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Vampirism Fire - A Human Guide v1.01
Vampirism Fire - A Human Guide v1.01
By: potofthemoon
Author: potofthemoon
Map Vers: VampirismFire5.08d2.w3x
Released Guide Vers: 1.01 (03/04/2012)
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By: potofthemoon
Table of Contents
Vampirism Fire: A Human Guide....................................................................................... 1
Introduction......................................................................................................................... 6
How to base......................................................................................................................... 6
Towers (General info)..................................................................................................... 6
Proper targeting........................................................................................................... 7
Mana towers................................................................................................................ 7
Frost towers................................................................................................................. 8
Pink diamond towers................................................................................................... 8
Wall towers/Super wall towers ................................................................................... 9
Calcite outpost/Orange calcite outpost ..................................................................... 10
Super Tower of Flames/Ultimate Tower of Flames ................................................. 10
Healing towers/Super healing towers ....................................................................... 11
Venom spire/Ultra venom spire ................................................................................ 12
Vampire spire tower/Ultra vampire spire tower ....................................................... 12
Blood tower............................................................................................................... 13
Holy blood tower ...................................................................................................... 13
Comet/Meteor tower: ................................................................................................ 14
Armageddon tower.................................................................................................... 14
Ultra lighting oracle .................................................................................................. 15
Other towers.............................................................................................................. 15
Towers (crunching the numbers) .................................................................................. 15
Pink diamond towers and their upgrades .................................................................. 17
Walls ............................................................................................................................. 19
Amethyst wall ........................................................................................................... 20
Sapphire wall ............................................................................................................ 20
Emerald wall ............................................................................................................. 20
Chrysoprase wall....................................................................................................... 20
Garnet wall................................................................................................................ 21
Ruby wall .................................................................................................................. 21
Diamond wall............................................................................................................ 21
Onyx wall.................................................................................................................. 22
Others........................................................................................................................ 22
Wall placement to prevent shade glitching................................................................... 23
Down ramps: .......................................................................................................... 23
Neutral ramps ......................................................................................................... 24
Up ramps ................................................................................................................ 26
Anti-sphere/Anti-assassin techniques ........................................................................... 27
Using your blood boxes and feeding blocks ............................................................. 27
Prevention ................................................................................................................. 28
When to anti-sphere .................................................................................................. 33
List of things used to anti-sphere .............................................................................. 33
General front entrance construction.............................................................................. 33
Basic and cheap......................................................................................................... 34
Preventing human sniping strategies ........................................................................ 34
Gapped entrances ...................................................................................................... 36
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Anti-Frenchmen entrance.......................................................................................... 37
Basing ........................................................................................................................... 38
Check for shades ....................................................................................................... 38
Putting down a base .................................................................................................. 39
Base awareness and warning walls ........................................................................... 39
Organizing your base ................................................................................................ 40
Pooling ...................................................................................................................... 41
Minibases .................................................................................................................. 41
The bases....................................................................................................................... 42
Having a long lead up to the base ............................................................................. 42
Having a small choke................................................................................................ 43
Having unharassible spaces ...................................................................................... 43
Having multiple viable entrances.............................................................................. 43
The map (base #s).................................................................................................... 44
Base 1........................................................................................................................ 45
Base 3........................................................................................................................ 46
Base 5........................................................................................................................ 47
Base 6........................................................................................................................ 48
Base 17 (Highly recommended) ............................................................................... 49
Base 18...................................................................................................................... 50
Base 23 (Highly recommended) ............................................................................... 51
Base 35...................................................................................................................... 52
Base 36...................................................................................................................... 52
Base 37...................................................................................................................... 53
Combo bases ............................................................................................................. 53
Shitty bases ............................................................................................................... 53
Proper map awareness................................................................................................... 54
Vamp income ............................................................................................................ 55
Urn of Dracula .......................................................................................................... 56
Vamp items ............................................................................................................... 57
How to tech ....................................................................................................................... 59
Early-game economy .................................................................................................... 59
Startup ....................................................................................................................... 59
Upgrades ................................................................................................................... 59
When to place down goldmines................................................................................ 60
Mid-game economy ...................................................................................................... 60
Transition to late-game ............................................................................................. 60
Goldmine comparison............................................................................................... 61
Late-game economy...................................................................................................... 62
Grabbing leaks .............................................................................................................. 62
Knowing the vamps .................................................................................................. 63
Distraction................................................................................................................. 63
Predictions................................................................................................................. 63
Selecting the coin...................................................................................................... 64
Opportunistic moments............................................................................................. 64
Black buildings ......................................................................................................... 64
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By: potofthemoon
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By: potofthemoon
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By: potofthemoon
Introduction
Hi ^^! My username is potofthemoon from USWest, formerly named
potofthemoon.. I often play human in my games, although I do vamp from time to
time. I was formerly an avid Vampirism Beast player, however made the transition to
Vampirism Fire as the Vampirism Beast community wound down. I have been playing
Vampirism Fire for quite a while now, although I honestly dont remember exactly how
long. I learned by watching many skilled humans play and then trying it myself in other
games.
There are many intricacies that make up competent human play, and in this guide
I would like to address these intricacies. I dont wish to go over every possible aspect of
vamp fire for that is not the point. The point is to cover what I believe are the most
fundamental points of human play and add informative tidbits that may help more
experienced players tweak their play. I know many others will have varying opinions,
which is great. I merely present here what I have seen that has worked well, based on my
experiences and my observations of many skilled players. The goal for this guide is not
to tell you how to play vamp fire, but rather to enlighten. I am hoping that through this
guide, players of all skill levels will find renewed interest in this game and create
innovative strategies of their own to share with the rest of the vamp fire community.
While I do not consider myself a skilled player in any sense (rather quite the contrary!), I
hope I will able to capture the mindset of the many skilled players I have watched over
the months, and make it tangible for those newer to the community to understand.
About this guide, it was compiled and written over quite a long time, pretty much
the entire time I played vamp fire. It has been tweaked as the versions changed. Initially,
this guide was just for myself and it started off as a bunch of interesting and important
tricks and strategies. As I added more, I began to organize them into coherent groups,
until I formed what you see here. I apologize in advance for grammatical or spelling
errors, Im not here to write an essay, but hopefully youll get the point of what Im
trying to say. I admit this is kind of a long guide, so I added a table of contents so you
can browse what you what to read. Ive tried to write this guide so it can be read and
understood by those perhaps less skilled players. Regardless, I hope all readers will find
some value in what I have to say.
How to base
Towers (General info)
For a quick overview on proper tower usage, I have complied a list of common
towers and towers I use on a regular basis. When it comes to building towers, it is ideal
to minimize costs by building the least towers necessary to keep you alive, unless you
plan to kill off a vamp right then and there (more on Killing vamps). This means keeping
tabs on the vamp and the amount of feed they have. Towers essentially act (if you dont
plan to trap and kill the vamp near your base) to shoo the vamp away. Therefore how
many towers you need depends on how fast you need to shoo them away, if you even
need to at all. If you can out-repair the vamp with only 1 human, towers may not be
needed at all. Whether you can out-repair the vamp depends on the number of available
fixers (engineers or others) and which fixers you can use to fix. Keep in mind the
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number of available fixers goes down if the vamp has a ring, high level chain, or are
using strategies like Frenchmen, since you are unable to use certain fixers such as furbs
or COF workers (they will just be killed). Tower up accordingly. Therefore I cannot
give you a breakdown of which towers and how many to get every game, rather I will
outline usefulness of particular towers. Deciding how many towers to get is based on
experience and map awareness. You should be able to approximate the amount of feed a
vamp has (more in Proper map awareness) and determine what items he could possibly
get, and respond accordingly and in time. In regards to generally deciding where to place
them, you want to place towers so they get maximum face time with the vamp as he
approaches your base and such that you have access to repairing every one in case of
richo.
As a general rule, I wont get any damage towers that can be richod (lower than
2k hp), especially if the vamp already has a richo, so the vamp gets the least feed possible.
But if the vamp does not have a richo yet, you can get 1-2 of these lower than 2k hp
towers if they are exceptionally useful, such as the vampire spire tower, since it slows a
great deal, and feeding one or two of these is not too big a deal. Once the vamp grabs a
richo, you should stop or at least minimize the amount of lower than 2k hp towers youre
building (including healing towers). Of course you can grab the tower hp upgrade,
however earlier on, the tower hp upgrade is rather expensive and may not be worth it just
to prevent richo.
Proper targeting
You should assign all your damage towers to a specific group number (Ctrl+#),
that way you can properly target high priority targets over the vamp. Some high priority
targets that you should be quickly taking out over the main vamp attacking your wall
include the Frost Wyrm, the non-tanking vamp(s), Frenchmen, felbeasts, assassins, meat
carriers, armor-reducing minis and other threats. Watch for these threats and pick them
off before they pick you off.
Mana towers
These towers are some of the most effective early game, and you should be
getting 1-2 towers to at least force an Immunity shield, especially if the vamps have
decided to go double chain and ring. It works well early game because the shield costs
1000 wood, and forcing the shield will prevent the vamp from getting other lumber
costing items/units early game (such as the wyrm). However, later game, these towers
lose their effectiveness if the vamps have gotten an Immunity shield. If the vamps never
get an immunity shield feel free to punish them by getting several mana towers.
However, if they grab an Immunity shield, dont get too many mana towers, their damage
output sucks compared to upgraded pinkies or the super flame towers. Granted, their
other main use in the later game is important for scanning uncharted areas as an
alternative scout to the vested slayer.
Mana towers:
Damage per hit (base): 153-156 (will deal an extra 100 per hit if target mana is being
burned)
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 0.32
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Frost towers
I wouldnt suggest building this until you have towers to actually damage the
vamp, therefore maximizing benefit from slowing the vamp as he comes to or leaves your
base. This is because it is rather expensive early-game for a tower that does really
nothing but slow. Place it where it can cover the maximum amount of space of vamp
approach, and having 8000 hp, you can place this tower right up against the edge (in lieu
of a wall tower) if it affords you more face time with the vamp. Its sight range (1600) is
less than its firing range (2000), and the sight decreases drastically during night (800).
Consequently, you may want to sight the vamp with a slayer for extra slow time. Dont
build more than 1 per vamp, they do not stack.
Frost towers:
Damage per hit (base): 151-152
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 0.42
Projectile speed: 1200
Range: 2000
Hitpoints (base): 8000
Hp regen (sec): 20
Bounty (gold): 100
Other abilities: Frost attack (5 sec duration) Cold slow
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mid game damage output, it would be cheaper to go with mass pinkies, more of this in
Towers (crunching the numbers). On a vamp with only demonics, ultra flames are
probably not even needed, depending on pressure. I tend to get Ultra flame towers only if
I have already initially committed to getting super flame towers, and suddenly need
increased damage output. Ultra flame towers are therefore not usually used by me unless
I have misjudged how powerful the vamp has become. Dont get regular flame towers,
they can be blasted/richo and dont do enough damage.
Super Tower of Flames:
Damage per hit (base): 802-810
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 0.5
Projectile speed: 900
Range: 1300
Hitpoints (base): 3000
Hp regen (sec): 20
Bounty (gold): 50
Other abilities: None
Ultimate Tower of Flames:
Damage per hit (base): 2502-2510
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 0.5
Projectile speed: 900
Range: 1600
Hitpoints (base): 5000
Hp regen (sec): 20
Bounty (gold): 50
Other abilities: None
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Healing towers:
10 hp regen
500 hp
5 gold bounty
Slower healing aura
Long cd on heal ability
By: potofthemoon
Regardless, know that the healing auras from either tower do not stack, if both
regular and super healing auras are present, the super healing aura takes precedence, and
no extra heal is afforded by the regular one.
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By: potofthemoon
each other. Note that the frost slow slows more than the venom leak slow, but both do
stack (frost and poison slows stack each once).
