Vampirism Fire - A Human Guide v1.01

Vampirism Fire: A Human Guide
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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How to use your units ....................................................................................................... 64

Your slayer.................................................................................................................... 64
Slayer timing............................................................................................................. 64
Leveling your slayer ................................................................................................. 65
The pulse staff........................................................................................................... 66
Slayer placement....................................................................................................... 67
Mana management .................................................................................................... 67
Mid-game slayer ....................................................................................................... 67
End-game slayer........................................................................................................ 68
Useful Vamp items for your slayer........................................................................... 68
Your human .................................................................................................................. 68
How to kill vamps............................................................................................................. 69
Killing vamps/minis (Intro) .......................................................................................... 69
Killing vamps (Early-game) ......................................................................................... 70
Worker trapping ........................................................................................................ 70
Walling in.................................................................................................................. 70
Other ......................................................................................................................... 71
Killing vamps (Mid-game) ........................................................................................... 71
Vesting ...................................................................................................................... 71
Invuln Trapping ........................................................................................................ 72
Other ......................................................................................................................... 74
Killing vamps (End-game)............................................................................................ 75
Embedded towers...................................................................................................... 75
Stacking cloaks ......................................................................................................... 76
Surrounding bases..................................................................................................... 77
Trapping.................................................................................................................... 78
Other ......................................................................................................................... 78
How to counter vamps ...................................................................................................... 78
Denying feed................................................................................................................. 78
Detonating your workers........................................................................................... 78
Killing feed with your slayer .................................................................................... 78
Distracting feeding with your slayer......................................................................... 79
Killing feed with your human ................................................................................... 79
Helping your allies.................................................................................................... 79
Properly committing suicide ..................................................................................... 80
Countering vamp cheesy strategies............................................................................... 81
Frenchmen................................................................................................................. 81
Double chain, double ring......................................................................................... 82
Warning wall camping.............................................................................................. 82
Meat carrier............................................................................................................... 82
Grave + Chaining workers ........................................................................................ 83
Frost Wyrm ............................................................................................................... 83
Richoing health towers ............................................................................................. 83
Double richo.............................................................................................................. 84
Break wall tower to Sphere through ......................................................................... 84
Power of the Underworld first .................................................................................. 84
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Constant pressure until double chain or break.......................................................... 84

Mass cyclone............................................................................................................. 85
Silencing and killing engies ...................................................................................... 85
Slayer luring and trapping (Slayer fountain camping).............................................. 86
Shading minibases .................................................................................................... 86
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 86
Appendix....................................................................................................................... 86
Conclusions & Thanks.................................................................................................. 88
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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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Projectile speed: 1500

Range: 1000
Hitpoints (base): 5000
Hp regen (sec): 5
Bounty (gold): 10
Other abilities: Feedback (100 mana/hit), Reveal (1500)
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
Range: 2000
Hp regen (sec): 20
Bounty (gold): 100
Other abilities: Frost attack (5 sec duration) Cold slow
Pink diamond towers

These towers are quite versatile, but you must be careful not to overdo it. 1-2 in
the middle of a base will ward off Wyrms. Upgraded pinkies (5-10 of them) can damage
vamps with Demonic remains. However, when it comes to mid game damage, I suggest
the super flame tower or ultra flame tower. If you do decide to use them, take advantage
of their decently far range, and place them away from the edges. I suggest not to build
more than 15-20 of these things, they are expensive, and too many and the vamp will just
stay away from your base and let you waste your wood, get his cloak, then all those
pinkies suddenly become quite useless. If you need a lot more mid game damage output,
you would best go with a comet. The only time pink diamond towers become more cost
efficient than super flame towers is if you upgrade the Glistening Powder upgrade and
build many of them, check out Pink diamond towers and their upgrades to learn more.
Pink diamond towers:
Damage per hit (base): 191-247 (can be upgraded up to +500 dmg)
Range: 1500
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Hp regen (sec): 5
Bounty (gold): 15
Other abilities: None
Wall towers/Super wall towers

All the wall towers are kept generally as an anti-sphere purpose, even though I
would recommend the Amethyst wall for this purpose to be upgraded as needed to
prevent something cheesy like triple richo from killing this wall. Generally speaking,
wall towers will suffice for anti-sphere walls. If you do use wall towers to anti-sphere,
always remember late-game to convert to super wall towers, to prevent any of this
cheesiness. While you should try to use COF BB first, your front wall should always be
wall towers, since they are also useful in splashing nearby graves to death that the vamp
has placed and is sitting on, preventing your slayer or regular towers from killing it, and
auto splashing your front wall to injure and kill shades or Frenchmen coming around your
wall. These are also useful very early game if you wish to save money by staying at
Amethyst wall for as long as possible, you can use this wall to hold off until you get a
sapphire.
Its second function is to splash graves that vamps have placed around your base
and are camping on, not allowing towers or slayers to target them. Note that the wall
tower will only begin to do massive damage to a grave once it has been built (not dealing
much damage to it while grave is building but killing the grave in 2 hits or so once its
built), meaning you will have to endure only 1 grave splash or so before the grave is
quickly destroyed.
Wall tower:
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 1
Range: 500
Hp regen (sec): 500
Bounty (gold): 10
Other abilities: Splash attack (200/225/250)
Super Wall tower:
Range: 500
Hp regen (sec): 500
Bounty (gold): 25
Other abilities: Splash attack (200/225/250)
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Calcite outpost/Orange calcite outpost

I tend to avoid these towers due to their inferior range and poor hp allowing them
to be easily richocheted. This tower does however do quite a lot of damage over time.
Unfortunately, making them immune to richochet would require the tower hp upgrade,
which is very expensive. Therefore, this tower might be good in cases that the vamp does
not have a richo and against vamps who stay at your wall beating for a while, and try to
break your wall by wearing you down. Another benefit these towers do have, is that they
require absolutely no gold, meaning you can have decent damage output without the need
for a gold. Its use however still seems quite limited to certain circumstances in pro play,
and personally I still do not use them very often. When I have seen them in use
effectively, the vamp has no richo, and there is only usually a max of 2 of these towers in
use, placed near the front. The ability Relentless Assault allows up to three times the
attack speed, but takes around 20-15 seconds of constant firing to get up to maximum
speed.
Calcite outpost:
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 3.0 (decreases with more attacks)
Range: 700
Hp regen (sec): 1
Bounty (gold): 10
Other abilities: Relentless assault (Each consecutive attack against the same target
increases attack speed by 20%, up to a maximum of 200%. Effect is lost after not
attacking for 10 seconds.)
Orange Calcite outpost:
Cooldown (sec b/t shots): 2.5 (decreases with more attacks)
Range: 700
Hp regen (sec): 1
Bounty (gold): 30
Other abilities: Relentless assault (Each consecutive attack against the same target
increases attack speed by 20%, up to a maximum of 200%. Effect is lost after not
attacking for 10 seconds.)
Super Tower of Flames/Ultimate Tower of Flames

