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Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
This is a guide to early era Mictlan, though much of it is also applicable to late era. Middle era Mictlan is a nation best reserved for sado-masochists as they loose all the best things about being Mictlan. (edit: MA Mictlan has since been overhauled and now has their own charm)
The philosophy needed to successfully play Mictlan is different from most of the other nations. First and foremost Mictlan is the most powerful blood nation in the game, but to properly leverage this strength takes a well managed strategy of balance and planning. Mictlan’s blood economy will drive a lot of power in the mid and late game and fortunately cheap and effective holy units carry them through the early game. First, let take a look at the national units available to recruit. Warrior – The warriors come with either slings or javelins and are either lightly or not armored. They are not very effective in combat, though they are the only nationally recruitable archers. Clearly Mictlan will not win any archery contests, and generally these units will only be used as chaff. The unarmored warriors are, however, easily massable and can be effective against opponents who have a weakness to archery (slow infantry with no shields and light armor). They can also be an effective vehicle for the flaming arrows spell, though their range is not great. Feathered warrior – Expensive and not very useful. He does carry a standard though, so I guess you could use him if you’re having moral problems. Generally you won’t be though, as the bulk of your army will be blessed sacred troops. Jaguar Warrior – The Jaguar Warrior is the backbone of the Mictlan recruitable army. On first glance he may not strike you as anything special, but he has a couple of traits which make him shine. First and foremost is the fact that he is holy, and this is the reason a good bless is critical for Mictlan. His sword is pretty good, dealing 18 damage once you factor in his strength, and this damage output can be increased with a good bless. He also will transform into a were-jaguar when critically wounded. This is really effective at giving the jaguar warriors some staying power because it effectively gives them a lot more hit points than most humans and makes it impossible to kill them with a single hit regardless of how much damage is done. When in were-jaguar form they have three attacks, which is a very nice thing to have with a good blessing. Finally, they not only are practically free from a resource point of view, they are also recruitable from any castle, not just your capital. Their effectiveness, price, and ease to mass make the Jaguar warrior the mainstay of Mictlan’s early game army. What they lack in durability of some of the other nations high caliber sacred troops, they make up for it in numbers. One bonus not a lot of people know about is that when shape shifting involuntarily (as the Jaguar Warriors do when critically wounded, and at the end of combat when the shift back to human) there is a pretty good chance to heal afflictions. Eagle Warrior – An excellent supplement to the jaguar warrior core of your army, Eagle Warriors give Mictlan a good answer to the Jaguar Warrior’s main weaknesses, archers and mages. Unfortunately the Eagle Warriors are only recruitable in your capital, and are holy, so you will have a limited amount of them. Also, they clearly illustrate by contrast the survivability advantage that the Jaguar Warriors shape change gives them. Eagle Warriors are effective, but they have a high attrition rate which compounds the difficulty in recruiting and relegates the Eagle Warriors to a supporting role to be rolled out mostly just for decisive battles. Sun Warrior – another capital only holy warrior that is eclipsed by the jaguar warrior in almost every way. They are much more resource intensive than the jaguar warriors, and their extra armor doesn’t really give them any more survivability because of the jaguar warrior’s extra hit points. To top it off, they’re much slower than the Jaguar warriors. Now, the commanders: Scout- nothing special, he scouts Tribal King – the only non-mage commander, useful for shuttling troops around, though you’ll usually need a priest to bless your holy troops so your priest kings will do most of the leading of real troops. Can also levy slaves, though the slaves are mostly useless in combat other than as arrow catchers. Mictlan Priest – this inauspicious guy is actually in my opinion the best unit it Miclan’s arsenal. Why do I make such a claim about such a small mage? I’ll explain in detail below, but this is the engine to Mictlan’s blood economy, and a darn good one. They are very cost effective researchers (particularly with a magic scale). They only cost 60 gold and are holy so are cheap to maintain, and are recruitable everywhere. You’ll want to amass as many of these guys as you can, you can never have enough. On top of blood hunting and researching, they are useful in a several situations because you’ll have so many of them. Calling back a god is a sinch. Hoards of undead, no problem. Lots of archers giving your jaguar warriors grief? Send in a dozen Mictlan Priests scripted to cast summon imp a couple times. Use them as Sabbath slaves for your bigger mages. I just love these little guys. Nahaulli – A versatile supplement to Mictlan’s early game, when they shape change into a turkey they have a mesmerize attack which (if they fail a mage resistance check) causes an enemy to attack the closest person, friend or foe. This can be a surprisingly effective supplement to early expansion, and the fact that