Vampire spire tower:
Damage per hit (base): 751-758
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 0.32
Projectile speed: 5000
Range: 1000
Hitpoints (base): 2500
Hp regen (sec): 5
Bounty (gold): 500
Other abilities: Venomous leak slow Poison slow
Ultra vampire spire tower:
Damage per hit (base): 2501-2508
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 0.32
Projectile speed: 5000
Range: 1500
Hitpoints (base): 2500
Hp regen (sec): 5
Bounty (gold): 500
Other abilities: Venomous leak slow Poison slow
Blood tower
Unfortunately, like all specialty towers, it will typically cost more than other
damage towers. I would think this is best suited against vamps who stay at your wall for
a long time, since the armor decrease ability will slowly stack up, but because it takes a
while before the negative armor actually does anything, I tend to shy away from these
towers altogether.
Blood tower:
Damage per hit (base): 1000-1000
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 1.0
Projectile speed: 2000
Range: 1200
Hitpoints (base): 2500
Hp regen (sec): 50
Bounty (gold): 60
Other abilities: Holy Blood (-1 armor per hit, effect will continue until tower disengages
target for a while)
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By: potofthemoon
stages of building. Although it isnt as damage efficient as the other end-game towers,
having 10 armor reduced a second is nothing to be sniffed at.
Holy blood tower:
Damage per hit (base): 10000-10000
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 0.1
Projectile speed: 2000
Range: 1500
Hitpoints (base): 5000
Hp regen (sec): 50
Bounty (gold): 1000
Other abilities: Holy Blood (-1 armor per hit, effect will continue until tower disengages
target for a while)
Comet/Meteor tower:
Gives very good mid game protection. However, due to its extremely high cost
for mid-game, it would not really be indicated mid-game unless the vamp has placed
extreme pressure on you (e.g. vamp has cloak when you only have a Garnet or Ruby wall
or vamp has 3 demos against your chyro wall). These towers allow you to actually
damage a late-game cloaked vamp, although slowly. Remember to use cripple if possible.
Comet tower:
Damage per hit (base): 15001-15001
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 1
Projectile speed: 1250
Range: 1500
Hitpoints (base): 5000
Hp regen (sec): 50
Bounty (gold): 250
Other abilities: Cripple (-50% movespeed, -25% dmg and atk speed, lasts 10 sec on vamp)
Meteor tower:
Damage per hit (base): 35001-35001
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 1
Projectile speed: 1250
Range: 2000
Hitpoints (base): 5000
Hp regen (sec): 50
Bounty (gold): 600
Other abilities: Cripple (-50% movespeed, -25% dmg and atk speed, lasts 10 sec on
vamp), Spell immunity
Armageddon tower
I use these towers primarily in the end-game since they dont disconnect people
when firing. Remember that this tower does have a cripple ability, so use it when
possible.
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Armageddon tower:
Damage per hit (base): 100001-100001
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 1
Projectile speed: 1250
Range: 2000
Hitpoints (base): 5000
Hp regen (sec): 50
Bounty (gold): 1000
Other abilities: Cripple (-50% movespeed, -25% dmg and atk speed, lasts 10 sec on
vamp), Spell immunity
Other towers
o Pearls/shiny pearls only useful very early game, the natural precursor tower to
the mana tower, which means you can use this very early-game and have a
smooth transition into the early/mid-game by upgrading to mana towers
o Opal spire only useful very early game/early game, the natural precursor to
pinkies or pretty much any other tower
o Wall of seeing I would suggest not wasting your money on this unless
absolutely necessary (i.e. slayer has died and there is no other form of detection
on an invis vamp attacking your wall), its far too expensive, and can be easily
destroyed. Also its detection range is pathetic (800). For detection, early game
just use your slayers tracker, mid-late game just get a vest on your slayer.
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built by itself and must be upgraded from the comet, the cost of both meteor and comet
must be incurred to calculate the Best wood/gold cost. DPS means damage per second,
and the higher the DPS/wood or gold, the more damage the tower deals per resource
spent (the higher the better).
Early/Mid game
Tower
Opal spire
Pink diamond (base)
Calcite
Orange Calcite
Super flame
Ultra flame
Blood
Comet
Meteor
Best
wood
cost
800
4800
3300
10800
14800
54800
15800
125000
275000
Best
gold
cost
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
40
390
Avg
dmg/shot
Shot
delay
DPS
DPS/wood
DPS/gold
58
219
800
1600
806
2506
1000
15001
35001
0.32
0.6
31
2.50.83
0.5
0.5
1
1
1
181
365
267801
6401920
1612
5012
1000
15001
35001
0.23
0.08
0.080.24
0.060.18
0.11
0.09
0.06
0.12
0.13
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
375
90
Items of note:
1 gold cost is negligible at the stage when super flame towers or blood towers are
typically built, that is why I have chosen to remove the gold analysis from those
respective towers.
Comet and even meteor tower appears to be a viable defense, and more cost
effective than the flame towers. However even one would be very costly to
produce, meaning you would be defenseless until you managed to save enough
for the comet or meteor tower, which could be dangerous, whereas the other more
tiered towers like the super flame and ultra flame would afford you defense along
the way.
The calcite outposts do not do very well in terms of cost efficiency, unless the
vamp is regularly assaulting your wall for more than 20 seconds at a time (the
approx amount of time needed for the outposts to reach full speed), at which case
it does quite well.
The blood tower also does not perform well as a cost efficient damage tower.
Late game tower
Holy blood
Armageddon
Lightning oracle
Ultra lightning oracle
Best
wood
cost
1000000
200000
750000
1000000
Best
gold
cost
2000
1000
250
1600
Avg
dmg/shot
Shot
delay
DPS
DPS/wood
DPS/gold
10000
100001
12950
50925
0.1
1
0.1
0.1
100000
100001
129500
509250
0.10
0.50
0.17
0.51
50
100
518
318
Items of note:
It is important to note at this stage, cost efficiency is not as important, due to the
excess amounts of cash you should have, this chart is important if you need to
reach your first end game tower fast and need to decide which tower will be most
cost efficient.
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By: potofthemoon
As expected, the holy blood is not very cost efficient in terms of damage,
regardless, reducing 10 armor a second (600 armor a minute) would probably be
worth it.
The ultra lightning is most efficient in terms of wood cost
Armageddon is close behind ultra lightning in terms of wood cost, but is quite
costly in gold for damage output efficiency
In the following chart, the cost efficiency of towers if they were upgraded from
their previous form (to offer tiered protection throughout the game rather than a sudden
one shot deal once its first built) is examined and compared to the ideal cost.
Progressed tower
Armageddon (comet meteor)
Armageddon (no prog)
Ultra lightning oracle
Ultra lightning oracle (no prog)
Total
wood
cost
475000
200000
1750000
1000000
Total
gold
cost
1390
1000
1850
1600
DPS/wood
DPS/gold
0.21
0.50
0.29
0.51
72
100
275
318
Items of note:
Upgrading from comet all the way to Armageddon costs about twice the amount it
would have cost if built ideally, although comet to meteor affords excellent mid
game protection.
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DPS/wood
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
0
10
15
20
25
30
# of pink diamonds
How to read this:
The higher the DPS/wood (value of the y-axis), the more cost efficient and
therefore better.
The legend on the right side refer to the cost of the upgrades, i.e. 10/20000 is 10
gold / 20000 wood cost (referring to the Glistening Powder upgrade for the
pinkies) and the 1/1000 would refer to 1 gold / 1000 wood (for the first damage
Gem Quality Level 1 upgrade)
The damage Gem Quality upgrades were calculated cumulatively, meaning the
second upgrade technically cost 1/1000 + 2/1500 = 3/2500, and the third upgrade
technically cost 1/1000 + 2/1500 + 3/2000 = 6/4500.
The No Upg is the dashed dark blue line and is DPS/wood if no upgrades were
got, this is your baseline for pinkies.
The SuperF refers to the DPS/wood of the Super flame tower, a tower of
comparable damage and efficiency, in just this one y variable, x variable would be
# of super flame towers, rather than # of pinkies.
You can compare other towers simply by calculating the DPS/wood and drawing
a horizontal line where the value is. If the value is higher, it means it is more cost
efficient.
Gold cost was not factored in.
Items of interest:
The Glistening Powder upgrade already begins to pay for itself after only 3
pinkies, better than all the Gem Quality upgrades combined.
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Getting all possible upgrades begin to pay for themselves at values greater than 9
pinkies, over just getting the Glistening Powder upgrade.
Getting Glistening Powder and will be more cost efficient than super flame towers
if you get more than 5 pinkies.
Even all the damage Gem Quality upgrades will not make pinkies more cost
efficient than flame towers.
As the graph suggests, all the values will asymptote and reach a y-max, and based
on a rough extrapolation all values do not seem to surpass 0.25 DPS/wood,
meaning the late game towers Ultra lightning and Armageddon will always be
more cost efficient no matter how many pinkies you build
Conclusions:
All the Gem Quality upgrades are generally useless, unless you plan to get the
Glistening Powder upgrade as well and build more than 9 pinkies. Even then the
15 gold cost is probably not worth it.
If you get Glistening Powder upgrade, you will be more cost efficient than super
flame towers only if you get 5 or more pinkies.
If you are planning to get more than 3 pinkies, get Glistening Powder, it will be
worth it.
The above conclusions are valid assuming 10 gold can be spared without serious
consequence. If gold is a factor (i.e. single vamp income), 2-3 super flame towers
are probably best against a single demonics vamp.
Walls
Walls are very similar to towers, in that you want to build the weakest one that
will keep you alive, for the sake of your economy. Similarly, you can afford a weaker
wall if you have stronger towers. This means you must have good map awareness if you
are to be successful. Here I will very broadly generalize when certain walls are
appropriate. When is comes down to survivability of a wall, both the wall armor and the
total hp are important. Hp gives you buffer, preventing crits from killing your wall and
giving your towers time to hurt the vamp, and armor allows you to out-fix the vamp and
overall survivability (for a good discussion on walls and how armor affects their effective
hp, go to http://wiki.vampirism.eu/index.php?title=Wall_%26_Armor ).
It is important to note that while a wall is in construction, say a diamond onyx
or building of a new ruby wall; the wall has the hitpoints, but effectively has 0 armor.
This makes all walls in construction very vulnerable to attack. Either speed them up
using engineers, or invuln them if necessary. As a general conservative guide, you can
take this modified summary of suggested walls versus vamp items (Reference:
http://wiki.vampirism.eu/index.php?title=Base_Construction ):
By: potofthemoon
Amethyst wall
This is only a precursor wall to your later walls. However this wall is useful in
early game for anti-sphereing against early game sphere/richo rushes, since a fully
upgraded amethyst wall can withstand a single richo shot (fully upgraded) and is built
rather quickly from the furbog harvester. Using the amethyst wall for anti-sphereing
affords you the benefit of being able to withstand against later game triple richo cheese
attempts to sphere into your base.
Nonupgraded hp: 1400 (2240)
Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 25
Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 30
Bounty given (gold): 5
Build time (sec): 10
Repair time (sec): 25
Sapphire wall
This wall can hold off easily against vamps that have no additional damage items
and have no stats upgrade. If the vamp has a single helm, or a single str upgrade, you
will need multiple fixers to repair. Anything more and you should be thinking about
moving onto emerald.
Nonupgraded hp: 5000 (8000)
Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 20
Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 55
Bounty given (gold): 20
Build time (sec): 20
Repair time (sec): 25
Emerald wall
This is the wall that will usually last you until 30:00, or before demonic remains is
purchased. Unless the vamp has chose to get a few str upgrades, it can easily hold off
against vamps with no demonic remains. It can hold off against 1 demonic remains if
you have multiple fixers on the wall and have 1 armor upgrade. Anything more and you
should be thinking about moving onto chrysoprase.