The super flame tower is one of the best general mid-game damage output tower,
especially in smaller bases and if you dont wish to waste gold or space on pinkies and
their upgrades. I highly recommend using a few Super Flame Towers instead of pinkies
if the vamp gets only 1 Demonic remains. Unless you need heavier mid-game damage
output, in which case you should use mass pinkies, 2-3 Super flame towers should be
enough. Dont get more than about 4-6 max super flames because if you need any more
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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:
Range: 1300
Hp regen (sec): 20
Bounty (gold): 50
Ultimate Tower of Flames:
Range: 1600
Hp regen (sec): 20
Bounty (gold): 50
Healing towers/Super healing towers

Careful to not overdo these as they cost you lumber and can be easy feed for a
vamp with richo, but by keeping tabs on the vamp, know how many you need (like get
more healing towers for vamps who get Ring of the hell lords (ring)). Do not place these
too close to your front wall or edges, since they are easily killed. You should be relying
mostly on the healing wave ability to heal your fixers/human, not the passive aura, since
the passive healing aura does not stack and heals way too slowly. You should not be
building more than 5 regular healing towers because if you need to mass heal quickly, get
1 Super healing tower.
Additionally, if you find the vamps constantly richoing your healing towers, space
out your healing towers so they cannot be all killed in one richo, and maximize the
distance from your front wall, even if fixers are no longer in the passive aura, as long as
the wall can still actively heal the workers with the spell ability you should be fine.
Obviously you can get a research upgrade for the super healing towers health for an
additional 1500hp to prevent richo of the wall, however early game when you cannot,
minimize the total number of these towers you have if the vamp has richo. The main
differences between the regular and the super healing tower are as follows:
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Healing towers:
10 hp regen
500 hp
5 gold bounty
Slower healing aura
Long cd on heal ability
By: potofthemoon
Super healing towers:

No regen
1750 hp
15 gold bounty
Faster healing aura
Short cd on heal ability
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.
Venom spire/Ultra venom spire

Having one venom spire mid-game to stack with your frost tower for extra slow is
an option for vamps that dont have richo yet. I also use it to try trap and kill the vamp,
by placing it behind the vamp as a wall and using the invuln ability of the slayer, you can
trap a vamp for 25 seconds (more on this at Killing vamps (Mid-game)), and as such I
often have one venom spire item on my slayer mid-game for this purpose. If you do end
up getting one, dont let it go to waste late-game and feel free to upgrade it to a Ultra
venom spire tower, although I tend to prefer the ultra vampire spire tower due to its ease
of construction.
Venom spire:
Range: 1000
Hp regen (sec): 150
Bounty (gold): 25
Other abilities: Venomous leak slow (deals 50 dmg a sec, lasts 2 sec) Poison slow
Ultra Venom spire:
Range: 1500
Hp regen (sec): 150
Bounty (gold): 50
Other abilities: Venomous leak slow (deals 50 dmg a sec, lasts 2 sec) Poison slow
Vampire spire tower/Ultra vampire spire tower

I use this as an end game tower for extra slow to be stacked with the frost tower.
This venom leak slow does not stack with the Regular/Ultra venom spire tower slow
since both are the same slow type (venom). Build one per vamp, they dont stack with
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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:
Range: 1000
Hp regen (sec): 5
Bounty (gold): 500
Other abilities: Venomous leak slow Poison slow
Ultra vampire spire tower:
Range: 1500
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:
Range: 1200
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)
Holy blood tower

My favorite tower, because it doesnt disconnect anyone upon firing and for its
armor reducing properties. Once you have your diamond wall, I would suggest getting
this as your first end game base defense tower. Be wary if you are building this while the
vamp is around, it builds rather slowly and can be richocheted if caught in the early
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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:
Range: 1500
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:
Range: 1500
Hp regen (sec): 50
Bounty (gold): 250
Other abilities: Cripple (-50% movespeed, -25% dmg and atk speed, lasts 10 sec on vamp)
Meteor tower:
Range: 2000
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:
Range: 2000
Hp regen (sec): 50
Bounty (gold): 1000
Other abilities: Cripple (-50% movespeed, -25% dmg and atk speed, lasts 10 sec on
vamp), Spell immunity
Ultra lighting oracle

The best tower in the game, but the only downside is that it can disconnect people
when firing. Therefore I try to refrain from using this tower end-game or as base defense
unless absolutely necessary.
Ultra lightning oracle:
Range: 2500
Hp regen (sec): 50
Bounty (gold): 1000
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.
Towers (crunching the numbers)

Analyzing the most commonly used damage towers we get the following charts.
Keep in mind that Best wood/gold cost means the least amount of wood required to
build the structure. For example, the lowest cost an Opal spire can be produced is 800
wood if produced from the furb, but Opal spires can also cost a total of 850 wood, if it is
upgraded from the pearl tower. In these cases, the lowest cost is taken (800 wood).
Another example is the meteor tower costs 150000 wood and 350 gold, but it cannot be
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By: potofthemoon
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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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.
Pink diamond towers and their upgrades

Similar to the above charts, I have analyzed the cost efficiency of getting various
upgrades on the pink diamond towers compared to the amount of pinkies a player has.
What this means is that I am trying to answer the question: if I get X number of upgrades,
how many pinkies will I have to build to make it worth it? Or the inverse question: if I
build X number of pinkies, how many upgrades should I get to get my moneys worth? I
have decided to only analyze wood cost here, since at this stage when you are getting
pinkies, wood cost is the most relevant. Note that there is also a gold cost, but generally
speaking, 10-15 gold at this stage is not as important as the wood spent on these defenses.
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Cost efficiency of various pinkie upgrades

0.25
10/20000
1/1000
2/1500
3/2000
4/2500
5/3000
All upg
No upg
SuperF
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 ):
Nothing & before 10 minutes Wall tower

Nothing Sapphire
Str upgrade/Helm of Dracula Emerald
3 Str upgrades/Helmets Emerald + 1 armor upgrade
Demonic Remains Chrysoprase + 1 armor upgrade
2 Demonic Remains Garnet + 2 armor upgrades
Cloak of Dracula/Power of the Underworld Ruby + 2 armor upgrades
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Multiple cloaks Diamond + 2 armor upgrades
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.
Bounty given (gold): 20
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.
Bounty given: 50
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.
Bounty given: 75
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.
Bounty given: 75
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.
Bounty given: 250
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.
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Bounty given: 500

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.
Bounty given: 1000
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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Wall placement to prevent shade glitching

Based on Warcraft 3 (WC3) game mechanics, there is a way to place your wall
such that you can have up to 6 fixers around your wall, and prevent any sort of
shade/Frenchmen/meat wagon glitching. I know glitching is bannable, but people still do
it, and with correct wall placement, you can prevent it. Without going into the in-depth
mechanics of how glitching works, I will just tell you how to properly construct your
front wall to prevent glitching.
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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Here are more visual examples:
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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Non-glitchable 4 space wide ramp example:
Non-glitchable 2 space wide example:
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.
Regular BB (feeding blocks) serve an excellent purpose in sighting past trees.

