Re: blood noob question
 

Yeah, the Abyssian demon breds are one of my favorite units. Another cool trick is that since they are also priests, can fly, and Abyssia can blood sacrifice (in addition to it's dominion spreading normally), if you have the foresight to take a high dominion (which helps push your heat anyway) you can fly in 3 or 4 blood slave laden demon bred to strategic locations (with jade knives if you've managed to get some nature magic), each build a temple and start blood sacrificing and in 3 or 4 turns you've pushed your dominion so aggressively and unexpectedly that it can be a quick kill if your opponent has a low dominion. Hmmm, as I write that I'm now not sure if that's true of EA Abyssia, or if the MA demon bred are different. Anyway, that strategy works well for MA for sure.

With EA/LA Mictlan you can do something similar with their national summons. I don't remember if one of the cheaper summons has priestly powers and flying, but that bad boy (sorry don't remember the name) at blood-7 is a level 3 priest and can forge his own jade dagger, as well as pretty effectively defend the temple all by himeself while auto-generating summons every turn. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: blood noob question
 

Unfortunately, EA Abyssia Rhuaxians aren't flyers. They are powerful priests though. The demonbreds are rather weak, but their commanders are fine assassins. I'm going to create a mod which adds some more national summons to Abyssia, and maybe a couple of these will priests.

Re: blood noob question
 

I don't think any of the Mictlan summons have Holy 3; at least in MA, they Blood-7 one (requires B4 to cast, costs 101 slaves, autogenerates sacred flying demons) is only Holy 2 (pretty important since it's the difference between Blessing and Divine Blessing).

At least in SP, I've found that a pretender with Blood can be used to turn MA Mictlan into a decent Blood nation, even though none of the national mages have Blood (OK, one of them has something like 2.5% chance of having B1). And, you get the benefit of normal dominion spread, plenty of Sacred summons and national units; yummy!

Re: blood noob question
 

Ah yes, that's what I get for posting from memory. Assuming the manual is correct, the blood-7 summon (Onaqui) is just holy-1 (he's blood-3 which is what had me confused), but on the up side as I mentioned he can definately have a jade dagger for this strategy, wheras that can be pretty hard for Abyssia to come by. The Onaqui is just all kinds of awesome for a number of other reasons to. They're flying, stealthy badasses who make great leaders for your demonic troops (they can cast blood lust and blessing among other things...if you've got a blood magic pretender that's plus 8 or 9 to strength for all your holy demons). Even better I find they are great to equip with a brazen vessel and armor of twisted thorns, then plop them down on one of the blood summoning sites you've hopefully found by the time you can summon them and have them cast ritual of the five gates every month. When you figure in their auto summons if you put 2 or 3 of them doing this you get a ready bake, diverse demon army every other turn for about 80 blood slaves (depending on what, if any, blood site you've found).

Re: blood noob question
 

I like having the Onaquis hang back and just research or summon. The auto generate sacred bats things is awesome, especially if you park them in high dominion. Backed by a nice bless (say F9) those bats are nasty and they an ugly surprise to someone who wasn't expecting Mictlan to show up with flying sacreds.

I've won some big battles I shouldn't have in MP because I had a squad of those bats set to hold and attack archers. They got in the backfield, ate all the archers, and then ate all the commanders for routeriffic goodness http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: blood noob question
 

Have I misunderstood something, but I am curious why manual (and some other sources) suggests death scale for Mictlan? Should't that run you of stock in somepoint?

Re: blood noob question
 

I don't think death scale makes much difference for blood hunting unless you're in a really long/big game.

The reason you might well take it is to drop a really heavy bless on micts crazy sacreds.

Re: blood noob question
 

Just one point: playing Mictlan, turn 47 (not so long) a province near my capitol with death 3 from a magic site has gone from >6k to 3k people wihtout events, patrolling or overtaxing. This converts a suitable blood hunt province to an unusable one.

Re: blood noob question
 

You are not expanding fast enough http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

If you take more province pop each turn than you lose by scales and blood hunt you are good. Compensate unlucky events with another players capital. That should do the trick http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: blood noob question
 

Good tip! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif