Re: Blood SCs
 

JonBrave,

I've see the same difference between blood and non-blood casters and "gem" usage. I assume this is because the non-blood castors fatigue out before depleting their gem stockpile while blood mages cast Reinvigoration to allow themselves to keep casting. I haven't really watched that closely (or read the logs) to determine if this is correct.

Re: Blood SCs
 

I was mostly just referring to the idea of blood magic, and how carrying around a bunch of slaves with you to cast a single spell would be unwieldy in the setting.

And also because blood slaves are, I think, vulnerable. What happens if your caster is an Abysian warlock or has a stronger aura of another sort? Bye bye, blood slaves.

Re: Blood SCs
 

After I posted I wondered too whether that might well be a factor.

While talking about the "Summon Imps" my blood mages seem to like, what are imps for, what do they do well, and how can I help them?

Re: Blood SCs
 

True, the difficulty of employing blood magic on the battlefield without killing your own blood slaves is one of the significant challenges of playing Abysia. They also burn indy recruits and nearly all summons and have horrible magic diversity, nothing but fire mages from non-cap forts. And yet, EA Abysia is one of my 2 most favorite non-mod nations. Go figure.


As lab summons, imps' bread and butter is the removal of poorly armored units from the battlefield, such as archers or mage communes. If they go hoof to toe with infantry, they are generally toast. Non-fire area affect spells are not their friend either.

When I am concerned about keeping them alive, my preference is to mix them with something beefier to demand the attention from whatever they are fighting. Flying thugs are the best. But, devils work OK too.

They also make effective, 0 upkeep patrollers for blood hunting. Especially nice is that they don't die when patrolling for EA Abysia and an enemy scout discovery triggers a battle where they mix with that nation's heat aura radiating PD.

The main utility of the battlefield spell, Summon Imps, in my practice is to tie up an assassin so the mage has a few turns to take him down with Blood Burst or another attack spell. When used via AI, I find it generally to be a means to finish off any leftover blood slaves so you have to replenish before the next fight. Just hope you don't have two battles the same turn.

Re: Blood SCs
 

I assume the reason is that blood casters don't have much else to do.
In other paths, even if you have gems, there are likely to be a bunch of other spells you can cast that don't use any. Almost all blood spells use slaves. Since the mage will try to cast every turn, the Blood mage will probably use slaves every turn while the other mages will find something else to do.

Re: Blood SCs
 

This is hardly a large issue with proper spacing.

Re: Blood SCs
 

You can't really keep your warlock away from your slaves, though. Or your warlock's bodyguard.

Re: Blood SCs
 

One warlock's effect doesn't really matter.

Re: Blood SCs
 

Imps are great decoy for drawing enemy evocations away from your real troops. They have good def, so trampling them isn`t that easy. And, as all demons, they love Darkness.

Re: Blood SCs
 

I was only talking of this: not choice imp summons but, exactly as you say, the fact that on the battlefield my blood mages like to get to casting this. So given that I'd like to understand what to make of them, if I can.

@thejeff
[It's not so easy to quote different posts here!]
Precisely as you say, gem mages can do useful stuff without using gems, but there are very few blood spells available which don't use slaves. Which I guess means (which you already knew!) that you have to be that much more careful about scripts, slave allocation & location with blood mages.