Speaking of the vampire counts, I just about finished crushing that cluster of vampire provinces last night. Fighting the vampires is a whole different beast than fighting other empire factions or orks or what have you. Because of the 100% or so "corruption" rating in vampire territory, your armies suffer attrition outside of town. Additionally, as I previously noted, if you take over a town, you're looking at keeping your armies there for a while - the corruption also tanks your public order.
So, this time, I mopped up my home territory and then sent my two main armies into Sylvania. We walked through the fragmented West Sylvania, stopping only long enough to sack and then occupy one of the towns as a temporary rest stop (within a few turns, it got razed to the ground by vampire "rebels"), then hit the vampire counts on East Sylvania. It was a pretty hard fight, but between our mortars and hard-bitten infantry (and my pegasus-mounted, leadership-specced general), we crushed them. I took a bit of a risk assaulting castle Drakenhof with no siege equipment other than ladders and a single mortar, but it worked out - since the bad guys refused to come out to face us, I charged my melee infantry and pegasus lord up the walls, blocking their tower, and then pelted the undead with flanking crossbow bolts and gunfire. It would have been a hard fight to take the courtyard from the three units of "red knights", but they disintegrated once we took the walls. :
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Then we turned our attention back to West Sylvania, where the Von Carstens were beefing with every surrounding Empire faction. Their army was actually pretty good, featuring several purple units (these appear to be upgraded versions of regular units). They moved a little quicker than I did, and were able to drive back Emperor Franz's main army. At that point, I attacked their last town with the secondary army and stupidly let myself get sandwiched between the enemy force and reinforcements. I don't think I've ever seen an army rout so fast. The vampires took heavy losses, though with their armies down to a few units of barely 1/3 strength. So, of course, they attack my secondary army again. We plowed through their remaining scrubs pretty easily, but they brought two general types - "Big Boss Von Carsten" and "Little Boss Von Carsten". These guys are just mowing my troops down left and right. I go from having a mostly intact army (15 or so units) to everybody routing. My melee infantry rout, my mortars rout, even the bad-ass Reiksguard rout. At least we managed to kill Little Boss. At this point, I have to revert to the old standby of kiting the leader while my crossbowmen and rifles shoot him. Except the AI isn't quite stupid enough to fall for it and keeps going after crossbowmen. My guys start running out of ammo, but, with their last few shots, my last few crossbows finally knock down Big Boss Von Carsten. My leader's dead, half his army is wiped out... but we won. All we have to do is walk into town.
Then a nearby scrub empire faction takes over the last Von Carsten city. That's ok guys. You'll just be joining my confederation soon enough anyway.
Meanwhile, the Beastmen finally show up on the opposite end of my empire with a slightly damaged army from beating up Marienberg. Guess we'll see how this goes. The good part is that "Templehof" sat out the entire campaign, and his army consists entirely of a stack of 20 skeletons and a single castle garrison, so hopefully he won't be screwing with me while I deal with the beastmen.