they can fly means you can easily shift them around to whatever army needs the most help. Really their biggest drawback is if you’re recruiting a Nahaulli you’re not recruiting a Mictlan Priest. You’ll want to script them to “stay behind troops”, if you give them the “fire” order they’ll advance into melee when their ammo of 5 is expended! These guys are a lot more useful if you research alteration a bit so they can buff your units’ protection, but this comes as an unfavorable tradeoff to some other critical research that needs to be done early. Priest King – High leadership and able to bless your sacred troops, this will be the general for most of your human troops. He’s the only real mage you’ve got that isn’t old. Same as the Nahaulli, alteration lets him give your lightly armored troops a good bit more staying power. Rain Priest – This is your water mage you’ll use to do water mage thingies. Moon Priest – This is your astral mage, use him to do astral thingies. Sun Priest – kinda expensive and prone to disease because he’s old, but he does several important things for you. He’s a level three priest, so he can throw down a divine blessing which is nice when you start having larger armies of holy units. He’s also a level three blood mage, so just one empowering will allow him to forge brazen vessels, which unlocks all the blood you need (give the brazen vessel to a priest king to forge armor of twisted thorns, or to another sun priest if this one gets diseased and dies, or to a rain priest to summon ice devils, or a moon priest to send horrors, or give it to this one to get a level 5 blood mage which lets you cast ritual of the five gates and infernal disease). Briefly, some of the more important summons: Beast Bats – summonable by all those Mictlan Priests so you can get a bunch of them in a hurry if you need to. Holy so they can take advantage of your nice blessing. Jaguar Fiends – What’s not to like? Flying, sacred, fairly cheap and pretty wicked when properly blessed. Only downside is your only option to summon them is the expensive sun priest or one of the rare Mictlan Priests who get a random pick in fire so you’ll probably have trouble getting too many. Tzitzzimitl – kinda hard to mass, but very effective artillery versus high protection troops. Tlahuelpuchi – AWESOME assassin, any of your big priests can summon, and not too expensive so you can crap out a bunch real quick if you see somebody who doesn’t yet appreciate the benefits of bodyguards. They fly, assassinate, and are blood mages, so give them a couple blood slaves and script (depending on research and situation) summon imp, hellbind heart, or leech. Onaqui – very good support summon. Let your Ice/Arch devils be the front line damage dealers, this guy should sit at home doing magely things and auto-summoning beast bats. Hoard from Hell – some nations have real difficulty dealing with the imps and you can summon them remotely wherever there isn’t much defense. For your pretender design, here are the things you want to keep in mind. Taking sloth is as close to a no-brainer as you get in Dominions as Mictlan really doesn’t have much use for resources. Once you start blood hunting you’ll be setting the tax rate in many of your provinces to 0% to keep the unrest in check, so taking turmoil scales will affect you less than other nations. Taking a single scale in magic is a pretty effective way to make use of those Mictlan Priests. Luck is usually a nice thing to take when you’re taking turmoil because of the synergy, and it also gives you a better chance of getting Mictlan’s national heroes which unlock magic paths you otherwise might have trouble getting. You’ll want a fairly high dominion so that you can recruit lots of holy units, and of course you’ll want to carefully consider what blessing you want. Depending on what tradeoffs you want to make you can even have a triple blessing, and don’t fail to consider the fourth level blessings (particularly fire, blood and water). Most of the blessings work well with Mictlan’s troops, though the earth blessing doesn’t do much for you because the troops are so lightly armored. Outside of blessing considerations, taking high levels of astral and blood allow some powerful blood spells, and earth is something Mictlan has a hard time getting if it’s not on their pretender. Ok, now that we’ve examined the starting lineup, let’s discuss what you’re going to do with it. With a decent bless, your holy warriors are good but their strength lies in numbers. This, combined with the fact that you’re going to want as many Mictlan Priests/ Nahaulli you can get means that you’re going to want to get additional castles as fast as possible. The philosophy you need when playing Mictlan is one of elegant minimalism, you need to consider every piece of gold you spend. Instead of recruiting units, you’ll often want to save that gold for another castle or (later) blood hunting, and this requires planning ahead. When I say that Mictlan’s holy troops rely on numbers I mean that on the scale of holy units- your army size will be a small elite army compared to more conventional armies. Always keep in mind that they are just the first stage rocket meant to get you to the real jewels, so don’t invest an inappropriate amount into them. What you really want to do is get to the blood magic as fast as possible without sacrificing the early growth of your nation. ***Blood hunting*** The thing to keep in mind when going blood hunting is that there is an opportunity cost to it– the gold you could have had if you weren’t doing it. This is quite different than other gems which are more of a bonus – there is no trade off. What this means as far as