A few tips

OK, here's the deal. You have to set up a base. Maybe not immediately, but within the first 5 mins. 2 walls is a must and lots of towers. You need lots of towers, because walls aren't strong enough to keep the vamps out until you get gold.

Towers
- The shiny pearl tower is inexpensive and gives you good damage for the wood cost, but doesn't quite have the range necessary
- The opal spire does acceptable damage over a long range, but is quite expensive on wood. You will want about 12 of these before 15 mins, but there are other towers you could choos instead.
- The ruined spire may be the best tower to use. It has the highest damage of the other lower tier towers, and it upgrades pretty well too
- Long range towers are eventually useful for extra damage

Don't waste your wood on towers either. you should probably not build more than 24 towers total, and then upgrade the ones you have. I usually don't even build that many. You must have enough to drive the vamp off, but you will need ot save your wood to get gold mines as well.

Wood
- beginning of the game, get a full population of regular workers. once you get a wall and some towers (5 or 6 towers) then you should begin switching them out for ghouls. These will do all right until you get gold.
- be sure to upgrade the speed of your lumber harvesting, and maybe the speed of your workers, although if your houses are close to the wood, then it shouldn't be that big of a deal.

Gold
- several ways of getting gold
- n00b way = wait for it (you will probably die)
- normal way = steal an item that drops from a destroyed building. Do this only for your teammates... not if the vamp is in your base. If the vamp is in your base, you have to concentrate on other things... let your buddies worry about stealing the gold.
- vamp blood way = use your tracker a lot and scour the map with your slayer to pick up a random gold spawn.
- team work 1 = when the vamp kills someone, wait for the minivamp to get alone and then get everyone to tele their slayers right on top of it. Kill the vamp, share the gold. This is normally called "ganking" the minivamp, which is a combination of the words "grab" and "yank." "Gank" is synonymous with the word "steal," only it implies a more forceable stealing, similar to mugging.
- Team work 2 = donate each other gold and wood. I understand how this is an unpopular strat, but it can easily ensure human survival. Divided, humans fall. Vampirism was designed that way. So, heres the deal: at the beginning of the game, designate one person (hopefully a pro) to recieve donations form the others. Don't donate your wood to that person until you get gold. In vamp blood, it takes 3 gold to be able to make a gold mine

gold 1 = vault
gold 2 = lumber house
gold 3 = murloc warrior

So if you can get the special player 3 shiny gold, he or she can build a gold mine, and will then give your gold back to you, plus some. Once the player has a murloc worker, donate him or her your wood to allow the production of gold mines. Then he will establish a strong base and give you gold and wood back.

Now, I know that you guys are guffawing at this strat saying things like: "yeah right, like I'm gonna do that" and "no way he would give the gold back!" and "a fool and his gold are soon parted," but human play is supposed to be based on teamwork. If you can't work together and trust each other, you've probably lost already.