Re: Paths of Blood
 

Since losing ethereality i would say that no, vampires arent worth it. LA Ulms vampire counts(possibly with a few lords) can do some fun things with magic but generally there are just far better things to do with your slaves.

EA Lanka and EA Mictlan are your best bets for EA blood(with pangaea, abysia and the 3 'heims also having access to it).
MA Abysia is probably the main blood nation around but again, the 'heims also have a bit of blood.
LA Blood comes back with a vengance with the nations of Mictlan, Ulm, Abysia, Marignon, Utgard and Midgard(i would rank them in that order) all using its powers.

Re: Paths of Blood
 

Lanka is a very heavy blood using nation. Between having many recruitable mages with blood out of the box and they also have many national blood summons as well.

Re: Paths of Blood
 

Playing Lanka without blood is like typing without hands - possible but why the hell would you want to? Almost all their mages(a 110 gold, non-capitol, 6rp mage being the exception) have blood magic, they have great recruitable and summonable sacreds(earth and nature helps recruitables, summons and mages) and extremely powerful thug/SC national summons(and great recruitable blood hunters).

Re: Paths of Blood
 

I sort of disagree. If you game is reasonably large and you get started early enough or find blood indy mages you can certainly use blood to supplement your existing magic paths in the late game. In the early and mid games it won't pay out, but in the late game it will be handy to have.

Re: Paths of Blood
 

The interesting thing about LA Ulm is that it's the only blood nation that can rely on summoned blood hunters. Allowing it to bootstrap itself, once it starts getting blood.
It's recruitable blood mages aren't to expensive for hunting, but midgame, the Counts are cheap, no support blood hunters.
And with lots of freespawn chaff, you should be able to trash you're economy.

I've never actually tried this mind you.

Re: Paths of Blood
 

Generally speaking of course, theres exception to everything. You must realise that you are giving up other stuff to research blood and getting a blood economy going. As someone previosuly mentioned the key is finding or having access to cheap blood mages.

Re: Paths of Blood
 

I agree with Velusion, if I find indie blood mages I pretty much *ALWAYS* get a little blood slave flow going, and even without I sometimes try and do it the hard way (blood hunting with scouts to get enough to empower). Playing with just a little blood is much different than playing a blood nation, but with 3, blood-2 hunters in a province (or blood-1 with a sanguine rod) you'll average 16 blood slaves per month. If you can manage to squeak out two of these, you'll pile up almost a hundred slaves every three turns, but even with just 3 blood hunters you'll still pull in a couple hundred blood slaves a year for a small impact to your gold income. Just do whatever you're gonna do without blood, then when you're ready you've got more than enough slaves to empower a mage a couple times and still cast/forge something useful.

Here's a couple real nice things that you can get with just a little blood on the side.

Take a nation with a forge bonus like MA Ulm or LA Caelum and crank out half priced blood stones. After whatever empowering you need you can forge 2 blood stones per turn with the income from one province of blood hunters. Not bad for a side strategy.

Forge boots of youth for your painfully old, yet indispensable mages.

How about black hearts for some really wicked assassin possibilities.

You'll have the income to summon a couple Ice/Arch Devils a year if you've got the research to spare for blood. Nothing to base a whole strategy around, but as a side bonus it's hard to beat.

Re: Paths of Blood
 

In Single Player, which is mostly what I play, I usually go for a little bit of blood if the nation has access to some of it, like MA Jotuns, LA Vaetti, Pangaea, Jomon broken etc.

In multiplayer I'd still be playing for fun rather than to go all out for the win, so I still might use blood as a secondary magic path. I just wish low level blood was a bit better to encourage some relatively minor use of it for nations that aren't primarily blood.

Re: Paths of Blood
 

Aye. Lanka was the 2nd nation I played where I went deep into blood magic (Abysia was my first try at heavy blood use), and they are excellent at it. The national summons can get really nasty (Devatas, Mandahas, etc), and you only need small amounts of death/nature/earth on top of a strong blood magic core for these guys and the standard blood spells (I love Infernal Crusade).

Re: Paths of Blood
 

Infernal Crusade is a very, very nice spell. Heavy cavalry with good stats, resistances and fear are just too good to pass up in most cases.