To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

I have been playing a couple of games to familiarise my self with the costs and benefits of Blood Magic as the core strategic spell path. My question to those who have experience at both using Blood Magic and having it used on them is: What are it’s strengths and weaknesses?

Some that jump to mind (please feel free to expand on or tear these apart) are:

Strengths:
1. Accessibility of Slaves over Gems: Unlike Gems where you can luck out in finding sufficient of a particular type on which your strategy relies on, Blood slaves can be found easily in any province with population of greater than 8k.
2. Duel Purpose School: The Blood Magic research path has spells that are useful in both battle and as ritual casting – though the ritual ones are why I would follow it.
3. Versatility of troops available through Blood: You have fast flying troops, solid front line troops and host of top quality commanders and spell casters available to be summoned.
4. Maintenance Costs: Nearly all the troops summoned have no maintenance cost.

Weaknesses:
1. Opportunity cost of income: When drawing Blood slaves from a province you effectively write off any income that you would other wise receive. In order to keep unrest low you need to drop tax to zero (or have unrest rise to the point that you generate no income from the province any way).
2. Opportunity cost or research: While your mages are happily rounding up slaves for the slaughter in the fields, they are not in the labs developing new spells.
3. Cost of maintaining & defending Blood Slave factories: The maintenance cost of the mages, any defences needed to keep them safe and infrastructure (lab and possibly castle) in each province you farm for Blood Slaves.

I would especially like to hear from players that have used the school to devastating effect – or had it used to devastate them. Any suggestions on its best use or ways to counter it are also sought.

Regards,
Goblin.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

First off, I have to say I have yet to see anyone make good use of a blood battlefield spell apart from summon imps, blood vengeance and leech(and the latter two quite rarely). That aside, blood magic is extremely potent for summons and items. With non-blood nations, I almost always set mages with blood randoms to hunting. The most common uses for blood include:

*Lifedraining weapons
*Soul contracts for free devil generation
*Lifelong protection pacts for assassin and general battlefield use
*Fiends of darkness for all around great troops, and stealth raids
*Gaining access to other paths of magic, and great SCs through the demon commanders

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Hellfire is eminently usable; as well, hellbind heart has it's specialty use, and reinvigoration as well. Generally, however, it is very weak in battlefield magic, and the Sabbath circle is completely useless base game.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Forgot about hellbind heart, hellfire is only good in Zen's mod.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Both Soul Contracts and Lifelong Protection give the holder a Horror Mark - as such I have avoided these. How does one protect against a horror attack (infact - what actually happens - is it an assassination or a general battle)? For that matter how likely is it to occur?

Goblin.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Yes, they both do that, but it is more than worth it. The horror attacks work like assassinations, and with the contract marks they are quite rare. You will usually be putting them on cheap units like scouts anyway, so all you will have lost in the event of being unlucky would be the forgeing cost.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Thanks Quantum,

I will give that a try and see how it goes (once I save up 80 slaves to forge the item). Any suggestions on the best Slave harvesting strategy? I currently look to use low level mage's with a Sanguine Dousing Rod, with a max of 3 in a province.

Goblin.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

If you are using the soul contract strategy, you should at the least have a dwarven hammer to shave 20 slaves off of the cost. As for hunting strategy, depends very much on nation and other conditions. As a rule, always use SDRs on your hunters if you have construction 4, though it is more important for level 1 blood mages than higher levels. I consider any province of 4000 or so pop fair hunting game, particularly if I don't have to shuffle mages from where I recruit them. As for how many in one provinse, I tend to intensly hunt a few provinces with 3-6 mages, and drop taxes and patrol. For long term with a growth scale spreading the hunters out is probably a better idea.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Blood battle spells can still be used I think, when you have your back behind the wall and must deal as much damage as possible, since you are going to bite the dust before long; other than that, I wouldn't make the majority of them the cornerstone of any strategy. Blood has two spells increasing the strength of troops, and it's not particularly expensive as far as battle enchantments go, so you might wish to try using these spells (especially the demon variety, available very early). Blood also has a massive battle empowerment spell (+2 to all magic paths, if memory serves), but has the unfortunate tendency to bring in horrors, and only a Blood 4/Blood 5 mage will be comfortable using it. Still, if the horrors aren't too bad, it might work for a mage having a lot of random magic.

Other than that, Blood is a magic school you can usually get without a lot of work, unlike virtually every other magic school out here (Water being the other easy one to build from scratch). If you can get mages with a random pick in Blood, you can start up a very nice Blood economy at once, even with a low amount of blood hunters. Getting to level 2 will only cost you 30 slaves, and then you should try to reach level 3 by various means; once you are at level 3, you should have all your Blood needs covered. Besides, you can empower a mundane mage in Blood at a fairly low cost (50 slaves is easier to come by than 50 gems), allowing you to get all those summoning spells and to join in the fun.

In short, I would always try to build up a blood economy, unless playing Ashen Empire or something to that effect; lifedraining alone is good enough to warrant the expenses, and I would rather keep my Death gems (Wraith Swords, the other only option in town for lifedrain) for other purposes. Add to that all the other benefits of Blood, and you have a pretty strong case.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

In Vanilla the best way to bloodhunt is to clamhoard and wish for blood.
As a side effect of this strat you will search your lands with accashic record, thus if there are any sites with boni to alteration or blood you will find them and they will further speed up your rapid growth of power in lategame.