What this means is that you can build a regular bb directly in the tree line, and have
vision past the trees. The COF BB can also be used for sighting. This is good for
viewing parts outside your base that you could not otherwise see, to view harassment
coming or if the vamp approaches your base. Use should always try to use all your
regular BB for sight past tree lines that cover large areas outside your base. Note that due
to collision size, the BB can only be placed from the left or bottom side of a treeline,
meaning you can only view to the right or above a treeline. You cannot place a BB at an
intersecting corner of 2 treelines either. If you dont quite understand what I just said,
just try placing BB in any treeline, you will find some treelines are impossible to place
any BB. Regular BB are generally useless for antisphere purposes and should only be
used in emergencies; more on that later. Note that you cannot seem to repair regular BB,
so if damaged by ring or whatever, just destroy and build another to prevent feed.
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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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Regular BB anti-sphere placement examples:
More GOOD regular BB anti-sphere placement examples:
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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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An alternative method to pre-COF anti-sphereing:
Regarding anti-sphering costs:
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Difference between anti-sphereing and anti-assassining (always anti-assassin right away,

anti-sphere at a good time):
If you are not antisphereing yet, you should at least be anti-assassining:
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.
List of things used to anti-sphere
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.
General front entrance construction

There are many ways to construct an entrance, so long as it meets certain safety
criteria, most ways will do. Your most basic front construction placement should at least
be anti-sphered and sealed from assassins, shades or other 1x1 units from walking
directly into your base. It should also be able to accommodate at least 4 fixers behind the
wall, and up to 6 for maximum effect. Preventing glitching or tping into your base is
rather flexible because once you have a few wall towers autoattacking the ground, the
units that the vamp can teleport to will likely die first. In this section, I will go over a few
different front entrance constructions and their uses.
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Basic and cheap

The simplest and often cheapest way to construct your front entrance is with your
main wall, and wall towers at the back, one space away. It is quick to produce and
relatively cheap, simple and effective. Sometimes the wall will be farther back in your
base, which will require more wall towers, but the concept is the same. Ensure the wall
towers are autoattacking the front to splash everything AROUND the wall, not just in
front of it. The dowside of this is that your human is effectively trapped up against your
wall, which could pave the way for possible human sniping strategies the vamps may
employ
.
Preventing human sniping strategies

For vamps that use a combination of human killing strategies to try to snipe your
human (i.e. Frenchmen, silence, double chain, ring combos) it may be prudent to
construct your entrance to prevent, or at least greatly reduce this risk of your human
dying. One good method to do this is to create an entrance with a safety zone behind
your front wall such that it can be accessed without the need to blink, and therefore can
even be accessed if your human is silenced. This safety zone will be an area that is away
from ring range, is highly splashed by wall towers so any Frenchmen/Shades entering
will be killed quickly, and give your human an area to escape to temporarily for healing,
but also be able to get right back to repairing the wall if needed.
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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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Another example of a gapped entrance:
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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Blocking your front from Frenchmen:
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.
Check for shades

Remember to always be in the habit of checking your base for shades before
basing. But be careful, if you end up killing a shade, skilled vamps will immediately
scan the area to see if you are basing and will continue to check once in a while to catch
your base before it even gets started. A prudent move if possible would be to simply
choose another base far away (bring your tracker along to shade check again). Also, a
vamp will be more apt to notice their shade has been killed if the vamp is not distracted.
Therefore a good time to start a base and begin to shade check would be when the vamp
is busy feeding or attacking another base. If you do catch a shade in your base, chances
are the vamp is shading. Check allied bases for shades with your remaining time with
your tracker to deny feed. You should seal your base off from shades once you have
checked for them.
Alternatively, you can actually set up your base, before checking for shades. The
pretense behind this is that vamps will either not actually see when the base is coming up
before its too late and the shade is scouted and killed before they decide to tp to it, or get
greedy and want to wait too long for feed to build up. Therefore you can kill the shade
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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.
Putting down a base

It is always a good idea to base while the vamps are attacking something else.
When basing, place your gms down first, before setting up a wall. Set up a wall quickly,
whether it be a Wall tower, or your first saph, meaning once youve placed down your
gold mines, the next structure you should be building is either a wall or more gms if you
feel lucky (note that if you chose to get wall tower first, once you have your saph, you
should get rid of the wall tower to reduce feed). Dont build up healing towers or dmg
towers first, at this stage it is either sealing up your base with a wall, or trying to eke out a
few more gms for economy. Regardless, once youve based, immediately anti-assassin if
you have not done it yet since it is cheap and saves a lot of grief.
Rarely do I set up my wall first, since the gms are the heart of any growing base.
Without gms, you might as well not even have a base. Economy-wise, you may choose
to set up a good wall first if you have furbs already in your base (grabbed more than 2
gold but dont have enough for a gm yet), and need to protect them right away. The only
other times you may choose to set up your wall first is if there is a tremendous amount of
pressure and you are like the only human on the map with many minis constantly
scouting the entire map, or if you suspect the vamps have scouted you already and are
waiting to do something sneaky like attack your base the instant you place down your
gms without a proper wall.
Another important thing that you should have or be getting is the worker hp
upgrade by the time you have established a base. You will need the hp to keep your
workers alive for fixing and so they dont get graved. If you have the spare lumber,
human hammer range upgrade is always good to help organize your base.
Finally, it may not be a good idea to start a base near an already established base,
since vamps will have likely scanned that base and will continue to scan the base to
determine its progress. With you starting a base nearby, vamps will immediately know
when you have begun to base (as their scan will catch the edges of your base) and catch
you before you can get a good wall up.
Base awareness and warning walls

