Re: Bandar Log advice
 

Grab four elephants in the beginning with your starting money, and those should last you forever as long as you protect them correctly. Hold / Attack against cavalry, straight up rush everyone else. This is assuming indie provinces are on 5 as normal, and not buffed up. That's what I did in my current game and I had no problem expanding really quickly. As for pretender, I took an awake rainbow pretender to make sure i could find enough gems to summon awesome stuff and decent scales (luck especially) to make things a bit easier.

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

Haha, I hate misfortune but as long as you took some Order you shouldn't hurt too bad. You did take Order right??

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

Expect to take your first province on turn 3. Four white ones, your crap army, and your Prophet smiting can take a tribal province(you will lose a ton of your crap army and some of the white ones). For tougher provinces, ten white ones is a recipe for indie battles with 0 losses (avoid barbarians and elephants which need masses of archers, and use screens of markata for calvary).

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

K, I'm curious: why Order0 and Growth3 instead of other way around? And I assume that build is imprisoned instead of sleeping?

BL starting army is full of archers. You don't need that many sacreds to hold the line if you choose your first battles carefully. I've managed to attack with first turn's recruits on Sloth1, maybe with Sloth3 you could wait a turn more. Or not.

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

Misfortune 2's only real problem is no free gem events from luck and barbarian attacks. The attacks are aren't a big deal as long as you keep an archer army around home for that.

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

Mmm, yes. Imprisoned, not sleeping.

Growth is a better income for games that last longer than 30 turns. Also, bandar eat a lot of supplies, so the Growth is necessary.

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

I just tried out the E9N9 bless and am quite pleased with the results thus far. However, misfortune plain scares me. What about turmoil 3 sloth 3 heat 3 growth 3 luck 1 magic 1 instead?

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

It's actually not as difficult as you'd think to bootstrap into blood. There's two components to blood-hunting cost, the cost of the units doing the blood-hunting and the reduced income from unrest/reduced taxation. An unsuccessful bloodhunt causes d6-1 unrest, a successful one causes IIRC d(number of blood slaves found x3 plus 4) unrest. In most cases a successful bloodhunter will get 4-5 bloodslaves and cause ~10 unrest, so you can support ~3 bloodhunters in a 5000-pop province indefinitely by turning taxes down to 0. You can support 8 or 9 scouts blood-hunting (poorly) in that province. The scouts will produce only 1/6 as many blood slaves as the real blood hunters, but you can probably get enough blood slaves to forge into Bloodstones or something. I don't know if you can get enough to support Kailasa's national summons.

-Max

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

The heavy turmoil cuts into income pretty fiercely, and after some experimenting I've found that it tends to eat you up slowly.

I wouldn't be afraid of Misfortune, as long as you avoid Misfortune 3.

Re: Bandar Log advice
 

I habitually take Order-3 Misfortune-3 in SP. I doubt you'll hate Misfortune-2 at all if you have more than 30 provinces (bad events don't scale with empire size). It doesn't stop me from getting good events (I got the 1500 gold event in a Misfortune-3 province last night and I commonly get gem events). With Misfortune-2 but no order events will be slightly more frequent but more often good. The key thing is to have PD good enough to beat barbarian attacks (forget about beating the knight attacks, just clean them out later or leave them alone). In some games I suffer about 1 barbarian attack per turn, in others (current one as MA Ashdod) I've had only a couple in 30 turns. I'm not sure why.

-Max