money rolling in then actively recruit and disband necromancer heroes in your army to rotate the trait pool.
6. Consider a “hit squad”, I tend to also pack 3 units of Vargheists into my armies. Though expensive they will allow you to fly past the melee and take out the ranged, or start rear charging the melee troops that are looking vulnerable while they attack your skeletons.
7. Expand quickly – the Empire will get strong fast, and because of the free skeletons you don’t have the normal economic constraints for army count so get those empire cities fast in order to keep them weak.