It is a good idea to place houses or tents in the way of your entrance to have a
warning of when the vamps attack your base. It is also a good idea to place 1 or 2
warning walls around your base, perhaps in the surrounding nearby bases if necessary to
get a good overview look. Use only structures that give 1 gold, dont use wall towers.
Keep in mind that these warning structures still give feed (albeit very little) so if you feel
the vamp will get too much feed from these walls, minimize their use (it is still prudent to
get a few warning walls) and get a slayer with a vest to blink around for vision instead. If
your feel like your slayer will be in grave danger of being killed, you can alternatively
use mana towers to scan the surrounding areas.
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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:
Organizing your base

Proper base placement is important especially for smaller bases when space is
important. Other than properly ensuring an assassin in your base is unable to get to your
worker line, you should also have a location where your lvl 20 slayer can stand without
being silenced but whos invuln aura will reach your front wall, and make sure your
worker line is as far from the edge of your base as possible. I also try not to place gms
too close to the edge, although if its unavoidable, space out your gms and place houses in
between so double richos wont own all your gms. Also when placing groups of towers, it
might be a good idea to place them so you can potentially repair each one, in case richo
damages your group of pink diamonds, you dont have to kill one pinkie just to get in to
fix it.
Dealing with double richo early on:
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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.
Having a long lead up to the base

This allows the human ample warning when the vamp is approaching their base,
and allows frost towers to slow the vamp and attack towers to shower the vamp for a long
time before the vamp can even reach the wall. In addition, many of these bases also have
a rear choke point at which the vamp can be trapped in and killed if they lose too much
health assaulting the humans wall. To fully take advantage of these, make sure there is
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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.
Having a small choke

Only a few bases have this advantage, but the benefits include making it difficult
for more than 1 vamp to attack your wall at once, being immune to Frenchmen etc
Unfortunately only a few bases have this benefit, although this benefit can quickly turn
into a disadvantage if you wall improperly. The small choke (2 spaces wide) bases are
best when there are many vamps in the game, as vamps that attack your wall get clustered
up and can block each other from hitting the wall or escaping your towers.
Having unharassible spaces

This means having parts in your base that cannot be harassed by the vamp,
whether it be your worker line being too far to chain or grave effectively, or having a
space where gms cannot be touched by double richo, or even something as simple as
having health walls that cannot be touched by richo. This usually means the base is
somewhat large, or is up against the side of the map, making it impossible for the vamp
to come near certain areas of your base. Place all valuables in those untouchable areas, if
you have the benefit of controlling such a base.
Having multiple viable entrances

Certain bases have two or more viable entrances at which a wall can be placed,
such that the outer entrances are merely an extension of the inner entrances. What this
means is that a base having multiple viable entrances can first be based at from the most
inner entrance, which offers the greatest early game protection due to the longer leadup
and ability to trap a careless vamp as they attack your wall. Later on in the game, as your
base needs more space, you can build the next wall farther out, shortening your leadup,
but giving you more base space. Because this is often the case in vamp fire (the vamp is
most dangerous early-mid game and you begin to run out of space later game) a base
which offers this so called tiered protection, is an advantage to players who can use this.
Base 17 is one example of a base that gives tiered protection.
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The map (base #s)

I will discuss a few of the bases on the map I use regularly in the following
section. The bases have been numbered on the following modified diagram (Reference:
http://wiki.vampirism.eu/index.php?title=Base_Reference ):
In the next few pictures of bases, the legend is as such:

Red stars Blood
Blue squares suggested wall placements
White lines Both Vamp-sphereable spots and Assassin-spherable spots (does not
include front wall)
Yellow lines Only Assassin-sphereable spots (does not include front wall)
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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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Base 17 (Highly recommended)
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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Base 23 (Highly recommended)
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.
Proper map awareness

It is important, even after you base, that you maintain good overall map
awareness and not ignore everything that dosent concern you. As a human, this is still a
team game, and even if you dont intend to help your allies, you should know what the
vamp is doing. Some have the misconception that helping novice allies will detriment
you, this is not always the case, as there are certain low cost things you can do to delay a
vamps break into a novice base, therefore delaying his feed (e.g. when vamp grabs a
sphere, quickly antisphering for a novice ally if they allow, or just shade checking all
allied bases). There are a few important aspects to map awareness that I will go through,
although the general rule here is to know as much as possible what the vamps are doing,
say for example by blinking a tracker in the middle once in a while to check on vamp
items and upgrades. This way you can respond properly in time (e.g. you see a shade,
vamps are probably shading; if you see an armor reducing mini, prepare a better defense
or wall armor ups). You should at least be blinking into the center at the major
checkmarks, 30:00, 45:00 to see what the vamp is getting and what the vamp has. You
can also check the vamp shops to see if any of the items have cooldown on them,
indicating the vamp just purchased this item.
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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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To summarize the lump sums of cash received at (one-time cash received):

15:00 100g and 1000w
30:00 200g and 2000w
45:00 300g and 3000w
60:00 400g and 4000w
75:00 500g and 5000w
Etc
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
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)
At 60:00, expect at least 3300 g (enough for a cloak)
At 75:00, expect at least 5300 g (need only +1000 g feed to get 2 cloaks)
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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Massive Grave = 30g

Cloak of Shadows = 325g
Rain of Inferno = 150g
Wind Walk Potion = 30g
Frenchman = 5g 2 food
Claws of Dreadlord = 125g 1000 wood
Meat Carrier = 60g 600 wood
Silent Whisper = 50g 1000 wood
Refresh Potion = 275g 2k wood
Demonic Gate (Opens at 45min):
Gauntlets of the Underworld = 2000g 1000 wood
Gauntlets of Hellfire = 1800g 1000wood
Doom guard = 60g 1food
Infernal = 30g 1 food
Recipe List (Opens at 20min):
Draculas Cloak requires Demonic Remains, Cloak of Shadows and Gauntlets of
the Underworld = 850g + 325g + 2000g + 500 wood + 1k wood = 3150g 1.5k
wood
Ricochet Gem requires Pulse Staff and Burst Gem = 175g + 290g + 200g (recipe)
=665g
Vampire Basics:
Wand of Cyclone = 2g
Sentry Wards (3 wards) = 15g
Ring of Regeneration = 15g
Replenishment Potion = 2g
Ring of Protection = 2g
Claws of Attack = 2g
Scroll of the Beast = 2g
Vampiric Research Center:
Level Research = 25 gold
Upgrade dmg by 100 = 50g 250 wood
Upgrade stats by 300 = 500g 250 wood
Power of the Underworld = 2000g 500wood
Upgrade Strength by 300 = 250 gold
Upgrade Agility by 300 = 300 gold
Upgrade Intelligence by 300 = 90 gold
Summon Frost Wyrm = 150 gold 100 wood 5 food
Upgrade Freezing Breath = 150g 300 wood
Upgrade Corrupting Breath = 150g 200 wood
Upgrade Frost Nova Breath = 150g 300 wood
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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):
Worker Type (one)