Nonupgraded hp: 10000 (16000)
Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 25
Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 80
Bounty given: 50
Build time (sec): 30
Repair time (sec): 25
Chrysoprase wall
This is the wall people usually get in response to demonic remains. Unfortunately
it often still requires more than 1 fixer against even 1 demonic remains. At this point,
grabbing 1 armor upgrade on the emerald wall or this wall is a viable option at this point,
depending on pressure. If there is a mini with an anti-armor aura, you will definitely
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need additional armor upgrades to survive along with multiple fixers. Anything more and
you should be thinking about moving onto ruby. Generally, chyroprase is not skipped
through the demonics phase unless you have an extremely robust defense, or the vamp is
severely underfed, in which case you can go straight to ruby after CC.
Nonupgraded hp: 15000 (24000)
Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 30
Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 90
Bounty given: 75
Build time (sec): 40
Repair time (sec): 25
Garnet wall
If you find yourself in dire straits against 2 demonic remains, or even a cloak
before you can get a ruby, you may have to grab a garnet wall. A +2 upgrade armor
garnet with multiple fixers can hold off against a single cloaked vamp, assuming there is
no anti-armor aura minis around. Anything more and you should be thinking about
moving onto ruby. This wall is usually only obtained in an emergency, and should not be
part of your normal wall progression.
Nonupgraded hp: 30000 (48000)
Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 40
Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 100
Bounty given: 75
Build time (sec): 50
Repair time (sec): 25
Ruby wall
This wall is ideal to hold off against anything before cloak, which it can do so
with ease, especially if it has 1-2 armor upgrades. A +2 upgrade armor ruby can
somewhat easily hold off against a single cloaked vamp (you will still need multiple
fixers), assuming there is no anti-armor aura minis around. If faced against a cloaked
vamp armor upgrades on your ruby become very important.
Nonupgraded hp: 50000 (80000)
Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 50
Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 110
Bounty given: 250
Build time (sec): 60
Repair time (sec): 45
Diamond wall
Usually this wall will suffice as the end game wall, with multiple cloaked vamps
unable to break it down. At this stage, it would be a good idea to obtain all the armor
upgrades first, as it essentially makes this wall as unbreakable as the onyx. You may
choose to rush this wall if the vamp gets a quick cloak and you wish to play safely.
Nonupgraded hp: 175000 (280000)
Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 100
Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 160
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Onyx wall
The biggest different between the diamond wall and this wall is the jump in armor,
the onyx wall has only 25k more life (base), but has over 2 times the armor. This makes
a fully armor upgraded diamond just about as good as a non armor upgraded onyx wall.
What this means is that from your current diamond wall, given the choice between
getting the onyx wall or getting all 4 of your armor upgrades on your diamond wall, get
the armor upgrades first, they are far cheaper and more effective at stopping the vamp.
Also this wall takes forever to upgrade to.
Nonupgraded hp: 200000 (320000)
Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 500
Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 450
Bounty given: 1000
Build time (sec): 100
Repair time (sec): 70
Others
o Regular gold mine some players use this as a very early game wall to get that
extra few gold before the minute. Keep in mind this wall has about as much hp
as the amethyst wall (albeit with high hp regen), if you are doing this, dont make
the mistake of leaving this for too long, it should just be holding you over until
your very next building, which should be a proper sapphire or wall tower.
o Nonupgraded hp: 2500
o Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 500
o Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 20
o Bounty given: 25
o Build time (sec): 1
o Repair time (sec): 40
o Command center Because it can be built relatively quickly from scratch from
the COF builders, some people choose to use this as a trapping wall. Remember
that the cc has about as much holding power as the Garnet, so gauge the use of a
cc as a wall on that. Granted it blocks a much larger path, and has a much larger
surface area to place more fixers, but the repair rate is far slower (like 4 times the
fixers needed to repair at the same rate as a Garnet).
o Nonupgraded hp: 50000
o Hitpoint regen rate (per sec): 200
o Base armor (0 armor upgrades): 100
o Bounty given: 250
o Build time (sec): 1
o Repair time (sec): 120
Note: Both the gm and cc had their armor reduced in version 5.08 to prevent their use as
a wall in the first place, so their use now as a wall is greatly diminished.
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Down ramps:
These ramps are described as the vamp approaching a base which is a higher level
than it is while it is attacking the wall. That is, the base is higher than the vamp, and as
such, the vamp will not have vision of the high ground. They also are the most common
in game.
The above wall placement is, in my humble opinion, the ideal wall placement for
any down ramps because if the wall is any lower on the ramp, fewer fixers can be placed
around the wall (the side fixers will be hit by vamp, although the wall will still be antiglitched), and any higher on the ramp is glitch abusable by the shade and it is pretty much
unstoppable (once again without going into WC3 game mechanics no matter how many
buildings you place behind your wall if the wall is placed too high the vamp will still
glitch into your base). To describe its placement, the wall is placed so the front end of
the wall facing the vamp is in line with the front end of the ramp (down ramps are
typically 4 squares long, so the wall is placed at the front two squares within the ramp),
with the anti-shade walls placed one square behind the main wall. Attempts to tp onto a
shade/Frenchmen/meat wagon placed at the fixer line, would glitch the vamp back to the
front. I typically check the correct placement by superimposing a research center to
make sure the wall is flush with the front.
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Neutral ramps
These refer to the openings that go neither up nor down, and as such, the vamp
has vision of the base, and the base has vision of the vamp. There are two types of these
ramps, the openings 4 squares wide, and the openings 2 squares wide. For the 4 square
wide ramps, placement is more flexible, so long as the wall is not so far forward that the
side fixers will be hit by the vamp. To prevent glitching, unlike in the down ramps,
simply add a double layer of walls behind your main wall (4 blocks thick). Teleport (tp)
attempts will push them back to the front of the wall (ensnaring the tping vamp stops tp
too if all else fails). For the openings 2 squares wide, proper wall placement is more
important.
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You can see the ideal placement for 2 space wide neutral openings. Any farther
forward and is lessens the number of fixers allowable, and allows more than 1 vamp to
hit your wall (if vamps try to stack up, i.e. another vamp goes invis to clip through the
main vamp hitting your wall so both vamps can hit your wall, simply ensnare the vamp
you want to glitch out, and he will pop back out). Any farther back and it gives the vamp
a chance to hit your fixers. Also if you put your wall too far back, the vamp can glitch
himself through your wall, or glitch a shade through your wall to tp onto later. This is
done by the placing the unit to be glitched through (must be invis and remain invis) up
against the wall, then stacking an invis vamp over the unit against your wall, then
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revealing invis (i.e. by hitting the wall). This will push through whoever was invis.
However, if a wall is built like the one illustrated above, glitching is prevented. To
describe the placement, the wall is one square back from being entirely in line with rest
of the treeline, or built such that the wall juts one square back from being in line with the
internal wallline.
Up ramps
They are the same as down ramps in structure but are simply inverted (that is your
base is on the low ground while the vamp comes from the high ground, and as such, the
vamp has vision of your base, but the base does not have vision of the vamp). However,
once again without going into lengthy WC3 glitch mechanics, they cannot be antiglitched and at the same time have an allowance for a max of 6 fixers behind your wall.
It is possible to anti-glitch these ramps but for that to occur, the wall would have to be
placed too far out, allowing less fixers behind the wall. For that reason and also the fact
you cannot see the vamp coming properly, I highly recommend against taking any base
with an up ramp. Therefore a player must choose between proper front wall vision or
having more space behind their wall. If you do choose to base at one, sight of the vamp
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is probably more important, and therefore place the wall such that it has vision of the
high ground.
Anti-sphere/Anti-assassin techniques
Using your blood boxes and feeding blocks
Citadel of Faith (COF) blood boxes (BB) are by far one of the most effective antisphere objects out there. Even if you have no blood, you should be trying to use both of
them preferentially over 2 wall towers; obviously on blood your only option is to use BB.
Sometimes this may not be possible since COF must be reached and sphere may be
obtained before COF is reached, however, feel free to replace wall towers with BB later
on. Wall towers cost 2k and have 5k hp, BB cost 1k and have 10k hp. Additionally BB
cannot be attacked by frost wyrms, which can slowly take down wall towers with their
freezing breath ability. Granted COF BB have no fast hp regen, but you should be quick
to fix if needed.
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Prevention
There is a difference between antisphere and antiassassin. Anti-sphere requires
that you place just enough objects in the side gaps of your base such that a vamp cannot
sphere into your base (no 2x2 empty square near a 2 block thick edge). This means you
can have 1x2 gaps along your edges and not fear the sphere. Anti-assassin is having base
placement such that an assassin cannot get into your worker line. It can sit in your base
all day but it wont get anything done. To save the most time and money, you should be
immediately anti-assassined ASAP with houses or tents within your base once you base,
and anti-sphered as late as feasibly possible, which means having good map awareness
and base awareness so when the vamp grabs a sphere, you know he wont just tp onto a
shade nearby and immediately sphere in or that it will take a while to get to your base, at
which time you can immediately antisphere.
Note that if you havent hit COF yet and your base has blood in it, your slayer or
a fang harvester, if the position permits, is an effective anti-spherer to use on blood if the
vamp rushes sphere and ricochet gem, assuming of course that your slayer has around 5k
hp or more. However, if you must use regular bb, place them such that one richo wont
immediately take out all 3 boxes. Of course this only generally applies in bases with only
1 blood to cover. The examples below show placements such that a richo to any one of
the regular bb will not take out all three, but one bounce will hit a castle tower, still
preventing a sphere in. Regardless, I would refrain from using regular BB to stop a
sphere attempt, because it is only a temporary solution and the vamp will continue to
richo as you will have to replace the BB and this will feed the vamp. Here are examples
of regular BB antisphere examples (for only 1 blood):
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In the above GOOD examples, the blood is covered by 3 BB from different angles
(each BB covers a portion of the blood), and the vamp will need to take out all 3 BB
before he can sphere in. It is not possible to kill all 3 BB in one richo since one of the
bounces will hit a wall tower. These do not have to be strictly followed, so long as you
understand the rules regarding how the richochet gem bounces:
It will bounce to the target closest to the initial target, then bounce to the target
closest to the second target (i.e. initial target closeness does not determine the
third target)
Closest is defined first as the amount of overlap to initial target (more overlap =
more closeness; this generally applies to BB)
o This also means that a bb with only 1 square overlap from the initially
targeted bb, will not likely be hit over a bb with a 2 square overlap
If there is no overlap, then closest target to initial target will be hit
If there is equal space for the next target (i.e. two targets are equal space from
initial target), the richo is pretty much completely random, and it dosent seem to
choose one over the other
For bases with 2 blood to cover, it gets a little trickier, and you will have to use
your slayer for at least one of them. This is why I generally avoid double blood bases.
Other ways to anti-sphere that doesnt require regular BB:
An alternative method for dealing with only a sphere, is to separately wall off the
blood, so even if the vamp spheres in, he will be trapped and possibly killed. Skilled
vamps will not fall for this trap but it remains a good deterrent if vamps do not have a lot
of damage yet. If you plan to use this, use a saph wall initially to block off the blood, to
be upgraded to emerald once the vamp grabs the sphere. Generally speaking, this
strategy will help keep you antisphered in a sense until you can get to COF and use a
COF BB to properly seal the sphere spot.
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It is very important to also note that assassins can blink 3 block thick spaces (i.e. a
tent wall wont stop them), because even though their blink jumps 2 spaces (like the
vamps sphere), the size of the assassin is only 1x1 block (unlike the vamp which is 2x2
blocks), so it can jump an extra block. What this means is that an assassin can jump a
little further than a vamp with a sphere, something to keep in mind when basing, more of
this in The Bases.
Now in all the above examples, I used primarily wall towers as anti-sphereing
because most people will associate wall towers with antisphereing. Personally, I prefer
the use of Amethyst walls, to be upgraded later as needed, as the form of anti-sphereing
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in areas away from your front entrance. This is mainly to prevent a triple richo (or two
richo + inferno stone (Rain of inferno item)) from being a problem early-mid game.
