did it ever occur to you that Vertcoin isn't doge?
No paws, no fur, no wow!

seriously, you need --algo=scrypt:2048 and later on 4096, 8192, etc...

I am not entirely sure about their N-factor schedule. The original wallet had this schedule:

| N        | Memory | Timestamp   | Date/Time                     |   |
|----------|--------|-------------|-------------------------------|---|
| 2048     | 256 kB | 1389430800  | Sat, 11 Jan 2014 09:00:00 GMT |   |
| 4096     | 512 kB | 1422985232  | Tue, 03 Feb 2015 17:40:32 GMT |   |
| 8192     | 1 MB   | 1448151056  | Sat, 22 Nov 2015 00:10:56 GMT |   |
...

but apparently they have decided to relax the aggressiveness and change it to this more relaxed schedule:

| N        | Memory | Timestamp   | Date/Time                     |   |
|----------|--------|-------------|-------------------------------|---|
| 2048     | 256 kB | 1389306217  | Thu, 09 Jan 2014 22:23:37 GMT |   |
| 4096     | 512 kB | 1456415081  | Thu, 25 Feb 2016 15:44:41 GMT |   |
| 8192     | 1 MB   | 1506746729  | Sat, 30 Sep 2017 04:45:29 GMT |   |
...

but I am not aware of any wallet update having been pushed out recently, so the code may still run on the old schedule at the moment.