Number of hits until return
Amount returned
Lumbering speed (wood per
minute for one worker)**
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
When to place down goldmines

As you build regular gms, remember that income comes every minute on the
minute. This means a gm built right before the minute will yield income, as opposed to a
gm built right after the minute, even if the timing was only 5 seconds apart. What this
means is that if you are coming close to the end of the minute, and see that you almost
have enough for a gm, hit return on all your workers to try to eke out that extra gm before
the minute ends, it will garner you an extra few gold.
What this also means is that if you have missed the minute mark in placing down
your gm, you can also wait for a while before having to place down a gm. This allows
you to keep lumber in the bank in case the vamp comes to your base and you need to
upgrade to emerald immediately. For example, say at :05 you have 20k wood in the bank,
it may be best to wait until :50 or so before placing down another gm, since it will afford
you at least 20k wood to play with for that 45 seconds you would normally have none if
you had spent it on the gm right then and there at the beginning of the minute. Obviously
this only applies to regular gms, but keeping wood in the bank especially if you are trying
to eke out extra gms early game (and do not have a good wall yet) is a prudent thing to do.
The gm timing should also influence your decision and timing of when to base. I
like to base maybe 30 seconds before the minute so I will have gms down before the
minute ends, reducing the amount of time I have based and are on the map for the vamp
to scout and attack me. If you are really fast at basing, you can choose to base maybe 15
seconds before the minute, so long as you can get your gms out before the minute ends.
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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Knowing the vamps

Firstly, it is a good idea to know how each vamp plays, and watch how they attack
buildings. If the vamp doesnt look like a leaker, your best luck will be to focus on the
leakier vamp. If the vamp chains workers youre in luck. Dont worry too much about
vamps that are overprotective of leaking (i.e. pausing over each structure they kill to
make sure), they will suffer in wasted time for their feeding. Feel free to deny structures
with your slayer from overprotective vamps, since youre not likely getting anything
from them anyways and they tend to feed very slowly.
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.
Selecting the coin

When a structure dies, the animation of the bright explosion often obscures a coin
that may have spawned under it. One good way to find out if there actually is a coin
under there is to almost vibrate your cursor over the middle of the building, if there is
an item, the name of the coin will flash when you scroll over it, allowing you to visualize
it better. The method essentially allows you to see if there is a coin under the building
even as the animation of the building exploding is obscuring vision of anything under
there for a second.
There are times when the vamp drops a leak but is standing awkwardly on the
coin and slayers that blink in are unable to right click the coin without right clicking the
vamp. Know that in WC3 there is a function to rotate your point of view to the left and
right side, by pressing the insert or home key respectively. Use these to try to get a better
view of the coin to right click on if needed.
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.
How to use your units

Your slayer
Slayer timing
You should always rush to get a slayer out as soon as possible. It should be the
next structure you get after you have maxed out on workers. Just make sure you max out
on workers first. You can improve your slayer timing by staggering building houses and
tents. You need at most about 5-6 houses, but you need 10 small tents to max out food.
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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.
Leveling your slayer

As your attention allows, you should be striving to blink in your slayer to level
only when the minute is almost up (second :57-:58) to grab your level before
disappearing ASAP, as many vamps love to camp the fountain. To prevent a vamp from
constantly feeding on slayers leveling at the fountain, a tracker is typically used to detect
vamps running to make a fountain dive. If you detect a vamp running to the fountain, or
even suspect a fountain dive by seeing a nearby scan or catching a glimpse of the vamp
running in the direction of the fountain, give a warning to your allies. Place the tracker
up top the ramp or on the blood within the base nearby the slayer fountain. Try to hug
the bottom right corner shown as below as closely as possible so your slayer will not be
blocked by the vamp even if silenced and can run out of the fountain. Also be wary of
minis placing stasis traps within the pool. If this happens, you will need to either avatar
before grabbing the level, or run in a tracker to activate the trap before grabbing a level.
Note: Max hero levels are 200 (Slayer, Vamps), max unit levels is 100 (Frost wyrm).
Good places to put your leveling slayer:
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Good ways to warn of an incoming vamp attack:
The pulse staff

As your slayer levels to 20, there is a high chance vamps will grab a pulse staff.
While proper slayer positioning may help protect against vamps that silence your slayer,
if the pulse staff is grabbed early, you should be thinking about slayer training upgrades.
Both give a total of 500+750=1250hp. A pulse staff does not do exactly 5k damage to a
slayer (slightly less due to magic reduction on heros), therefore depending on your
slayers current hp, you may choose to get one or both slayer upgrades to survive a pulse
from the vamp, allowing you time to blink away. The second bounce from the pulse
deals 15% less damage than the first bounce. Obtained empirically, the first hit appears
to do only 75% of its actual damage, that is 3750 damage, and the second hit would deal
15% less, at 3187.5 damage. Also note that the range of the pulse is 500 from initiation
and bounce. This means that if the staff has already hit the first target and your slayer is
nearby, even if you blink away before it bounces to you, your slayer can still be hit by the
second bounce from across the map (i.e. the staff already selects its next target once it has
already hit the first target). The upgrades are definitely worth it if the vamp has grabbed
the pulse staff as his first item to prevent leak grabs and get slayer kills, and your slayer is
still relatively weak.
Slayer upgrades versus pulse staff summary (assuming you need above 3750 hp to
survive, and the proper skills were obtained):
With no upgrades, your slayer will have to hit at least level 12 or so before it can
survive the staff. You will probably want 1-2 levels more because the often
vamps will hit your slayer first a little to soften it up.
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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.
Useful Vamp items for your slayer

You should always remember that your slayer can buy vamp items as well,
although you should do so appropriately, since vamp items are obviously gold heavy. I
will list some items I often use, when I buy them and their main uses:
o Conc End game to grab a cloak in peace
o Shades Anytime to spy on vamp
o Sentry wards Anytime to spy on vamp or as a base detection tower, while wards
cannot be placed on buildings, buildings can be placed on wards
o Silent whisper Anytime, works on vamps with no Immunity shield, use to
silence vamp to prevent chaining/healing etc
o Cyclone Anytime (depending on vamp pressure), works on vamps with no
Immunity shield, to stop a vamp from attacking your wall
o Immunity shield Mid to end-game to prevent silencing of your slayer
o Draculas Cloak End game, to end the game or just make your slayer hard to kill
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
How to kill vamps