When to anti-sphere
Depends on your reflexes and comfort level. Very quick players are able to antisphere the instant the vamp grabs the sphere (and triggers the warning), while slower
players like myself prefer to anti-sphere preemptively based on vamp feed and map
awareness. Assuming you havent reached COF yet and the vamp has a richo and sphere
to deal with your regular BB on the blood in your base, you can try some of the regular
bb placements shown above, or use your slayer and even your human to block a sphere
attempt, before you are able to get COF BBs out. If you do blink a human or some other
1x1 sized unit, make sure you stand in the middle of the blood square, not right up
against the edge, since a vamp can sphere past a ledge and a human right up against it.
Proper surrounding base awareness will help as well, more of that in Basing. To
summarize, some skilled vamps will try to surprise you with a sphere by having a shade
near one of your sphereable spots, buy the sphere and quickly tp onto the shade, where he
will have quick access to your sphere spot. Scan the outside of your base for such shades
from time to time to prevent this.
Wall tower your standard anti-sphere wall, can be taken down slowly by frost
wyrms (with upgrade) or killed by double-richo + inferno stone.
Amethyst wall cheap, can withstand a single richo, can be upgraded to
withstand the weaknesses of the wall tower.
Feeding block weak, should only be used in emergencies.
COF BB excellent anti-sphere device.
Slayer will work if needed in emergencies (blink in to cover hole blasted
through by vamp), ensure it has enough life to withstand a pulse.
Fang harvester works if you can have it mining on blood at the same time,
otherwise the Fang just sits there needlessly.
Gold mine never use this, it can be double richoed, or even single richo +
inferno stone by a single vamp to gain sphere access.
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Your most basic front entrance construction with a small safety area:
The idea is to allow your human to run away from Frenchmen and the ring even
when silenced. Ensure that your front wall is still properly anti-sphered, that the entire
safety area is thoroughly covered in wall tower splash, and that the safety area itself is
still sealed off from your main base. The disadvantage of this entrance is the expense of
constructing such an entrance, and the danger of a wagon getting in possibly surviving
long enough in the safety area for a vamp to tp onto it and into your base.
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Gapped entrances
These entrances are different than the previous two in that there is a 1 square
break in the seal. What this gap does is allow your human to run directly into your base
without the need for blink, however, as a result, the front is not exactly sealed from
shades/assassins/Frenchmen. These entrances require a little more maintenance and
vigilance to keep, but do offer some good advantages. For advantages, it allows your
human, even when silenced, to run all the way into your base, giving you an even larger
safety zone, and hence an ability to likely run out of range of chain as well as ring and
Frenchmen. Another advantage is that if you have autofix turned on, the human will
always run INTO the base to repair towers near your front within your base, as opposed
to running outside. Finally, it is quite cheap to produce.
The disadvantages are that with a break in your seal, shades and other nasties can
get into your base. Therefore it is important to have constant detection (like a slayer with
a vest) at the front and keep your human blocking the gap when there is no need to run
away, and remain vigilant for anything trying to get into your base at all times. Hence
your human becomes, in effect, a plug for the break in the seal, and moving it, removes
the plug.
An example of a gapped entrance:
Ensure that the wall is still only 1 space away from the anti-sphere walls, and that
the gap is only 1 block thick (if it is wider the vamp will simply sphere into it). Maintain
constant detection at the front. These entrances require more attention so it may be more
appropriate for players with a greater multitasking ability.
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Anti-Frenchmen entrance
While the gapped entrances or safety zones provides protection from a wide
variety of human sniping attacks, it does require some maintenance and vigilance at the
front door. For humans wishing to counter a specific type of human sniping strategy, the
Frenchmen, an alternative is proposed. This is useful since Frenchmen are typically the
first strategy used by vamps to kill the human, due to its ease of execution and low
execution cost. It is to use regular feeding blocks to block the sides of your entrance
against Frenchmen. While this method does not allow you to escape silence + ring +
chain, it can give you time to react if silenced + Frenchmen approach your door, as the
Frenchmen must break through the feeding blocks first before it is able to attack your
human. Note that Frenchmen will still be able to kill the feeding block eventually, so this
is not a permanent fix, rather it gives you time for your human to free themselves from
behind the wall to escape being hit by Frenchmen. This will likely be a more early-mid
game strategy since the blocks will take up space behind your front wall, reducing the
number of fixers (by 2 down from a possible max of 6) that can be placed behind there.
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Basing
When starting a new base, keep in mind a few things so you can successfully start
a new base without getting caught with your pants down.
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before he tps onto it and whether he scans or not doesnt make a difference, as your base
is already set up. This is method is obviously more risky and not suggested because
skilled vamps can tell immediately if they are dealing with a skilled human player and
will not hesitate to remove you from the game ASAP.
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It is a good idea to scout the surrounding areas of your base for shades as well,
since vamps may use their shades to have good awareness of what is going on around
your base, or use a shade to tp onto to quickly reach your base faster.
Warning walls in front of your front wall:
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Tower placements:
Pooling
Occasionally, 2 humans will decide to pool resources to go against a very well fed
vamp. The best way to do this is to pool the one who creates the wall, since the wall is
the most important aspect of the base. Henceforth, I will refer to the techer as the one
who owns the wall and should be being pooled to, and the pooler who gives all their
resources to the techer The pooler can decide to go towers, but better would just be to
get gold from the techer for furbs then simply pool all wood. The idea is to further the
tech of the techer, not the pooler. If the techer dies, everyone in the base is dead. A
simple outline would be to pool all the wood gained from the first 15 mins to the techer,
wait until the techer gets all his furbs, then the techer buys full furbs for the pooler.
Generally speaking, the pooler will stay at furbs the entire time and simply pool all wood
to the techer, since the only time the techer can afford to buy the pooler the next tier of
miners (i.e. Fangs) will be in the BO stage, when pooling wood is no longer too
beneficial. At this phase, the techer can choose to fast-track the pooler to BO, so there
are now two BO tiered humans in the game. Obviously this is just a rough guide,
regardless, the pooler should never surpass the techer in tech, unless the pooler wishes to
take over as the main waller.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of having a well coordinated pooler with you in base
is that you have 2 lvl 20+ slayers. With 2 slayers, you can cycle engies, effectively
having 4 engineers fixing your wall at any given time, as the cooldown closely matches
the engineer survival time. Additionally, if you trust your pooler, you can both share
control so that you have two people to attend to a base, to help with things like taking
care of the front wall, leveling slayers, summoning engineers, healing and keeping the
wall alive, base awareness, and teching up.
Minibases
These types of bases refer to the small bases you should create at the beginning of
the game before you actually base. It is a good idea to have many small mining
minibases rather than one or two large bases because it will reduce the risk of you being
graved, and reduce the lost mining time if the vamp were to assault your minibase. It is a
good idea to also have empty minibases so detod workers from another attacked
minibase can be quickly replenished at an empty minibase. Minibases are not meant to
be kept if a vamp attacks, rather they are sacrificed to the vamp. This means you should
minimize the number of structures in a minibase, to reduce feed, since structures cannot
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be detod. Good minibase setup will help you feed less and minimize lost mining time.
The following are a few pointers:
Build many minibases all over the map, with all your miners spread out.
Use tents as warning walls leading up to your minibases. Make it so you have
plenty of warning before the vamp makes it to your worker line.
Keep your houses one square away from the treeline, to help with mining and
make it difficult for the vamp to get into your worker line.
Position your worker lines in your minibases so its hard to grave at least the
entire line.
Place warning walls in possible grave spots around your minibases.
If you are slower to react, try placing a tower in range of your minibase worker
line but outside the minibase, to slow vamp feeding as it tries to retarget the tower
after killing every worker. This also helps reduce the effectiveness of vamps
Minibase shading.
Before you deto your workers, hit e to return the resources your workers may be
holding.
A good typical very early-game minibase:
The bases
In this section I will try to go over some of the most popular and some of my
favorite places to base. This is not to say bases not outlined are not to be based at, rather
some of the bases I outline have some sort of advantage which I will try to talk about. In
general, the best bases have certain advantages which can be categorized. I will first
discuss some advantages to look for in a base when choosing one, before actually delving
into the bases themselves.
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detection, and plenty of blockading structures along the path (warning walls) to make it
very difficult for the vamp to get near your base and alert you if he does try, combined
with a frost tower and damage towers you can make it difficult for a vamp to even
approach your base (i.e. forcing a conc as they approach). Additionally, if the path
leading up is very long, you can build blockading structures behind the vamp if they are
slowed as they ascend the path to increase the feeling of being trapped. It may make the
vamp hesitant to enter further, or act to slow the vamp as he also tries to escape.
Personally, having a long leadup is my favorite and most important aspect I emphasize
when taking any base.
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Note that in bases with a few suggested front walls, all anti-sphere areas are added,
i.e. if you choose one of the front wall suggestions, you may not need to antisphere all the
suggested areas, depending on which wall you took, just use your common sense, its all
been labeled for you. It may be a good idea to take the inner most walls first, as it afford
you the most protection early-game, then take outer walls later game as your base needs
more space.
Base 1
This base has a pretty decent leadup and a large area to place plenty of towers if
taken at either entrance 2 or 3. Additionally, it takes a while for the vamps to reach.
Anti-sphereing this base is quite expensive and most of the base is rather harrassible.
Back to world map.
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Base 3
Ideally, you will take entrance 2 right off the bat, so you dont have an awkward
blood antisphere to deal with, and it gives you a decent leadup. Entrance 3 is never taken
(for obvious reasons), and Entrance 1 is best taken later in the game as an expansion to
Entrance 2, offering you tiered protection and more space for a base as it is needed. Back
to world map.
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Base 5
Most players tend to take the whole base (entrance 1), however I do find a benefit
in just taking half the base (entrance 2). Entrance 2 gives you a nice long lead up to the
base, and proves a very good choke point (at entrance 1) to trap a vamp and make it
difficult to assault your wall. Its weaknesses include being easily graved, and having
workers vulnerable to chaining from the sides. Take entrance 2 if faced with a higher
pressure and expand to entrance 1 when needed. Back to world map.
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Base 6
Both entrance 1 and entrance 2 openings have their pros and cons. Obviously the
#2 allows a nice choke at back and lead up, while the #1 has the narrowed opening but an
extra blood spot and anti-sphere to deal with. The downside of this base is the ease in
which the whole base can be harassed from the side. I will generally take entrance 2 in
situations where there are many vamps alive, since when they all try to attack you, they
all can get stuck or clustered up at the rear choke. Back to world map.
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This base has a nice long leadup, and is close to the vamp base, meaning end
game tower placement will be very easy to finish off the vamps. Entrance 3 creates the
longest path towards your wall, and is therefore highly suggested. This entrance affords
more protection as the leadup becomes considerably longer (than 1 or 2), and proper
tower placement gives you at least 15-20 second face time when comboed with a frost
tower and blockading structures before the vamp can even hit your front wall. Entrance 3
also allows you to not have to worry about the blood spot early game.
The only downside of this base of course is that it is so close to the vamp base,
meaning good map awareness in the base is crucial. Entrance 2 can then be taken mid
game as more space is needed, then finally entrance 1 can be taken to tower up the center
at the end of the game. This base therefore allows you good tiered protection and a good
ending position to finish the vamp at the end of the game. Back to world map.
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Base 18
This base is quite popular amongst players who can use this bases features to
their advantage. It has an awkward leadup, and is very close to the slayer fountain,
allowing good human awareness of the fountain, although this means that the vamps will
also have good awareness of the slayer fountain as well as they continually scan your
base. The base is quite ensconced in trees so you may want to use regular BB to sight
around the base. Back to world map.
