Vampire Coast is in the worst state it's ever been in. [Campaign]

tl;dr about halfway down the post, in all bold.



To start with, I'll mostly be discussing Aranessa and Noctilis, although Clyostra has the option to abandon her home base and sail the high seas as well. Luthor Harkon is, for all intents and purposes, the "average and expected Total War experience with a VCoast roster", and while some of this stuff does or can apply to him, he's not as hard hit by this any moreso than all of the other faction/races in the game.



Let's get started!



Line of Sight: The Line of Sight nerf in the most recent patch crippled Horde factions more than anyone else (although let's be real, it sucks for everyone). But even moreso for the Vampirates, who ideally spend large amounts of time at sea. It kind of sucks when you plan to sack a settlement 3-4 travel turns out only to discover halfway there that some other army you're at war with has sent a full stack to intercept you, knowing full well that you left the safe shallows of your home port because CA's Campaign AI is omniscient, and always has been so since before the LoS nerf. Fine, you say, I'll take them on, steamroll through and keep going, right? Your other option is to return to port and waste another two or three turns, wait for them to leave.



If you do this, expect to repeat this process several times. And that settlement you wanted to sack? You're going to see it 20 turns later, still unsacked, because of this process and everyone hating you.



Doesn't feel very piratey.



On higher difficulties, be prepared to actually sail directly into Black Buckthorn or other pirate lords way beyond your actual fighting capability while moving from your home base to that place you'd like to conquer, as now you can't actually see them until you're within their movement range.



Now, the common answer to this has been "Use your agents for more vision!" On paper, this is actually a pretty cool idea. I mean, the Dreadfleet should feel like a fleet, right? And seeing this convoy of small agent ships surrounding and escorting the Reaver conjures up some cool images, like the end of Game of Thrones Season 6, right? But in practice, because agents cannot take action on sea, all this means is ~250 gold per turn per agent for a bunch of neutered, moving watchtowers.



Replenishment/Raise Dead: But let's say you've beaten that surprise full stack. Congratulations! Except now, assuming you're in the first 100 turns and haven't built a Doomstack, you've probably got troops to replenish. If you were a land-based horde like the Beastmen, you could pop into a replenishment stance like encamp or raiding. You cannot do this on water, and often, as a result, you have to sail back to friendly waters.



If you were a ground-based vampire faction, you could raise dead. And if I remember correctly, you could raise dead on water as well until a recent patch destroyed that functionality. I cannot stress how thematic this function would be for the vampirates. It would give those roving pirate bands meaning even more than just the Pieces of Eight, as sinking them could yield you Depth Guard, Animated Hulks, a Carronade, which supplement your army early on before your flagship has been built up to snuff. The starmetal harpoon is effectively this, in Macguffin form. Mechanically, it could help you recuperate from those surprise full stack battles that the AI sends at you that you now can't see coming in the middle of the ocean. But you can't. If you want to raise dead--a key part of the Vampire race--you have to go to ground. If you want to replenish away from home, you have to go to ground.



Are you seeing a pattern yet?



Ah, but what if you took a few key settlements and thus expanded your friendly water area? Well, firstly, say goodbye to that cool Pirate Cove mechanic, but furthermore, the moment you commit to that, you get caught up in the rat race that is babysitting those settlements until they get walls, eliminating the hostile factions around them, and in general not being a pirate. And because you're an undead faction, leaving them early will result in rebellion in a few turns anyways, because yay corruption. And god forbid that you go to take that settlement, and it's a situation like you often find with, say, Fyrus, where it's a 1-settlement faction who's somehow raised two full stacks on their meager minor settlement income and camped out there.



tl;dr -- It strikes me as odd and frustrating that a race that is both horde-based and vampire-based does not benefit from key functions to either horde or vampire-based races unless they are on land, whilst suffering from the drawbacks of both horde and vampire-based races all the time. Furthermore, it's also athematic to force these factions onto land when we consider that the horde facades of these races are supposed to be self-sufficient naval flagships.



Horde Growth: A dead horse so well-beaten I'm not sure Mannfred could raise it, but here we go: Horde mechanics in general means the vampirate flagships/hordes take a long time to get up to speed. Effectively, for the first 80-100 turns of your VCoast campaign, you're not a pirate: you're a captain with a ship in drydock waiting for it to get finished building. Fortunately, with Vampire Coast compared to, say, Beastmen, you can, if you want, focus on ship infrastructure and use your starting settlements for recruitment. Go out, do piratey things, return to base for replenishment and restocking your crew. But doing this slows your overall Horde Growth significantly, and most players in my experience would prefer to beeline Horde Growth buildings (Captain's Cabin V, Anchor I) and then begin actually building their vessel.



Campaign Objectives: For the life of me, I cannot understand why the game would encourage players playing Noctilis to take Caledor. There are a grand total of 0 ports in Caledor. Taking Caledor gains you exactly 0 friendly waters to replenish. It cannot be used as a launching ground to do piratey things. It is a time and money sink that wedges you between at least two soon if not immediately hostile parties. Now, players can ignore the urge to take and eliminate Caledor, but if they want to expand, the next best option is usually the Vampire Coast.



But even if we say Caledor is stupid and players should ignore it, the primary money-making infrastructure building for the VCoast relies on the player owning 3 full provinces (or at least capitals). While players can opt to turtle in Sartosa, the Awakening, and/or Galleon's Graveyard, you lose out on a major ritual, and the money income infrastructure building by itself is one of the worst in the game, if not the worst, so even players who want to just be a roving horde are encouraged by hardwiring in the faction design to take land.



But the problem is, once you do that, again, you're committed to a ground-based game. You're not hunting for treasure. You're not chasing Pieces of Eight. You're not setting up pirate coves to create an elaborate under-empire of liars, cheats, and thieves. You're not raiding hostile settlements and intercepting armies at sea; you're babysitting money sink tax faucets whose only function is to allow you to do what should be--and are, for other hordes and vampires--the fundamental processes of replenishment and raise dead.



This isn't even getting into Mortal Empires, where the campaign goals force you to just play the game like any other race anyways; forget pirate coves, forget treasure hunting. Just expand and conquer. But to me, given that the Vampirates are neither mortal nor interested in Empires in the same way as the order/chaos races, Vortex is just the better campaign anyways, so that's its own problem and I'm happy to ignore it.



Closing: Each of these problems may be minor by themselves, but when combined, result in largely one of two outcomes: Either you're going to spend some 80-100 turns cowering in your home settlement while you wait for your ship to become baseline functional, or you're forced onto land to hold and expand territory so you can actually function as a faction--but in doing so, you abandon all pretense of this being a pirate game.



If you decide to try to "be a pirate", on any difficulty above Normal, you are not the hunter, but the hunted, a scared rat of the seas fleeing from every angry full stack that magically appears out of a permafog back to safer waters because you do not have the luxury of throwing chaff at the enemy and replacing it. You do not have the luxury of picking targets and singling out the weak and the abandoned, because you have no sight, nor upkeep to maintain sight. You are constantly playing poker with an opponent who can see your cards.



If you decide to instead build recruitment buildings on your ship, then you significantly hamstring your horde growth, a problem not unique to the VCoast, but exasperated by the significantly reduced ability to do anything on water, which is where the Vampirates arguably want to be.