Killing vamps/minis (Intro)
A general rule is, if a vamp is harmless, let it live, since you should know that
more vamps = more income. However, just because a mini is not attacking nor has much
items, does not mean they are harmless. Beware of minis that pool the main vamp, as the
passive income all the minis will receive and give to the main vamp is quite significant.
Strive to first kill highly fed nosfs, or armor-reducing minis, before killing the others.
While the items currently held by a vamp when he dies will transfer (in the form of the
soul), the money currently held by a vamp when he dies will not (it will revert to 0).
Keep this in mind and try to surprise and kill vamps that you suspect are saving up
money for another item (e.g. has been richoing your base all game and still has the same
items he did before he started). In case you didnt know yet, the mathematical formula
for income gained based on number of vamps is:
y
x 1
2
Where: x is the amount of income, and y is the number of vamps; both x and y are
integers
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
Killing vamps (Early-game)

Generally speaking, killing vamps early game only usually occurs if vamps make
a mistake. Killing a skilled vamp early game is next to impossible, without the
coordination of perhaps several skilled humans. As a result, killing skilled vamps early
game solo is quite risky and very unreliable, both due to the possibility of feeding the
vamp, and wasting your early game lumber, which is extremely precious. Nevertheless, I
will discuss some of the techniques for killing vamps early-game, including pros and
cons for each.
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.
Killing vamps (Mid-game)

Often, players miss their chance to kill vamps in the mid game, whether it be due
to wanting to prolong the game, or due to missing opportunities. There are a few timeframes in which a vamp is vulnerable to certain types of strategies and attacks. I will
discuss these segments of time and ways to exploit them to the human advantage.
Because careful vamps will know these time-frames and avoid getting themselves killed,
the key element will be surprise and speed. Knowing how aggressive the vamp is
through map awareness will help you determine whether any of these strategies can be
exploited to kill the vamp in the mid game, instead of having to take it to the late game.
This is important because some mid-game killing strategies are risky situations, in which
failing to kill the vamp with the strategy right then and there will likely result in lost
economy, or even your death.
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.
Killing vamps (End-game)

In this segment I will refer primarily to ending a game in the end game, when the
humans reach BO to end the game. Sometimes it is possible to kill the vamp as he
assaults your wall by surprising him with an ultra lightning oracle and trapping him
quickly. However, it is also possible that as the vamp sees he has no way of breaking
your base late-game as you continue to pull ahead, they tend to sit in their own base in
the center, contemplating on what to do, waiting for the human to try to end the game
(and catch him in the act to get more feed), or more often than not, begging for feed. Due
to your large amounts of disposable income, when killing vamps in the late game, make
sure your spare no expense to be as safe as possible, as a slip up can create great amounts
of feed for the vamp. However, getting to the end game is very risky, and therefore
when considering overall winning potential, one should weigh the consequence and
benefits of even taking a game to end game. For example, if a vamp is extremely fed
before 30:00, it may be best to try to kill the vamp before he gets demonics. Most
efficiently speaking, a vamp can be killed or at least harassed early or mid game if he has
not gone for early game items (ring, helm, stats, Frenchmen; anything to break that
sapphire or emerald before 30:00) and is saving for a late game items. Also take into
account the game length, do you really want to be playing a 45 minute game?
It is very possible for a vamp late-game to be so fed that he can knock down onyx
walls and ultra lightning oracles dont affect him anymore. This is because the humans
have a cap, which is the ultra lightning oracles/Armageddon towers and onyx walls with
4 armor upgrades. The vamp, however does not. He can keep upgrading his stats till the
cows come home, eventually dwarfing the stats his multiple cloaks give him. Therefore,
although humans are at a great advantage end-game, in the super end game, assuming
vamps have fed on human mistakes, the vamps slowly pull ahead, and will continue to do
so. Keep this in mind if you wish to prolong the game. There are many ways to end a
game, the best way depends. First use the mana towers to scan the whole area, find out
what items the vamp has, and more importantly where he has vision (shades, frost wyrm)
and perhaps what he might be planning. Then decide on the course of action. Killing the
vamp requires planning, and surprise.
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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An embedded tower example:
Another embedded tower example:
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.
How to counter vamps

Denying feed
Detonating your workers
You should know that when a vampire breaks into your minibase or even main
base under normal circumstances, you should detonate your workers. I find the best way
to do this is by first selecting the max number of peasants nearest to the vamp, pressing
e to return any wood they may have been holding, then alternating d and clicking on
an empty area nearby (so you dont mistakenly select another unit as you detonate) as
quickly as possible. No shift/rally commands are needed. It is important to have good
minibase setup that will give you plenty of warning before the vamp can get into your
worker line. I find in general, a good habit to get into before detonating any worker (i.e.
furbs to exchange for fangs) is to press e and return any residual resources to get the
most out of your miners.
Killing feed with your slayer

If an allied base is penetrated early or late game, it is a good idea to deny the base
IF there is no chance of killing the vamp or salvaging the base. Some humans will often
refuse to commit suicide or deny anything in their base, leaving it up to other players to
do the job. The first thing to know is that the base must be unclaimed before you can
begin denying things with your slayer. So watch for the unclaimed signal, then begin
denying the items of most value first. A vest may help deny stronger structures later
game. It is a good idea to avatar before denying a base to prevent silence or pulse. The
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triggers on a base being unclaimed is as follows (Reference:

http://wiki.vampirism.eu/index.php?title=Base_Claiming ):
A base is unclaimed if:
The owner, in any way, leaves the game.
A vampire destroys a building in the base, and the human isn't in that base. If a
base has been unclaimed because of that, nobody else can claim it for one minute,
but units can still be destroyed during that minute.
Distracting feeding with your slayer

In the early game, sometimes novice humans are slow to detonate their worker
line before the vamp gets into it. If the vamp is very fastidious in not leaking, to slow
down their feeding pattern and give the human time to detonate their workers, you can
just blink your slayer nearby. The fact that your slayer is around the vamp also forces the
vamp to retarget the slayer every time it kills something, so you can use your slayer to
essentially slow the vamp feeding off the base, and allow other slayers, or yourself to
continue denying the base. Of course the downside is that the vamp will not be leaking
with your slayer nearby.
Killing feed with your human

It is riskier to do so, but is often faster. If you intend to do this, make sure you
have upgraded the human hammer range upgrade first, then you must first wait for the
base to be unclaimed, before claiming it yourself. Then structures/workers can be denied
accordingly at sufficient range, being careful to stay out of the vamps way. Note that
some bots have decided that claiming another persons base that has been broken in and
denying with your human is against their rules.
Helping your allies