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This base has a very nice long leadup, with excellent tower positioning at the top
center peak. Regarding entrance 1, with a frost tower to slow and random houses and
tents in the way, a vamp can spend almost 30 seconds climbing that mountain, and 30
seconds descending, which allows you to kill the vamp easily (of course make sure you
have sight of the vamp all the way, slayer with vest is the best here. Note that in addition
to spherable spots, there is an area (bottom of base) which can be blinked by assassins,
but not vamps, remember to anti-assassin that area. Usually entrance 1 is taken, but
entrance 2 could be taken if you really needed heavy base protection, unfortunately it
leaves you with very little space, a requirement for extremely good base management.
Never take the wall at the rune location. Back to world map.
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Base 35
This base has a decently long leadup, with a good area to place towers for slowing
and hindering the vamps advance. It also has a decent area for a worker line, and an area
to prevent richo of healing walls (place healing walls right up against the back tree line,
you will be able to heal your fixers but be out of range of the richo). Taking the wall at
the rune is not a good idea due to the inverted ramp and lack of leadup. Back to world
map.
Base 36
It has a very good entrance, however, its leadup is somewhat lacking and your
worker line can be somewhat harassed. Warning walls are therefore a good idea. The
base does allow for a large amount of towers to be placed such that they can all hit the
vamp. It has good visibility of the surrounding front, but the front also has good visibility
of you. Base 36 and 34 are in range to protect each other and hence are a good team base
as well. Back to world map.
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Base 37
This base very similar to Base 35, except the downside is having 2 blood to cover
and that the base is generally inverted (not the entrance, the entire base), meaning you
dont get good vision of the surroundings while the vamp has a good view of you from
above. Back to world map.
Combo bases
What I mean is that often two separate bases will work well together, meaning
this will work well when you have 2 players wanting to work together in 2 different bases.
This way you can share towers and fixers. Be sure to allow each other so you can build
warning walls between the bases. These bases tend to be my top choice only for 2 solo
human bases to work together and dont work as well as a single base (when only one of
them is taken, although many of them are still great without their combo counterpart).
Therefore these bases are great if you have 2 good players who wish to work together.
Bases 3 + 4
Bases 8 + 9
Bases 19 + 20
Bases 28 + 29
Bases 32 + 33
Bases 34 + 36
Shitty bases
Given that almost any base can be taken on the map despite their pros and cons,
there are a few bases which I routinely avoid by themselves, since I believe they suffer
from way too many disadvantages. The bases are:
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Bases 1 + 2 although this may look like a good double base, its main deficit it
has over the other double bases is that this is two bases in one. If the vamp breaks
one wall, both humans are done. The other double bases are separate, meaning
one break wont destroy the other. Base 1 by itself is fine however.
Base 8 The exposure of this base to vamp harass (assuming Base 9 isnt taken),
in addition to its small amount of space, makes this base very undesirable.
Base 11 Generally, taking teleport bases are a bad idea, the human portal blocks
proper placement of antisphere BB or towers and forces you to use a slayer,
making it very awkward to antisphere. Also your attention is diverted in two
different areas, making base management hard. Antisphereing this particular base
is a nightmare.
Base 13 Inverted base makes it difficult to see the vamp coming at all, and
allows the vamp to see your whole base easily.
Base 15 Base is awkwardly shaped allowing vamp to harass your entire base.
Also antisphereing is expensive in this base.
Base 21 Double entrance makes basing here not worth it. As a double base it
suffers from the same drawbacks as bases 1+2.
Base 22 Base is too small and allows vamp access to harass your entire base.
Base 30 Teleport base, same reasons as Base 11.
Back to world map.
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Vamp income
Dont underestimate the amounts of passive income the vamps get. Feed is
important to a vamp, but more often than not, the vamp will get most of their income
from passive forms of income. The checkpoints 15:00, 30:00, 45:00 and so on also give
cash. Ive broken down the amounts of passive income a vamp gets. There are 3 main
types of passive income a vamp will get, this is income obtained not from feed. Unlike
the human income, vamp income is not affected by the number of humans or vamps left
in the game. Passive types of income become quite significant if there are a few minis
who are pooling a vamp, as this income becomes effectively doubled or tripled or more if
there are several willing minis in the game. In these cases, you may choose to kill a mini
or two to reduce passive income, more of this in Killing vamps.
The first type is obtained in the first 15 minutes of the game, very much like the
free levels the vamps get at the first 15 minutes of the game, this income is free, however,
depending on how much feed you have. Furthermore, this initial trickle of income
depends on if you are not afk (make at least 1 action (move, scan, chain, attack) for the
minute you want to receive your income). It works by giving you 25 gold every 1.5
minutes, for a total of 250 gold at the end of 15:00. If you get anywhere above a total
feed of 250 at that time, you will stop getting this trickle of income. If you dont, this
income ensures non-afk vamps have at least 250 gold at the end of 15:00, assuming you
dont buy anything else. If you buy something and it drops it below 250, you wont get
extra income, it counts the total feed the vamp has had.
The second type is also free and obtained only at the special landmarks, so every
15 minutes, starting at 15:00. The amount starts at 100g 1000w, and increases 100g and
1000w every landmark. This type is not affected by the amounts of feed or what you buy,
so this income will be had by every vamp. This means at 15:00 the every vamp will
receive 100g and 1000w; at 30:00 they will each get 200g and 2000w; at 45:00 they will
get 300g and 3000w and so on. The third type of passive income comes from the Urn,
which will be discussed in the following section.
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Urn of Dracula
The last type is obtained from the urn. Urn cash can only possibly start at 14:00,
when it comes out, and is usually obtained at 14:00, but is sometimes obtained at 15:00 if
feed is truly scarce. Fyi vamps get an additional minute if obtained at 14:00. How the
urn works, is that it gives the vamp money and wood every minute, increasing the bounty
at every 15 min landmark. It starts at 25g and 50w per minute and increases 25g and 50w
once at every 15 minute landmark. So from 15:00 30:00, each of the vamps will
receive 25g and 50w every minute. From 30:00 45:00, vamps will receive 50g and
100w every minute. From 45:00 60:00, vamps receive 75g and 150w. From 60:00
75:00, vamps get 100g and 200w, and so on.
To summarize the urn (rate of income):
From 14:00 30:00 25g 50w per minute
From 30:00 45:00 50g 100w per minute
From 45:00 60:00 75g 150w per minute
From 60:00 75:00 100g 200w per minute
Etc
Using the above values, we can calculate how much gold a vamp can possibly
have at a certain time, and adding in feed and subtracting items and upgrades, we can
actually calculate approx how much gold a vamp has remaining. The Urn actually gives
the vamps quite a bit of income, which is why it is always purchased. The Urn pretty
much pays for itself within 8 minutes of purchasing it at 14:00.
To summarize the urn + other forms of passive income (0 feed, 0 purchases; except for
urn of course) (cumulative income):
At 15:00, expect at least 350 g
At 30:00, expect at least 725 g (need only +125 g feed to get a remains)
o Total of 375g from urn
At 45:00, expect at least 1775 g (need only +1375 g feed to get a cloak)
o Total of 1125g from urn
At 60:00, expect at least 3300 g (enough for a cloak)
o Total of 2250g from urn
At 75:00, expect at least 5300 g (need only +1000 g feed to get 2 cloaks)
o Total of 3750g from urn
Etc
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By typing show and adding the feed, then subtracting the cost of gold spent on
items/upgrades, you can ballpark how much gold a vamp will have in his bank. Know
this amount and act accordingly, dont over spend, dont under spend. Of course the
calculation doesnt have to be exact, get a general ballpark range since calculating these
numbers in game would be a waste of time. This is why it is a good idea to know the
general cost of most popular vamp items and upgrades.
Vamp items
What items a vamp has should reflect how you play your game. If a vamp has
harassing items to your fixer line, such as rings, or a high level of chain, you will
accordingly need more towers, rather than a stronger wall. If the vamp deals more
damage and is more powerful, you will need a stronger wall, and better towers if you
cannot out-fix his attacks, even if it means delaying your economy.
There is something you should always keep in mind, and that is when the items
come out. For example, vamps only get wood after 15:00, demonic remains only comes
out at 30:00, so there is no need for serious defense or a chyroprase wall before then,
unless the vamp has bought many str tombs, which you should easily scout out by
checking the vamps stats. Additionally, cloak can only be bought at 45:00, so if you
have a chyro wall, and several pinkies already, dont bother upgrading to a ruby until that
time, unless you have scouted the vamp getting a few demonics. Keep in line with the
vamp items or what items they will likely get at the 30:00 or 45:00 min landmarks, if you
are deciding between going to the next tier or getting the next wall or getting more towers.
Then act accordingly, dont just get a better wall or more towers for the hell of it, and
dont get caught with only a chyro while he clearly has enough for cloak. Heres a
comprehensive list of the prices (Reference:
http://wiki.vampirism.eu/index.php?title=Prices ):
Market of Blood:
Vampiric Boots = 100g
Sphere of Doom = 800g
Vampiric Concoction = 40g
Ring of the Hell Lords = 300g
Draculas Helm = 210g
Abomination = 15g 1 food
Shade = 5g 1 food
Demonic Merchant:
Pulse staff = 175g
Immunity Shield = 70g 1000 wood
Urn of Dracula = 200g
Demonic Remains = 850g 500 wood
Assassin = 75g 600 wood 2 food
Fel Beast = 45g 2 food
Rod of Teleportation = 100g
Black Market Merchant:
Burst Gem = 290g
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By: potofthemoon
How to tech
Early-game economy
Startup
Once the game starts, you should build 1 house, 2 normal tents. Start building up
all your workers and normal tents (nobody likes to see large tents ^^). Max out workers
and food (it will take 10 normal tents to get to full food capacity), then get a slayer tavern,
quickly hit return wood on your workers a few times to get 400 wood and grab a slayer.
You should also being building many empty mini-bases all over the map so that if a vamp
attacks one mini base, you can deto your workers and quickly rebuild them in another
mini base, minimizing lost mining time. You should base the instant you have 2 gold and
20-30k wood, because you now have enough for 1 gm. You can also choose to base right
away if you have more than 2 gold, to buy furbogs to increase mining capacity, although
the risk is higher in this case and you may have to get a good wall first before plotting
down any gms. Early game wood is very important, so map awareness of how powerful
the vamp is getting is also very important. Early game is where most risks should be
taken, how much defense to sacrifice for economy. Maximize your risks early game, and
reap the benefits later game.
Upgrades
Early game Research Center upgrades that you need to get depends on the vamps.
For example, if the vamp is not graving, dont get worker hp yet, if the vamp is very
weak, dont get wall hp upgrades yet, etc
Now one upgrade I do NOT research is the worker lumber upgrades, and here is
why. The upgrades merely increase the amount of lumber a peasant miner can hold, not
how fast it mines. We know that the upgrades increase the amount of lumber a peasant
can hold from 10 15 20 25, however the number of hits required for the peasant
to gain that amount of lumber is also as follows 10 15 20 25. What this means
is that unless your peasants are spending a significant amount of time in transit (i.e.
walking back and forth between the trees and houses), the lumber harvesting upgrades do
NOT increase lumber intake whatsoever. Your peasants should be right up against the
trees (houses one space away from tree line) and walking distance should be negligible.
Perhaps this is best described using a chart, where I compare the effective mining speed
for each type of worker (assuming negligible transit time):
Peasant w/
no
harvesting
upgrades
10
10
Peasant w/
max
harvesting
upgrades
25
25
~54
~54
Furbog
Fang
Fire
golem
Satyr
5
100
10
1000
8
4000
10
20000
~1800
~6662
~45000
~180000
The most important variable in this table is the lumbering speed, which was
obtained empirically from in-game. What can be seen is that lumber harvesting upgrades
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do not increase lumber intake for the peasant. It is important to note that given the
number of hits and the amount returned between different types of miners, you cannot
exactly derive relative lumbering speed, this is because the different types of miners hit at
different speeds.
