Hello! Luis here, a senior designer at Triumph Studios, and today I am going to talk about something I have been looking forward to work on since the release of the game: Vampires! The Elder Vampire is a new leader typer that will be one of the key features of the next content pack, Thrones of Blood, which comes out on November the 11th!
Elder Vampires are ageless undead who have gained great power through a curse dating back to the era of Archvampires and the Deathless God, though these tales are now considered more myth than truth, even by Vampires themselves. They abhor the sun and often desecrate the land through special structures, creating a zone of somber darkness. These Sunless lands allow them to exist outside caves so they may expand their domain and exert their influence.
Mechanically speaking, if the Vampire is not in the Underground, Gloom or Sunless terrain they cannot recover health on the World Map and their damage is penalized.
There are two types of Elder Vampire, the Pureblood and the Hybrid. These differences are cosmetic; the Pureblood is a vampire of a specific species tied to the lore having a more custom look in terms of body and clothing, while the Hybrid can have a form but will not have as much customization as the Pureblood.
Elder Vampires replace the Wizard Tower structure and upgrades with their own Vampire Castle. The Castle evolves and upgrades in a similar way to the Wizard Tower and shares a lot of the same unlocks, but the Vampire Castle and its upgrades give some extra things!
For example, the Vampire Castle Foundation gives the same things as the Wizard Tower Foundation, the extra Imperium and Vision Range, but it also unlocks a feature of the Vampires: Thralls and Ritual Spells.
Much like the Eldritch Sovereign, the Elder Vampire has access to thralls but the way they gain them is different. Instead of capturing them in battle they are instead ‘home grown’, using food income to produce them. They have a separate tracker and don’t take away from population growth.
Their first ritual spell is shared with the Eldritch Sovereign, the Clairvoyance Ritual that lets you find nearby points of interest, but as they upgrade their Vampire Castle they gain more and unique rituals, from a Ritual Sacrifice that can heal the vampire in the world map to a powerful Blood Moon Ritual which blots out the sun and removes the penalties of the surface world to all vampires no matter if they are in the new Sunless terrain or not.
The side upgrades too follow this fashion. Instead of an Item Forge the Vampire has access to a Soul Forge that grants access to the Item Forge feature as normal but in addition lets them recruit Hatchling and Matriarch Vampire Spiders as well as two new units: the Tier 1 Doom Bat and the Tier 2 Shrieking Bat.
Another example is the Abattoir which replaces the Prison, this structure allows Vampires to devour captured heroes instead of executing them as usual. This grants the vampire who eats the hero an amount of experience that increases with the level of their sacrificial meal.
And this goes on for most upgrades normally unlocked by the Wizard Tower! For example, the Crypts become the Deep Crypts that allow Vampires to regenerate faster in their domain. The Channeling Chamber becomes a Ritual Chamber that helps reduce the amount of Thralls needed to cast Rituals.
Of course, Vampires cannot be called Vampires without spreading their cursed state to others. When they recruit or convert a hero, they transform them into a Turned Vampire, replacing their Mortal Champion Hero Skill tree to that of the Vampire’s unique skill tree and giving them the Undead unit type. They also suffer from Sunlight Weakness and gain a new passive called Experience Drain - as all Turned Vampires must submit to their Elder: A portion of the experience earned in battle by a Turned Vampire is granted to the Elder Vampire instead.
Hero Skills
The Vampire’s Origin Skill Tree is all about draining blood from your enemies, bestowing power to allies and mind control.
A vampire starts with a blood draining ability, either a powerful melee ability called Draining Bite or a weaker, ranged version called Siphon Blood. These abilities deal physical damage to a target and heal the Vampire for half of the damage dealt. Unfortunately you can only drain blood from those who have it so units that are immune to the Bleeding effect cannot be drained.
The Elder Vampire’s initial class determines if the vampire starts with the melee or ranged version but can be repicked with a skill reset.
These abilities then lead down two paths: A control path and a friendly unit buff path.
The first grants the Vampire’s Drain the ability to stun, and as the vampire earns experience can then turn into a mind control and at higher level becomes a Dominate effect, allowing vampires to capture enemies for their own army at the end of battle for a mana cost.
The second path starts with the ability Drain Familiar, which allows the Vampire to feed on a friendly unit to regain hitpoints and strength. The Vampire then later can have it where it becomes more symbiotic, the vampire sharing its profane strength temporarily with the familiar and even granting them a regeneration effect so the wounds from the feeding are not as grievous.
Other skills grant the vampire the ability to bypass defenses when draining its enemies, reduce the cooldown on the drain ability, turn to mist when threatened and even the Vampiric Flight passive, allowing the vampire to gain a Flying movement speed and granting some evasion from ranged attacks.
Signature Skills
Because there are many fantasies and tropes surrounding vampires I decided I would need to have a lot of options somewhere where you could get to pick and choose as a player what your ideal vampire plays like. To do this I decided to use the signature skills - they are all unique to the vampire and there’s a lot! A total of 25 unique skills.
The way the Elder Vampire works is that at each signature unlock step they get a different set of options. So at level 4 the vampire picks from four options that give you an active ability and a passive, each with a different theme.
For example the Desecrator signature allows your vampire to cause rotting explosions by targeting corpses and as a passive grants a Tier I Zombie at the start of combat for a more undead theme. Meanwhile Hemomancer lets the vampire sacrifice their hitpoints to empower their next attack and passively they heal when they kill an enemy.
At level 8 they pick from 6 passives, from reducing cooldowns on kill from the Reaper passive, dispelling enemy status effects with their attack with the Defiler passive or empowering themselves as their hit points are reduced with Vampiric Rage.
At level 12 the Vampire picks a new active ability from 6 abilities, here’s some examples:
Gravemarch creates 4 corpses of Tier I Skeletons in the target area and then for the next 4 turns the vampire revives a random corpse on the battlefield, be it those you spawned or existing ones.
Bloodblight damages and applies Blood Parasite (another new status effect I will tell you about in a few weeks) to the target and nearby units.
Tormenting Mist creates a somber mist around the Vampire that deals Frost damage, demoralizes and torments all enemies it reaches.
Blood Communion heals a friendly unit and the vampire both while removing status effects.
At level 16 things get a bit different. You get to pick from 3 signatures unique to this level OR you can upgrade the skill picked at level 12.
The upgrade depends on the skill, but picking up on the examples from before, Gravemarch would summon Tier 3 and Tier 4 undead units, Bloodblight would spread to more targets, Tormenting Mist would give you a permanent aura effect that mimics the ability it comes from and Blood Communion would infect adjacent units to the Vampire and the target with Blood Parasite.
The three unique skills to this levels are:
Curse to Undeath which is a ranged area of effect that Soulbounds all enemies hit along with a passive that damages all Soulbound units at the start of each of the Vampire’s Turn
Rosebound Noble allows the Vampire to summon a Tier 4 Rose Knight in battle, a new unit introduced in this content pack. Additionally as a passive this signature allows you to recruit Rose Knights from your cities.
Supernatural Movement gives the Vampire a free teleport skill in battle and Fast Movement speed to itself and all Turned Vampires under you as long as they aren’t mounted.
I hope you enjoyed reading this dev diary and are looking forward to playing with this new leader type! I had a lot of fun designing it and some on the triumph team might even say I went overboard but I really wanted to give the best translation of a vampire in the world of Age of Wonders for all of you to play with! I will come back in a few weeks with the new tomes I designed for this content pack, but for now I will leave you with Bas as next week he will be talking about the Vampire’s favorite hang out spot, the Sunless terrain!
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