Helping even the most novice of allies can slow vamp feed. Simple things such
as scouting everyones base for shades when you have the time can help greatly. Helping
to kill off assassins or wyrms, or even Frenchmen if you see them approaching an allied
base. The idea here is to slow the vamps feed as much as possible, your ally may be too
novice to stay alive, but if you can delay the vamp from feeding on your allies base, or
even prevent it, it will all come back to help you, and its not just karma. For example, the
longer vamps focus on another base, the longer you go unharrassed. Giving that novice
player 1 gold when you have 15g to get his emerald wall can greatly delay a vamp from
breaking into their base. You have to be careful though when it comes to delaying feed.
It may be preferable to let them die before they can build much more feed in their base
for the vamp to break into. You must use your proper judgment to determine whether or
not to delay feed from the vamp by helping an ally survive longer.
From a non-strategy based perspective, I think it is always nice to help allies if it
is not of too much burden to you. There are a lot of newer players out there who would
love to learn how to play, but have simply no one to teach them. I see them continually
join games to learn, but are continually flamed down by better players who see them as a
feeder and are often kicked before they have a chance to try. I fully agree that feeders are
detrimental, but I feel like we should all give them a chance to improve. If this is an
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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!
Properly committing suicide

If in any event, your base is penetrated and it holds lots of feed, and there is no
way of killing the vamp right there and then, you should be thinking of suiciding your
human for the greater good. This is especially true mid to late game where the
consequences the feed your base will provide to the vamp if you keep your human alive
will far outweigh the benefits of having your single human + his miners alive (for say
pooling another surviving player).
The first thing you can do is not blinking away from your dead wall and dying
right behind your wall (this is especially effective if you have engineers summoned
nearby your human behind the wall, as the odd collision size and clustering of the
engineers make it highly likely your human will be hit before the vamp can enter your
base). Bases with the small 2 square openings are the easiest to commit suicide by
simply blocking the vamps path with your human (make sure you are standing against
your anti-shade walls so he cannot invis through you). Some vamps will cyclone you or
spam retargeting to stop from hitting you. Another thing that can be done is to type
unclaim so that your base becomes possible for other players to come and deny feed.
Once the vamp gets past your human or if the vamp sphered into your base, you must use
a number of strategies to kill yourself properly, many of them require proper timing.
This is because usually when the vamp gets wind of what you just tried to do, they will
spam actions to prevent attacking your human. By surprising them with a suicide
strategy, they may not have the reaction time to begin spamming nonsense actions and
may kill your human by mistake, since the human unit has been given the highest priority
target value (a few other structures/towers tie with it) for a vamp to autoattack:
o Get yourself killed by the other more distracted vamps/minis by blinking nearby
o Time a blink right next to the vamp just as he kills one of your structures (autoretarget will prioritize your human as the next target after killing that structure)
o Ensnare the vamp and immediately blink your human right next to the vamp (the
stuck vamp will have to continually spam actions to ignore your human as a target
as he is ensnared)
o Invuln your nearby buildings (make sure your slayer is not reachable) and
immediately blink your human right next to the vamp (your human becomes the
only available target and the vamp will have to spam actions to ignore your
human)
o Deny a structure the vamp is attacking while you are standing right next to the
vamp (loss of target forces a retarget on next available target, in most cases is the
human)
o Blink into your worker line next to the vamp as the vamp is assaulting it, works
best with peasant miners
o If all else fails, deny the hell out of your base with your human, starting with the
most expensive structures first. Stand next to the vamp while doing so.
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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.
Countering vamp cheesy strategies

Cheesy doesnt necessarily mean that the vamp is unskilled; rather it is quite the
contrary. Many cheesy strategies require skill and timing to pull off successfully.
Ultimately you should know what a vamp could possibly have in store for you, and when
they are likely to do those things; see Proper map awareness. As such, to improve your
vamp fire human play, you should play vamp from time to time to understand where
vamps are coming from. In lieu of this, maintaining good map awareness of vamp items
and feed is a good start. Scout the middle often, and dont just rely on the triggered
events such as Vampires have obtained Demonic Remains, to determine your actions.
Cheesy strategies usually only work because the human was completely unprepared for it.
Dont get surprised, check what the vamp is doing periodically. Another reason cheesy
strategies usually work is because the human underestimated how deadly a particular
cheesy strat can be. This means if you see the vamp preparing something cheesy or have
just done something cheesy to another player and killed them, start preparing the proper
defenses right away (i.e. mana towers and human hp for double chain and ring), dont
wait until the vamps get to you door unless you have gosu super fast reaction time. Here
I list a few of the common vamp tricks I may have not yet discussed, along with
suggestions to counter them. Regardless, there will be times you will be caught off guard
by a cheesy trick, this part is primarily to let you know these tricks exist, rather than tell
you concrete ways to counter them. You should be able to minimize the risks once you
are aware of what tricks the vamps could be playing.
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.
Double chain, double ring

Often this is coupled with a silence to your human so that your human cannot
blink away. Variations of this (i.e. two ring 1 chain) are often used by vamps as a
desperate measure to kill humans, because one mistake can cost the human the game very
quickly. This is often used as a vamp recovery strategy, which is if the vamp has
somehow found himself greatly behind and needs to end the game before it gets out of
hand. As such, failure to kill the human with this early game strategy will set the vamp
even farther behind. Often human killing strategies like this are comboed with a grave or
even Frenchmen as well.
For starters, your human should not always be simply sitting at your front door all
the time, keep him inside your base and blink him in to fix when needed. Get human hp
preemptively. If you suspect vamps of coming at you with this, you should try to
construct an entrance that will prevent this focused human killing strategy from working,
see Front entrance construction. Use engineers to repair when they come. Having
plenty of warning walls leading up to your base will warn you what is about to happen, so
if you see those bats fly, immediately getting mana towers and engies can be done.
Secondly you should always be scouting the middle, so if you see this strategy being
prepared, be prepared yourself, with mana towers and other dmg towers when you see
them coming. Finally think about getting Super towers of health for the rapid heal, but
do not put the healing towers so close they are hit by the rings. When the vamps do come,
summon your engineers and if possible, kill any graves the vamps put down to increase
the pressure first (either with slayer or wall towers), and immediately build mana towers
or pinkies away from ring range before blinking in your human to fix if needed at all.
Regarding the ring, it hits all the targets in its range and cycles through those
targets every second or so. The ring is an aura effect, and this aura marks targets for
which the bats to fly out and hit periodically. The aura only stacks twice.
Warning wall camping