** Source: http://wiki.vampirism.eu/index.php?title=Harvesters
Mid-game economy
Transition to late-game
As the game winds into mid game, risks taken at this level arent as prosperous,
since the ball of economy is already rolling. Still, some risks (i.e. get CC before ruby if
possible) can still be feasibly taken, over others (i.e. still not getting worker motivation or
human hp) that are very cheap at that stage and can cause a lot of problems if not
obtained yet. For those of you who dont know general proper mid game to late game
economy it is:
1. 10 regular gms before your start saving wood for COF, keep pumping fang
harvesters until you near the amount of wood you need for COF (I often start
saving gold for the COF when I have around 80k-100k wood but this is variable;
remember you need ultra research center before COF, I often forget to take into
account the extra gold required for the ultra research).
2. COF, build only green gms at this point (dont upgrade any normal gms),
everything should be fangs at this point if pressure allows (some prefer to keep
some furbogs for fixing, i.e. keeping 3 or 1 furb, at the loss of 1 or 2 fangs).
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3. Approx 300 gold (give or take depending on number of vamps) before you start
saving lumber for cc.
4. CC, convert all green gms to red ones first, then only build red gms; i.e. one green
gm red gm right away, dont have more than 2 green gms and never build
anymore regular gms, no need to save lumber for Base of operations (BO), and
max out on Fire spawn harvesters ASAP. Feel free to start saving wood for a few
gold gms right when the goblin comes out.
5. BO, save for goblin first and save all the wood you get, dont upgrade anything
into gold gms, and build only gold gms once you have the goblin out. Dont
convert gms anymore, esp the regular ones you may still have, build gold gms
directly from the goblin and destroy other non-gold gm to make space (you can
choose to upgrade the red gms once you start running out of space).
6. Keep your goblin alive by keeping him away from the edges of your base (so it is
not chained by the vamp). Max out Satyr harvesters ASAP, although you may
need to grab a late-game tower to ward away a cloaked vamp.
I cant tell you the exact times or when to get the next tier since that all depends
on the game, the vamps, leaks, feed, poolers etc For a conservative rough estimate for
0 leaks received + standard vamp harassment and an income of 1, COF is usually
obtained well before 30:00, CC around 45:00, and BO around 60:00. For standard 2
vamp income, it may be around 10-15 mins earlier you hit each checkpoint depending on
leaks and pressure.
Goldmine comparison
Here is a table of comparison of different gms:
Gm type (one)
Income delay
Income (x) per minute
Wood cost (realistically)
Wood per income (x)**
Normal
(white)
1 min
1x
20,000
20000/x
Super
(green)
15 sec
4x
50,000
12500/x
Ultra
(red)
6 sec
10x
110,000*
11000/x
Elite
(gold)
4 sec
15x
80,000
5333/x
* The cost of the ultra (red) gm is 50000+60000=110000, since you are unable to build
the red gms by themselves, and need to be upgraded from the green gms with the loss of
a green gm.
** The Wood per income (x) means the amount of lumber spent per obtaining an income
cash in, which you want to be as low as possible to be most cost effective. What the
Wood per income (x) variable shows is that even with the loss of a green gm, the red gms
are still worth it for the lumber (albeit by a very small margin), which is why you always
convert all your green gms to red ones asap. Upgrading a red gm into a gold one (say
when you are waiting for gold for a goblin) is definitely not worth it. Upgrading a red
gm into a gold gm costs 50k+60k+80k=190k, giving an effective Wood per income (x) of
190k/15x = 12667/x. This makes upgrading a gold gm from a red gm even less profitable
than building a green gm at that stage. This is also the basis of why you never upgrade a
regular gm into a green one.
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Late-game economy
If more gold gms are needed find other bases to put them in. You will need to
properly anti-sphere and defend these additional bases accordingly, so choose wisely.
Getting a proper late game economy rolling is essential in ending the game properly.
However in late game, like after your CC, and especially after you get BO, the motto is
better safe than sorry. Build that diamond first if needed, get an extra tower or two first.
This is because by this point, your economy is already extremely high paced, and taking
risks to improve your economy at this level is not very profitable at all, and can easily get
you killed, and spending that extra cash will set you back only a little.
With regards to slowly replacing your gms, you should first use up all the feasible
available space by building new gold gms, then begin destroying the white then green
gms to replace with gold gms, before upgrading any red gms to gold gms, if you are
unable to or it is too dangerous to begin a new base for more gold gms.
Grabbing leaks
This obviously refers to the early game. Good manners suggests that you grab 2
gold before stopping to allow others grab leaks, since technically only 2 is needed to start
a base. However, if no one else is grabbing leaks, feel free to grab them and sell them. I
know for the most part, grabbing leaks is all about reaction time and a good connection,
both of which I lack. But there are ways to increase your chances. Regardless, once you
become better at multitasking, you will find yourself blinking your slayer back and forth
trying to grab leaks, often depleting your mana. Therefore, proper regen is needed, and if
your micro and macro allows, you can try this: sit at the vamp fountain and blink away
only to grab leaks, run away from the vamp, or level up.
You do run the risk of getting pulse staffed right away, however you run an
almost equal risk of being pulse staffed in the fountain anyways since vamps typically
hunt for slayers at the slayer fountain. Remember that you will need to blink your slayer
back to the level up fountain every :55 or so to get your level.
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Distraction
If a vamp is allowed to freely attack a set of targets without being attacked, it will
generally attack the unit next to it. However, if the vamp is attacked by anything, that
target will be the priority autotarget. Therefore, by attacking the vamp with an offending
unit while it tries to attack a set of neutral structures, causes that every time the vamp
kills a structure or unit, it will automatically retarget the offending unit, causing it to
move away from possible leaks it has just dropped, towards the offending unit, giving
you more time to grab the leak. Use a single tower, or even your human with upgraded
range to attack vamps as they move through set of these structures you built to coax leaks
out of the vamp. Dont use your slayer though, coins wont drop with a slayer nearby.
The idea is to place the tower or attack from a vantage point such that the vamp
must move away from the structures to get at the offending tower or human, rather than
towards the structures, this will force retarget to move the vamp away from the structures
so your slayer can grab the leak before the vamp does, and make feeding annoying.
Predictions
Sometimes, the coins appear, but you just arent fast enough, or there is too much
latency. In this case, you may have to predict a coin drop. This requires knowing about
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how long your delay is, and timing it so that the instant the building dies, your slayer
blinks next to or on the building. This just requires good timing. You merely have to
choose a building the vamp is attacking, time the delay, send the blink command right
before the structure dies, then as it dies your slayer will blink, spam the move command
to the center of the dead structure and hopefully you got a coin. It may be easier to grab
leaks from larger structures, like research facilities or slayer taverns, since the vamp has
to travel some distance to grab a dropped coin, if there is one.
Never use shift commands (i.e. rally points) to grab leaks, since the blink
animation on the slayer is quite long and you will need to cancel the animation by issuing
the move command to have any chance at grabbing leaks.
Opportunistic moments
You should focus your attention on vamp feeding in areas that is likely to produce
leaks and the vamp is less likely to pick up the leak. Some areas include chowing down
on massive amounts of workers, or mowing through a ton of towers.
Black buildings
This method is illegal in most servers, but for the record, this is a trigger glitch in
which occasionally a human will die, and all their buildings will turn invisible, and rather
than dying, they turn to the vamps side. These buildings do not attack or anything, they
are invisible and null, however they still give bounty when killed, and hence can be killed
for gold by bug abusers.
By: potofthemoon
So build a few houses then lots of tents, then a house or two then tents, in the meantime
pumping workers from all your houses. As you do this before the vamps spawn you
should be trying to keep your stored lumber at or near 0, using up all your lumber to
building tents. To save money on having to build more houses, build houses in corners
so one house can cover a larger surface area of return. Once you have everything out,
wait for 400 and immediately build a slayer tavern, then hit return on your workers until
you get 400 again to build the slayer. Hitting return gets your 400 lumber quicker.
Typical slayer timings for quick players are around 1:45-1:50. It is possible to get it out
sooner, but the important thing is getting your slayer out and in the slayer level area
before the 2:00 mark. Usually this requires you have your slayer out by at least 1:55.
Place your slayer tavern as far as possible from any of your minibases, this way if its
scanned, if the vamp chooses to cancel your slayer, they will not get lots of possible feed
in the process.
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With all the slayer upgrades, your slayer only has to hit at least level 6 or so
before it can survive the staff.
Getting slayer upgrades if the vamp has gone for an early pulse staff is usually a
very good investment, since vamps will buy the pulse staff as early as possible if their
plan is to gain early-mid game feed by killing slayers. Therefore, if a vamp has gotten a
very early pulse staff, the vamp is most likely trying to get most of his early game feed
from the slayers, and you need to respond appropriately (upgrades + blinking into the
fountain only at :57 or so).
Slayer placement
Once you have gotten level 20, there is no real need to continue to level them.
Each subsequent level gives +3 str and +3 intel, and +2 agil (that is +75 hp, +45 mana, +2
damage, and + armor per level), which is a bad gain for taking the risk your slayer may
be killed. Placing the slayer in your base is important as well. Ideally, the slayer should
be close enough to the wall such that the invulnerability ability (invuln) will cover the
front wall, and far enough such that the vamp cannot reach it with his silence. Some
people place the slayer in a position near their wall such that clicking on the engineers
will instantly summon them against your wall. Decent vamps can easily silence your
slayer before it has a chance to summon anything. Your reaction time should be
sufficient that you can summon and blink the engineers over in time. Use your mid-game
slayer to detect the vamp with a vest.
Mana management
It is important to keep in mind and check the mana of your slayer before blinking
in to attempt to grab a leak or deny structures, especially if you are not in the habit of
sitting at the vamp fountain to regen mana and hp when youre not leveling. Blinking in
with only 500 mana may not be a good idea since once youve blinked in, it leaves your
slayer unable to blink out. To ensure this doesnt happen, keep your mana pool high.
Mid-game slayer
Slayers do play a role in mid-game, and if the vamps are decently fed, you should
think about getting engineers and striving to get to lvl 20 if you havent yet. In the mid
game, they are essential for scouting invisible vamps as they attempt to assault your base,
and essentially making your towers much more effective and making your base very hard
to assault. The mid-game slayer should also pose a trapping threat from either invuln
trapping, or net. Getting your slayer a vest is an excellent idea, and more importantly
using your slayer to vision vamps combined with slow from a frost tower will make your
slayer extremely difficult to deal with. It is very important to keep your slayer alive mid
game because it functions to help you through to the late game. Reviving a slayer at this
level takes around 2 minutes.
You should use your invuln sparingly. Good times to use it are when a vamp has
surprised you with a cheesy strategy. An invuln can help think straight, and act
accordingly in time. It can also be used to keep your wall safe until the next upgrade, for
example if you chose to stay at emmy (for econ reasons) and the vamp finally runs to
your base with a demo, you can invuln while upgrading to chyro to upgrade relatively
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safely at the very last moment. Invuln can also be used to keep towers safe as they are
building (e.g. invuln a constructing ultra blood tower or comet tower so it doesnt get
richoed as it is built), or prevent other general emergencies (e.g. vamp about to destroy a
building to sphere in).
It may be a good idea to get an immunity shield on your slayer depending on if
you have the spare cash and if you are facing some pressure, since this allows you to
sight the vamps or harass the vamps without the risk of it being silenced. If you do need
to scout the vamp desperately, and the vamps have made it extremely difficult for a
vested slayer to get around, you can alternatively use the scan ability on the mana towers
to sight the vamp.
End-game slayer
Slayers end-game are more useful than ever. Get/Use Vampiric concotion (conc)
first when you blink to the center to buy stuff, then take your time buying cloaks, or
youll risk getting your slayer killed instantly (obviously scan the mid beforehand). If
you cant kill the vamp with a cloaked slayer just yet, keep a vest on him at all times and
use it to keep a close eye on the vamp (constantly following it around by selecting the
move command to simply follow the vamp around without attacking it). Cloaked slayers
can also be used as temporary walls to allow placement of end game bases, more on that
in; Ending the game properly.
