Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

Yeah, very early game MA Mictlan plays just like EA/LA because it's all about the Jaguar warriors. The problem is they lose their most cost effective researcher as well as their blood power so there isn't really anything to transition to once the Jags become obsolete. They really have no good answer to massed archers, so you probably won't live long enough to get to the point that your realize their only cross pathed/strong mage is in a kinda weird path combo with no terribly effective combat or summoning spells.

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

Great guide Baalz. I was just wondering if, with all the bless strategy going on, you usually take a dormant/imprisoned God. Obviously sacrificing becomes supremely important if you do, and I read your opinions on that. I didn't see any specific mentions of whether you go with a awake/dormant/imprisoned god, though... maybe I just missed it.

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

I should think sacrificing doesn't grow all that much in importance with an imprisoned god, since a god is only equivalent to three sacrifices or so per turn (with a low-ish dominion of 5), and your scales may be bad enough that you don't really care to push your dominion. As long as you keep your home dominion reasonably high (3 or 4 candles) you're not in any danger of a surprise dominion death. Basically, an awake pretender is worth a couple of priests and a sun priest in terms of pushing dominion.

-Max

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

And to elaborate on what Max said- buying some extra candles with the points you save on a non-awake pretender will also counteract the loss of your pretender's dominion spread. Mictlan has a slave income from their capital for a reason, you're expected to sacrifice from turn 2.

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

I think each sacrifice causes a temple check, and temple checks are only as effective as your starting dominion. Mictlan needs the recruitable sacreds in any case. So I wouldn't start with a Dominion less than 8 (unless I click on the wrong Pretender http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif). You can get a F9B4D4?1 Dom9 sleeping Smoking Mirror with usable scales, eg:

Magic: Fire 9 Earth 1 Death 4 Blood 4
Dominion 9
Scales: Turmoil 3 Sloth 3 Heat 2 Growth 3 Fortune 3 Drain 2
Dormant

This lets you hire 9 jag warriors and an H2 priest every turn (for the research, H1 will not cut it with drain until you can make skulls), assuming you make your scout a prophet and patrol with your tribal king on turn 1. Jags plus your starting army is enough to take indy 5s.

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

Another strategy is to completely trash your scales and get a good bless and a powerful SC pretender such as:
Moloch
Dominion 9
F9W9B3(or B4 and luck 2)
Turmoil 3
Sloth 3
Heat 3(it dosnt spread that fast)
Luck 3
Drain 2
Imprisoned

When your god breaks out you get a 55 health(0 dom province), strength 18, 15 protection(unarmoured), 24 attack, 22 defence(unequipped), fear causing flyer with awe, a heat aura and full slots and decent buffing paths(fireshield, phoenix pyre, quicken self, breath o' winter) and good combat paths(F9/W9).
Your scales suck and will probably cause you not to be too great very early on(until your tough sacreds get up to speed) or very late on(where your moloch gets blown off the battlefield as soon as he appears) but it can be fun to play, particularly for someonce such as myself who loves SCs.

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

I'd like to second Baalz's recommendation for taking a magic 1 scale with Mictlan. Given the incredible utility of their little mage-priests it's a huge waste not to leverage their research potential by giving them some magic-scale loving, and especially by avoiding the drain hit.

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

The thing you have to remember about Mictlan is `it's all about the bless'. If you take a dominion 7 or greater and a good blessing you'll be recruiting a force every turn that can take out up to medium strength indies. Taking an imprisoned pretender will usually allow you to get a second (or third) blessing, or at least an extra fourth level bless. Because the benefit of extra blessings is so drastic (a dual bless is often more than twice as good as a single bless) every ounce you can squeeze into it really pays off. Conversely you should already be expanding fast enough that an awake pretender won't help that much (with a high domain score don't worry about the dominion spread). I generally take an imprisoned immobile pretender, rely on jags for early expansion, then ice/arch devils as a mid game answer to other's imprisoned combat pretenders.

Honestly, if you want to trash your scales go with a triple bless...its much better than a tough pretender. The bang for the buck of a 20 gp triple blessed jag is pretty ridiculous, once you get three castles up there isn't much that can hold you off until research gets pretty far along.

On the magic/drain scale I have had some success taking drain and piggybacking off of the inevitable magic-1 neighbor and managing my dominion growth, but honestly this adds a lot of micro and inefficiency as you're shuttling mages around all the time, plus obviously theres some risks.

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

This is something I didn't know until I played for a long time.

No matter what the current scales read in any given province. You get NO benefit, at all, from any positive scales if you don't have at least one point of positive dominion there (you only get the bad ones). So if you opponent had +3 magic scales, and you move all your combat mages into their newly conquered capital to research, you will only get their regular research rate.

That said, if you conquer a province, and get one white candle in it, you can use their scales for as long as they remain, though the further the scales are from your own, the quicker they shift.

Jazzepi

Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
 

True. However, if your scales are heavily negative (e.g. drain-3 dominion), you benefit from hostile magic-3 dominions in the sense that you're at least not taking any penalty to research. If you've totally trashed your scales for a triple bless this could be important, especially because Mictlan can micromanage its dominion spread to avoid dominion kill and still contain its own dominion. I've never tried it, but IIRC Gandalf did this to get a quad bless with Mictlan and he reported it as being fun (which is not the same thing as effective, because we all know Gandalf is crazy and doesn't optimize for effectiveness).

-Max