Some vamps may notice that you consistently place warning walls in front of your
base every time the vamp has left, and may actually pretend to leave, go invis and come
back, and wait for your worker or human to come out and start building warning walls
again, before trying to snipe it. To minimize this risk, you should use your furb to build
warning wall houses early game (never your human), and scout the area first with your
vested slayer mid game before using a worker build warning walls. Sometimes vamps
will wait invis with a silence, and try to silence your human if it comes out to build
warning walls. If you fear this, you can first use your avatard vested slayer to actually
locate where the vamp is, before trying to build warning walls.
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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By: potofthemoon
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.
Grave + Chaining workers

This strat is used to kill 400hp furbs near an edge (reachable by chain and grave
and not visible by human). Always know what going on around the edges of your base,
especially if you have workers near the edge, build warning walls around your base as a
habit. For example, if your furbs are near an edge, even if they have worker hp upgraded,
doesnt make them safe from graves. Vamps can place a grave, and right as the grave
hits, chain your furbs, allowing the grave to finish the other wounded ones right off,
maybe even mixing in a silence to prevent you from blinking your workers away.
Regardless, a vamp with fully upgraded chain will be able to kill a few workers per chain,
so keeping furbs away from chain range is an essential part of the early game. If your
base is small and staying away from the edges cannot be avoided, ensure you at least
have proper vision of the area behind your worker line, so you can quickly blink your
workers away if the vamp poses a threat.
If the vamp places a grave, regardless if they get kills or not, they may stand there,
protecting the grave and not allowing your slayer to blink in and kill it, rendering a large
part of your base inhabitable for furbs. You can easily kill the grave by building a wall
tower within your base near the grave, and splash the grave to death with the wall tower.
It is also a good idea to label all your furbs a control group so that in case your furb line
is harassed, you can instantly recall them all to blink away.
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.
Richoing health towers

This in itself is not a big problem, but can be annoying especially if combined
with the need to heal against chain or rings, and you are in constant need to build new
health towers. Try to build them out of richo range, if not, dont repeatedly build 3 or
four in the same place to be richoed again and again in quick succession, spread out 3-4
health towers so one richo only takes out one tower, it will reduce feed and the
effectiveness of the richo.
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By: potofthemoon
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.
Break wall tower to Sphere through

For vamps that have a cooperative mini or two, or just by themselves, this strat is
usually used to destroy wall towers to allow a vamp to sphere in. They can do this many
ways, for example by triple richo (3 vamps required) or double richo + infernal stone (2
vamps required), or even using a wyrm. This tends to work since most players will
assume a wall tower is safe against sphere, which in most cases is true. Prevent this by
not using wall towers to antisphere, rather use Amethyst walls, upgraded to Sapphire
walls once the vamp get sphere. They can even be further upgraded if needed (i.e. you
see the vamps stacking up richos).
Power of the Underworld first

You should strive, unless you are faced with extraordinary pressure, to keep your
emerald wall for as long as possible, and that usually means until the vamp get their
demonics. This is easy to determine because at 30:00, the human need only wait for the
Vampires have obtained Demonic Remains notification, before upgrading to the next
wall and taking other appropriate steps. However, there is the rare occasion that vamps
with large amounts of feed obtained before 30:00, they can get upgrade Power of the
Underworld first, instead of demonics, before rushing off to your base. Because the
Underworld upgrade does not trigger a notification, humans will not know what is in
store before it is too late. Prevent this by keeping tabs on the amount of feed on the
scoreboard, and other items/upgrades the vamp has bought. Is it possible the vamp could
have gotten that much feed? Finally, it is very good practice to ALWAYS scout the
vamp once the timer hits 30:00 to determine what items the vamp goes for, and take
appropriate steps. Be suspicious if the vamp dosent get a demonics at 30:00, did he get a
lot of feed? Is he clearly saving for something bigger?
Constant pressure until double chain or break

This is a popular early game pressure strat used by two nosfs who have good
teamwork. Usually used to target a human player they have identified as being skilled
Page 84 of 88
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.
Silencing and killing engies

This strategy is used against humans who may rely too much on their engineers to
save them if against a demonics vamp with their chyro or even emerald wall. The idea is
to allow the engineers to be summoned and blinked to the back of the wall to begin fixing,
silencing the engineers, and killing them with a followup felhound. Since the felhound is
quite tanky and has a blink, it may be possible to bring the felhound up to your wall to
begin killing engineers in very short notice.
To counter this, once you summon your engineers, unless you are in immediate
danger, realize you dont have to blink all 4 engineers to begin fixing, often 2 engineers +
your human is enough fixing required. Keep 1-2 engineers away from your wall and only
blink in the number of engineers you actually need. Also remember to target the
Page 85 of 88
By: potofthemoon
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.
Slayer luring and trapping (Slayer fountain camping)

Two main ways to lure and kill your slayer comes to mind. The first is to plant a
grave and wait for slayers to come to it, before having a stasis ward to stun it, or silencing
the slayer before killing the slayer. The second more popular method is to simply camp
the slayer fountain near the minute mark to silence and catch leveling slayers. Be wary
of these strategies, and if you suspect vamps of using it, you can simply avatar before
blinking to kill a grave or leveling up if you need to grab a few more levels, or blink in a
tracker before you move into the target area. Alternatively you can use a wall tower to
kill a grave near your base.
If you find the vamp constantly camping the fountain, a good way to get levels is
by blinking your slayer right before the minute mark at one of the two ideal slayer
leveling spots, grabbing the level, and running out of the fountain with your slayer (or
blinking out if its not silenced). This allows your slayer even if silenced to run out and
force the vamp to at least chase your slayer before it is able to kill it.
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
Page 86 of 88
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)
Page 87 of 88
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
Conclusions & Thanks

The pictures (especially the screenshots in game) were created by me. I have
referenced pictures I have taken from other sources. Feel free to use the pictures I have
made but please give me credit for creating the original pictures, thanks!
I would like to thank the creators of Vampirism Fire (Skillet-Collide,
Cheekything), for creating the map, and thank the map developers (Davethebat,
Littletiger) and coders (Caesio, d07.RiV) who have the dedication to continue to update a
map many people enjoy. Indeed thanks to all of clan VFR in general for hosting and
continuing to support this map.
I hope to update this guide in the future if newer versions of the map do come out,
so if you have anything you think should be added, changed, removed, or just
constructive feedback, please let me know by email: potofthemoon(at)yahoo.com and Ill
be glad to make any changes or reference one of your innovative strategies!
Thanks:
To everyone whom I played with who allowed me to watch them play so I could
learn.
To Shadowly for bringing to light the feeding block Frenchmen blocking
technique
To you for reading!
Page 88 of 88

Vampirism Fire - A Human Guide v1.01

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