For this strat Ryleh and Pythium are very well suited.
You won't have blood till something like turn 60 but after that you will swim in blood. With 4 wishers you get e.g. 1000 blood per turn.

For conventional blood hunting i now like mictlan most. Just do gather 200-300 slaves, patrol a 20k population province and hunt with 15-20 priests with sdrs.
After something like 20-30 turns this province will be reduced from 20000 to something like 3000 population and you have to move on but this way you have only to hunt in a few provinces and not in many.
Mictlan is basically the only blood nation which can do this kind of patrol+bloodhunt.
If you also do a bless strat you can use your money on the excellent mictlan sacred troops.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

I am replying to this thread from a completely different meaning of you original question - "To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic".

My answer will also tied to the "Dom III Wishlist" so I should post it there also.

I'll like to see many more elements of the game to be tied to an "Good and Evil" scale. For example, if you were at the extreme evil end of the scale it would benefit your Death and Blood magic but would hamper your Nature and Air. There could even be specific Good and Evil units, items and spells.

So to answer your question, you would use Blood if your were tending toward evil, but not toward good.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Oh, no, not that again... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Venture in this thread if you dare...

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Posted also on the Dom III wishlist:

I see what you mean. Okay, skip Good\holy and Evil\unholy. But relationships between related magic which provide mutual benefits is all I was looking for.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

The Theological aspects although interesting where not really what I was after (this being a strategy game not a role playing one). Thank you Baron and Alneyan for keeping it on track.

I hadn't looked at wish for generating Blood - but then I have not played a game that has reached turn 60 yet (major Newbie). With the mod's following a claim strategy seems to be quite hard (2W and 2S needed) - so the 15-20 mages with SDRs may be the way to go. However with a few growth scales the population depletion should be minimal...?

200-300 slaves a turn by turn 40 should provide for a very strong industrial base to fight any nation. The thought of a military campaign assisted by up to 10 Hordes from Hell being dumped across your poor victims empire each turn should shatter their economy (Gems and Gold), plus make movement almost impossible except for flyers.

So far all the comments have been on how strong Blood is - it lacks battlefield magic is a given, but what are effective strategies against it (and it’s hellish hordes). One that jumps to mind is being able to identify the Blood Factories and shut them down (Fires from afar and the like). Any other ideas?

Goblin.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Well, air battlemagic is good againt all the summons but storm demons (expect demon SCs to be prpared with lightning res., though).

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Vs. the Blood SCs herald lances can work very well. You need a bit blood forging capabilities on your own but then golems with ring of warrior, burning pearl, herald lances and some other items are surprisingly effective vs. blood scs and will also kill lots of devils and the like too.

Vs. the normal devil hordes and the like staff of storms + air magic is very effective as qm said.

Horde from hell raiding can be very effective. As soon as the enemy has a few good units in each province though horde from hell alone won't be enough. The imps have very bad morale so as soon as a few die the rest routs.
Normally 3-5 dead imps from the 25 imps you get with horde from hell are enough and they rout.

1 Sauromancer spamming undeads in every province + a few points of pd should be enough to defend vs. horde from hell 90% of the time.
Horde from hell is available quite early though and thus difficult to counter. Many nations/buildups can get crippled if you rush them with horde from hell spamming imho.

Maybe QM has some good ideas how to defend vs. early horde from hell raiding, i have no good ideas for that apart from playing ryleh/atlantis http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

Well, Ermor and CW pan are pretty good at defending againt it too. Apart from that, just rapid response forces and good guessing, or strike the blood hunting gounds.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

So the answer is have undead (no maintenance and no moral checks) or wipe out their capacity to produce enough blood.
I have noticed that the AI has a fondness for suicide battle groups - ie an army will attack a new place each turn, moving deeper into your territory. This is usually quickly fixed but often blood hunting grounds come under threat. Is the AI actually trying to capture these or just taking an offensive strategy?

Goblin.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

personally, i don't find hordes from hell to be too much trouble - they route very easily, and good national pd can often stop one; as well parachuting response squads (air or astral) or just some small roving intercepting bands can work.

if your opponent is using all his blood on hordes, I'd say that's often a good thing as this means he's getting fewer of the blood SC's.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

I'm almost positive it is random agresssion.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

AI has strategy?

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

In the few times that I played a Blood nation, I preferred to cast Hordes from Hell on a friendly province. That gives me a cheap flying commander who can carry items, ferry troops, and lead a better flying army than the Imps. Even if you just want to raid with the initial army, at least you can script them at the cost of a delay of one turn.

Re: To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic
 

My first use of a horde from Hell was deep into enemy territory - I didn't realise that once the battle was over you kept the units, so they died due to no retreat options. Since then I have used them against lightly defended independants and national provinces with the aim being that if they take it well and good - if they don't, they retreat and I have a Deamon and 10-20 Imps.

After a few turns I have a decent flying army able to take on stronger provinces. The Imps are not great troops but there mobility and quick mobilisation results in them having a significant impact. The fact that they are expendable is almost an advantage...

Goblin.