Your human
I am referring to your main human, the one that if it gets killed you die. Not too
much to be said except for a few pointers:
o Very early game you can use the portals from the teleport bases to get from one
side of the map to the other to quickly to build more scattered minibases.
o Human hp upgrade is usually quite important and you may want to get it
preemptively: even a single vamp can chain and ring you to death
o The human attack range upgrade is useful in organizing your base and grabbing
leaks; more on that in Grabbing leaks
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o Turn off auto-repair, it makes your human run all over the place and if any other
structures around your wall are damaged, your human may run out of the safety
from behind your wall in a misguided attempt to fix
o Remember that the mana-burn ability is a good defense in itself early game,
against vamps with no Immunity shield
o If you get the mana regen upgrade for the healing towers, you can be
constantly burning the vamp
o Think about getting the human teleport when you have multiple bases or you plan
to help other peoples bases
o Try to keep your human away from the edges of your base and away from your
front door until needed to repair, to prevent double chain or other nasty tricks
from vamps early on
o If you do decide to suicide your human for whatever reason, remember that the
human gives the vamp 50 gold feed
Note: the brackets around y/2 means to round all halves down
The amount of income is always an integer, no hidden decimals. Therefore, you
should choose to kill minis/vamps accordingly (i.e. 3 vamps alive = you can kill one
vamp with no reduction in income). As an aside, killing a nosf yields an egg that gives +5
lvls, and a mini heart gives +2.
Summary of human income to number of vamps:
1 vamp = 1 income
2 vamps = 2 income
3 vamps = 2 income
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4 vamps = 3 income
5 vamps = 3 income
6 vamps = 4 income
7 vamps = 4 income
etc
Worker trapping
This technique is illegal on most vamp fire servers, and frowned upon by other
human players. For the record, it involves finding a base placement where the vamp
must run through many workers to get at towers that are within attacking distance of
them. Upon trying to get through, the vamp is surrounded by and trapped by all the
workers clustering around them, and killed by the towers as the vamp is unable to kill the
workers to escape, or get to the towers. Note that vamps can still go invis to clip through
and escape the worker traps, although humans can place walls behind the vamp as he is
being surrounded to prevent the vamp from escaping. Better vamps are able to spot these
traps immediately, avoiding them till later, when it all becomes feed. So unless the vamp
is lured into your trap, the precious early game lumber spent on towers is wasted. This
technique is usually only used very early game.
Walling in
This technique is straightforward, useful to end the early game quickly against
single vamps (in the event the other vamp has died super early on or left). This is
probably a good idea if you dont wish to play a long prolonged game with single vamp
income. If you are able to grab 1 gold leak early on (or purchase 1 gold from the player
who has killed the first vamp), and the vamp has no tp staff, allow the vamp to enter a
base that has a lot of stuff in it that will take a lot of time to kill, such as many tents,
workers, towers. When the vamp goes into the base to feed, keep him busy feeding and
simply wall up the base from behind. Feel free to set up your own lure base, by having a
whole lot of workers in a base, far from the entrance so the vamp cannot see you are
walling them in. The key is to keep him busy for a minute or two so he wont notice your
emerald wall coming up behind him, this means not detonating your workers. If you plan
to do this, it may be a good idea to get all your wall upgrades and perhaps your slayer
upgrades as well. Get the hammer upgrade so your human can also act as a tower. After
the vamp is trapped, merely tower him in, and use your slayer to continually harass the
stranded vamp. It may be a good idea to claim the base you are trapping the vamp in so
other human players cannot tk your attempt to end the game. Make sure that you can end
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the game and the vamp is unable to escape, as this strategy is literally a do-or-die
situation, failure to trap the vamp will set you extremely far back. If you have a furbog,
and the vamp is still too weak to kill a wall tower, you can use a wall tower to trap the
vamp in for a far less riskier wall in.
Other
If opportunities arise, you can slayer gank, and combine it with humans attacking
and burning the vamp. The human mana burn is quite damaging to the early game vamp,
assuming you can get close enough to burn without being killed. One way vamps will
often die is by diving the slayer fountain too early without escape mechanisms or items.
Vesting
This involves stacking Master Vampire Slayer Vests on your slayer and killing
the vamp before he is able to get demonics, which is usually before 30:00. Therefore, the
usefulness time frame for this strategy usually effectively ends at 30:00, and is most
effective as early as possible. This strategy, especially if you have support from others, is
extremely effective against vamps who are intent on saving for demonics and buy
nothing else. It can also be used as a surprise move to attempt to kill a vamp that has
been extremely fed up to that point. A vest gives +3000 hp and +300 dmg, the exact
same amount Draculas helm gives the vamp. If you gauge you are able to out damage a
vamp feel free to grab vests and try to kill the vamp. This will at least force the vamp to
waste money normally saved for the demonics in stat upgrades, or a helm if you
continually harass them. Most vamps will grab a conc for the invuln, but remember the
invuln only lasts 15 seconds and has a large cooldown, so you can go right back to
harassing them then. Some vamps will then go into hiding until the demo comes out then
rush to buy the demo, so dont let the vamp out of your sight once you have determined
to use this strat. The idea here is to either kill the vamp outright, or force them to spend
money on stat upgrades to survive. Achieving any of the 2 goals will make your vest(s)
worth it. If a vamp has been extremely fed before 30:00, your best bet of winning the
game outright is probably just killing the vamp before 30:00. You need to make sure
they cant simply outheal your slayers dmg at the fountain, which is why it usually
requires 2+ vests to do. Failing to achieve any of the two goals (usually the result of not
harassing enough, or trying this strategy too late) will set you back in economy
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considerably. It may be a good idea to build a few healing towers at your base as you can
harass the vamp, and as your slayer is getting hurt, quickly heal up in your own base, and
continue harassing the vamp again, not even giving the vamp a chance to heal.
Regardless of whether or not youve failed, once the vamp gets his demonics, even fully
vested slayers cant do anything to it, so you can sell all your vests except for 1 to bring
back some lost cash. Try to use only vests if gold permits. Other possible slayer items
for this purpose include:
o Circlet of the Vampire Slayer: +50 to all stats, too weak
o Pendant of Vitality: +10000 hp, ideally you want dmg, not hp, although if you
havent got the gold for maxed out vests, you can top off your slayers inventory
with one of these
o Divinity Jewel: +250 to all stats, Divine Grace ability, too expensive
o In case you are wondering, the ability on the Jewel (called Divine Grace)
is a modified locust swarm spell, which deals dmg over time to targets
around the holder when activated. How locust swarm works is locusts
will be emitted from the user, and begin attacking units around the user
(focusing on 2-3 of them at a time). They will deal dmg to an enemy
target, then fly back and give a certain percentage of the dmg dealt as
healing back to the user. For Divine Grace, Locusts are emitted every 6
seconds, for up to 10 minutes, with a maximum of 100 locusts that can be
swarming around the slayer. A max of 50 locusts can target one enemy
target. Each locust deals 12 damage/second, and will heal the user 80
life/second if it is attacking an enemy target. The locusts will deal this
damage/healing in a small area around the slayer of about 160ish,
essentially melee range. What this means is that at its absolute best, with
50 locusts out raping the vamp, 1 vamp being assaulted by a slayer with an
activated divinity jewel will receive 12*50=600 dmg/sec and it will heal
the slayer 80*50=4000 life/sec. This may not seem too bad except for the
fact that it will take 6*50=300 seconds (5 minutes) to power up, and also
because the locusts have a mind of their own, not all of them end up
following the user, so even by walking around and especially blinking
around with your slayer, you will lose locusts, either by them dying and
having to be respawned again, or by just sitting in one area mindlessly. So
to get the absolute best, you need to stand still for 5 minutes and have the
vamp come attack your slayer. Realistically, you have about on average
5-10 locusts around your slayer at any given time.
Invuln Trapping
This is essentially trapping the vamp near your base or an area where base
defenses are wailing on the vamp. Usually, this will require the use of the slayers
invulnerability ability since a vamp will notice once you start walling off behind them.
This is a strategy that can work pretty much at any point in the game, however I have
chose to discuss it in the mid-game section. Your slayer will need his lvl 20 ult, therefore
the time frame for this strat is pretty much from 20:00 onwards, or whenever your slayer
gets his lvl 20 ult. Knowing when this strat is appropriate is also important. First, you
have to be able to trap a vamp near your base in the first place, this requires that you
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acknowledge that your base has a rear-choke point, an area that can be walled off to
prevent the vamp from going back home. Second, your base defenses can attack him
while the vamp sits in this trapped space, and third, that you have detection in this area
constantly. Additionally, usually a vamp will ideally have no TP staff and no sphere to
escape, and no silence to stop your invuln. Be sure to remember you need some form of
detection when the vamp goes invis before you trap him, whether it be summoning your
tracker before invuln, or getting a vest on your slayer. Here are some examples of rearchoke points.
Rear choke points (as shown below), allow humans to trap weaker vamps, or even make
it difficult for several vamps to assault your wall at once:
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The process by which this can be done is by quickly grabbing a venom spire on
your slayer, summoning a tracker, placing the vemon spire down over the choke point
and immediately invuln, or you can move to an unsilenceable distance before invuln is
casted if the vamp has silence. Use the tracker to view the vamp if he tries to go invis.
Just make sure that when your slayer is channeling invuln, it cannot be stopped or harmed.
If the vamp has a conc, dont worry, conc lasts 15 seconds, and invuln lasts 25 seconds.
If you need more than 25 seconds, you can opt to trap a vamp near your defenses
as he assaults your wall by saving for ruby, then building a ruby at the rear-choke. Build
the ruby behind the vamp safely by using the engineer + invuln technique, which is done
by placing down the wall with the worker, immediately summoning engineers and
immediately using invuln (in that order) to allow the engineers to build the invulnd wall
to full capacity. It is possible, but harder, to trap vamps with sphere and tp staff as well;
you just need to act accordingly and make sure you are quicker than the vamp, by
antisphering as well as blocking the choke, and ensnaring the vamp if he tries to tp. If
you do choose to ruby up behind the vamp, or concoct any trap that takes a prolonged
time to kill the vamp, keep in mind other vamps may come to the rescue if you are not up
against a solo vamp.
Other
There are many other ways vamps can die mid game, although most human
speared initiatives appear to revolve around either trapping or vesting. Mid-game is often
a time of weakness for most vamps, as they are unable to do much without their
demonics, and once demonics is countered, they cannot do much until their cloak is
obatined. Once again, the element of surprise is key in killing vamps. For example, for a
variation of the trapping technique, if you can afford a comet tower you can build it as he
is attacking your base. Comet towers as they build, have no model and are invisible,
making it hard to spot. Then right before the comet finishes, trap the vamp in using the
invuln + venom spire. 25 seconds face time with a comet for a vamp without cloak is
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likely fatal for the vamp. You can choose to speed up the comet with engies for a tighter
finish. Be creative.
Embedded towers
This entails that you place hidden ultra lightning oracles (or other powerful long
range towers) near the vamp base, embedded in the trees in such a way the vamp is never
able to get to it, due to the blocking of tree cover. Because no additional wall is needed
to protect the tower, there is very low risk involved (unless the vamp were to catch you in
the act of placing it), since the vamp is unable to reach the tower hidden in this particular
spot. You will need to cut your way into that spot and replace all trees afterwards. I find
it best to use this strategy first since it is the safest and helps pave the way for more
concrete follow-up end-game strategies to kill the vamp.
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Stacking cloaks
Another typical way is by stacking cloaks on your slayer. Make sure you grab a
conc first, and think about grabbing the Godlike slayer upgrade so you can buy cloaks
with ease. Like embedding towers, this strategy is nearly risk free once you get the
cloaks, and I will often either do this first, or as a follow up to embedding towers. Use
this in conjunction with other end game strategies and so you can keep an eye on the
vamp without the vamp being able to kill your slayer. Grab an Immunity shield, so you
can harass the vamp without being silenced.
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Surrounding bases
This is a more concrete way to end a game, although it takes more resources and
time to set up. Unfortunately this method does incur a slightly greater risk than the above
two strategies. I tend to use this strategy as a follow-up to end the game after I have used
any one of the above 2 strategies, since it allows for a safer transition. For this method, 3
bases ideally need to be secured around the vamp base. If you only want to take one base,
the topmost one will do (Base 17).
The base borders are denoted in red (from top to bottom: Base 17, Base unknown,
Base 24), and the entrances to be blocked are in green. Make sure they are shade free and
ward free. Scan for patrolling wyrms and other vamps/minis. Then secure the front
walls by safely and quickly building a diamond wall by using the engineer + invuln
technique. Another option for securing the bases with only 2 square width openings is to
place your cloaked slayer there, blocking vamp access.
Nevertheless, hopefully the vamp is blissfully unaware but in the case that they
are not, use the above methods to slap up bases forcefully. After each base is secure,
begin throwing up powerful towers near the middle but within the bases. Eventually the
middle will be inhospitable to the vamp. Finish off by chasing around with multiple
cloaked slayer, since vamp will be unable to return to center to heal. Use mana towers to
scan the entire map if needed.
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Trapping
This is a riskier method, but can end a game against a vamp who has no tp staff
and is desperate to stay alive at all costs. Due to the risk of failing and feeding the vamp
very hard, it is not a strategy I typically use. It is very similar to walling in the vamp in
the early game. To trap a vamp at this stage you need to set up the trap to lure the vamp.
I find the best way to do this is by making an auxiliary base that is presumably just for
additional gold gms. Choose a base that has no sphere spots after trees have been regrown. Build lots of gold gms and other random crap in the base, but no towers. Make
the wall something weak like a ruby wall (or maybe diamond to reduce suspicion). The
idea is to allow the vamp to break in, and keep him busy feeding while you wall up
behind him and anti-sphere the entire outside of the base (if he has a sphere). Use the
engineer + invuln technique to allow the diamond wall to be placed while the vamp is in
the base. Before you do this, you should be sure he has no staff of teleport. Finish by
surrounding the entire base with towers and scouting with a cloaked slayer.
Other
Obviously there are many other ways to kill the vamp, seize opportunities to kill
the vamp as they arise. The above strategies just help you to create opportunities if the
vamp is not giving you any.
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inexperienced player who is willing and wanting to learn, I think it would be a good idea
for you as a better player to help them out and give them pointers. This way it keeps
them coming back and helps to broaden the vampirism fire community as a whole. Its
just a game, people should be playing to have fun rather than just trying to win all the
time!
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Note: there is a bug currently that allows you to leave the game and still have your mini
present in the center of the map, potentially giving more income or providing other
humans a target to kill. This works only if the vamps have allowed minis, and your
human is killed, then you leave immediately. Your mini will spawn with you not even in
the game. I suspect this mechanism is also what can increase the chance of black
buildings occurring after a human has died.
Frenchmen
Frenchmen can be used to attack your human to try to snipe it, countering them is
very easy if done properly. Know that vamps typically combine a silence and chain
followed up with Frenchmen to snipe your human. Firstly should you see them coming,
blink your human away and attack them with your slayer as they approach. If not, you
can properly target them with your towers. Upon failing that, you should have wall
towers that splash them to death. You will need wall towers since Frenchmen can hit
through weaker walls whereupon the vamp can then tp onto the Frenchmen that broke
into your base. Often the vamp will silence your human before the Frenchmen are seen,
and effectively trap you human near the wall. If silenced you will have to attack your
rear anti-sphere wall immediately to run into your base quickly, before blinking your
slayer or retargeting your towers to kill the Frenchmen before going back to fix the wall.
See Front entrance construction for front wall constructions to counter this.
A good way to spot this is to build plenty of warning walls in front of your base
(which is a good habit to have), when the vamp starts to break through them, Frenchmen
will have to soon follow, scout behind the vamp with your slayer every time he advances
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through and is busy with your warning walls, and kill Frenchmen before they reach your
wall.
Meat carrier
Usually used to for a tp glitch into the base. The proper wall placement prevents
this; see Wall placement. Upon failing this, use your human to block it as it tries to move
up the sides of your wall. The wagon is super slow, albeit strong (25000 hp), you should
be able to keep up with it. Once you have Wall towers behind your main wall, this unit
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cannot break through (although it may disconnect you), and if you have unglitchable wall
placement, you are fine. If not, use your human to run and continue to block it from
coming up the sides or blink in a furb to block both sides of your wall. All the time
continue to target it with your towers.
Frost Wyrm
Vamps can also use a Frost wyrm to blast workers, can freeze your wall rendering
it unfixable, and corruption your wall towers (preventing hp regen) to slowly destroy
them overtime for a sphere in. Although these tricks may be harder due to the triggered
warning once a Frost wyrm is trained, they should not be taken lightly. Guard against the
frostie by ensuring you have adequate vision around your base, and building a few
pinkies within unguarded portions of your base once you hear the warning. Make sure
they are not near the edge especially without vision because they can be taken down by a
frost wyrm. Most decent towers will do (like mana, super flame; not opals or pearls) but
pinkies are usually chosen due to their relative ease and cheapness in getting them up
early game and long range, if you need a tower fast, build a mana tower. Build at least 2,
because a good vamp can take out a single pinkie by healing their frostie while it attacks.
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Double richo
Effective in killing gold mines near the edge. You should always try to keep your
gms away from the edge if possible; see dealing with double richo to gms. Dont ever
use regular gms to anti-sphere, thats just asking for trouble. If they begin double
richoing your gms, you might as well deny all the ones near the side if feasible. If you
see this happening, move them away from the edge, space out the placement of your gms,
and place houses in between gms so richos will kill only one gm and 2 houses. Place
gms so that richoing them would expose the vamp to your front tower fire. You can try
placing a few mana towers to drain their mana as you use your slayer to constantly scout
them with a vest, the slayer is important here as you need constant vision. Additionally,
if your base is quite small and accessible to richo all over and the vamps are continually
killing all your gms with you unable to do anything, you can save up and build a comet
tower to lay down the hurt as comets are relatively low on gold and high on wood, an
economic predicament you will probably face if vamps are double richoing all your gms.
Make sure the comet tower itself is not richoed as it is building, by invulning it or
building it while the vamps are away.
By: potofthemoon
(and perhaps has grabbed a leak early on), and therefore a threat that needs to be
neutralized ASAP. It involves both vamps assaulting the base (often with a few Claws of
Attack +20 to increase the pressure) constantly. The vamps continually double chain
whoever repairs the wall, whether it be furbs or other humans. Although initially the
vamps chain dmg is not high enough to kill humans, the vamps stay at the base, continue
to apply pressure, and buy level upgrades to continually upgrade their chain level.
Eventually, the vamp is able to double chain the human to death, or break down the wall,
whichever comes first. The idea is to keep the human busy fixing while hoping the
humans current towers are insufficient to push the vamps away fast enough, usually this
means early game enough that the human does not have Ultra research center and
therefore no mana towers or human hp upgrade yet. This can be very difficult to stop
especially earlier on and if caught by surprise, but dont panic. Tower up immediately,
build calcites and pinkies and healing towers. As the tower build, repair with anything
you have. You can try to time your healing wave between the vamps chains by
watching for the vamp pause right before delivering a chain lightning, to prevent yourself
from being double chained.
Mass cyclone
Sometimes a vamp or two will grab a whole bunch of cyclones to disable your
fixer(s) while they chop down your wall. This is primarily an early game strat in which
vamps target humans who still have sapphire walls (or just wall towers), and attack the
base while trying to prevent any repair. It is often combined with damage scrolls and
claws early game to break down a saph. Because the cyclones only last 5 seconds each,
they are relying on speed of taking down your wall, and if you have been trying to go
econ, this could be dangerous to you. Things you can do include (if possible/feasible):
Upgrading to emerald; see gm timing to help reduce lack of lumber in the bank in
case of emergencies early game.
Blinking in a whole bunch of additional furbogs to repair, and if you have proper
wall placement, you should be able to fit up to 6 fixers, your human + 5 furbs, this
makes it so cyclone disable cannot be chained on 1-2 fixers.
Call for help, hopefully a team playing human will be able to help you out,
although this is not always very reliable.
Use your slayer to buy a cyclone staff and cyclone the vamp himself if you have
the gold to buy a cyclone or two from the vamp shop.
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felhound asap. You can also choose to get the engineer hp upgrade as it will allow your
engineers to tank an extra hit. Additionally, you can construct your entrance to allow
your engineers to run into a safe zone, see Front entrance construction.
Shading minibases
This is primarily an early-game strategy when humans still have minibases all
over the map. As suggested before, proper minibase setup will help to reduce feed, by
warning the human when a minibases worker line is about to be attacked. However,
some vamps will grab a tp staff and shade, then move the shade around and directly into a
minibases worker line, effectively bypassing all the warning walls, then tp to it so by the
time the human gets the warning, the vamp is already in the worker line and feeding on
the workers. To stop this from occurring, you will have to make sure your warning walls
are sealed completely, and do not even let a shade through. It may take an extra warning
wall or two to do so, but it will prevent this method of feed from working so effectively.
Conclusion
Appendix
Ive just added this section because I often will use my own made up slang for
various things in game, many of these terms may be used in this guide. Whether or not
they are in common use is not known to me.
Term
Bats
BB
BO
Cape
CC
Chyro
Claws
Cloak
Description
Ring of the Hell Lords
Feeding Block or Blood Box
Base of Operations
Draculas Cloak
Command Center
Chyroprase wall
Claws of attack +20
Draculas Cloak
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COF
COF BB
COF Worker
Conc
DC
Demo
Dmg scroll
Egg
Emmy
Engie
Engie HP
Flame golem
Fountain diving
Frenchy
Frostie
FS
Furbs
Gaunt
Gm
Human HP
Human range
Human tp
Inferno
Inferno Stone
Invis Cloak
Invuln
Lvlup
Net
Nosf
Pinky
Pulse
Regular BB
Remains
Richo
Rico
Ring
Roar
Saph
Scan
Scroll
Shield
Silence
Slayer diving
Slayer fountain
Sphere
Staff
Stasis
Tower HP
By: potofthemoon
Citadel of Faith
Blood Box
Super Tower Builder
Vampiric Concoction (alt. verb: vamp invulnerable)
Double chain
Demonic Remains
Scroll of the Beast
Vampire Soul
Emerald wall
Engineers
Engineers Vitality (upgrade)
Fire Spawn Deforester
The vamp attacks the lvling slayers at the lvling area
Frenchman
Frost Wyrm
Farsight, referring to Shadowsight
Furbogs
Gauntlets of the Underworld
Gold mine
Human Survival Training (upgrade)
Rifles (upgrade)
Staff of Flight
Rain of Inferno (item)
Rain of Inferno (item)
Cloak of Shadows
Slayer invulnerability aura
Slayer leveling area
Ensnare
Nosferatu, referring to the main vampires
Pink Diamond tower
Pulse staff
Feeding Block
Demonic Remains
Richohet Gem
Richohet Gem
Ring of the Hell Lords
Silent Whisper (alt. verb: silence)
Sapphire wall
Shadowsight (vamp) or Reveal (human)
Scroll of the Beast
Immunity shield
Silent Whisper
The vamp attacks the lvling slayers at the lvling area
Slayer leveling area
Sphere of Doom (alt. verb: vamp blink)
Pulse staff
Stasis trap
Tower Defenses (upgrade)
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TP Staff
Trap
Vamp fountain
Wagon
Worker HP
WW
Wyrm
By: potofthemoon
Rod of Teleportation
Stasis trap
Vampire base near heals and shops
Meat Carrier
Improved Worker Motivation (upgrade)
Veil of Darkness, referring to windwalk
Frost Wyrm
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