your strategy is that whenever you “convert” a province from giving you gold to giving you blood slaves you need to adjust how your economy functions. Every time you crank up your blood slave flow, you need to adjust the rest of your strategy to the lower gold flow to keep from grinding to a halt. In a practical sense, that means the more you blood hunt, the less you can recruit troops for gold. Done properly you can switch recruiting nationals for summoning demons (a pretty good trade off), but done haphazardly your economy will crash leaving you unable to support enough of an army to defend yourself. You’ll generally want to do minimal blood hunting initially, use your gold for troops and your mages for researching. Always keep in mind when you start blood hunting you’re giving something up, so don’t do it until you can get a payback greater than the cost. What this point is depends on what your strategy is, but will generally be a certain level of research in construction or blood. Also keep in mind that there is going to be a lag from when you start blood hunting to when you get that payback, so switching to blood hunting when in an intense war is a decision that takes quite a bit of thought. Another thing to keep a close eye on when you start giving your gold economy the axe is upkeep. If your upkeep is running 40% of your income you’re fine, but if you cut your gold income in half when you start blood hunting suddenly you don’t have enough gold to replace that lab that just burned down because your upkeep is 80%. Mages in particular, but don’t recruit any troops just because you’ve got the resources for it. Once you switch to blood let the demons be the workhorses. This is something you have to start managing BEFORE you start blood hunting, even if you have the gold laying around think about it before you buy every unit. This is why you want to keep most of your troops sacred, and your army size relatively small. Of course, this isn’t an either-or question, you can crank your blood up just a bit and keep some gold flowing in, but you’ve always got to keep in mind that balance. As far as where to blood hunt, basically how it boils down is that there is no difference in the blood slaves you get for any population over 5000, so blood hunting in a 10k population province will get you the same blood slaves as the 5k province, but (all other things being equal) will cost you twice as much gold. The other thing to keep in mind to is depending on your scales, and if you're patrolling to reduce unrest your population may be dropping, so if you start hunting in provinces real close to 5k you could drop under that before long and you start getting diminishing returns. Where to blood hunt depends on a couple things. Always start with the provinces closest to 5k (with no mines or other gold boosting sites) as these will be the "cheapest" blood slaves. As you start wanting more and more blood slaves, start moving up the chain to higher and higher population provinces but keep in mind each one will have a higher cost in gold than the one before it. How high you go really depends on the strategy you’re following, you’re almost always going to need some gold so this is where you need to focus on balance. If you're going for a very tight blood focus (a good strategy with Mictlan), I find that in very general terms by the time I end up putting blood hunters in the territories close to 10k population my gold income has dropped to the point that I enter more of my “blood mode” and stop really recruiting troops (including blood hunters) and instead save the little gold I get for buying mages for specific needs and building labs and temples. By that time you’ve got enough blood slaves coming in that you can get a good amount of summoning done every round to compensate. On blood hunting the provinces under 5k it’s more a question of the upkeep cost of the blood hunters because the gold income hit isn’t as much. This is where the Mictlan Priests really shine. They’re so damn cheap, I find it’s also worthwhile to put them in the 4k-5k population provinces as well, and even occasionally the sub 4k ones. You won’t get quite as many blood slaves (4/5 the blood slaves for a 4k population), but when your blood hunters cost 60 gold and are holy you’re not paying much for the blood slaves either. And again, it all depends on what your other options are, how valuable the blood slaves are to you, how easy it is to defend those blood hunters, what other territories you have, etc. The thing to keep in mind is that you’re always “paying” gold for blood slaves, you just need to decide what price you’re willing to pay. The more blood slaves you want, the more expensive they are…but getting to the point that you’re sucking in 100+ blood slaves a turn is a pretty sweet spot if you can do it while remaining stable. You’ll also need to keep in mind the protection of your blood hunters. Mictlan is very vulnerable to raiding by stealthy troops because your blood hunters are going to be spread out and not terribly effective at defending themselves unsupported. Place castles where you can, and pull your blood hunters inside them whenever you think you should to protect them. Ideally you’d like a castle on each province you’re blood hunting, but in practice that’s usually not feasible because of your restricted gold income. The 8th level blood spell Three Red Seconds is an expensive way to place castles using blood slaves instead of gold, so that may be an option in the later stages of the game. Scripting all your blood hunters to retreat from the back row will save you a lot of grief if you start getting raided. Here’s an example strategy to get your blood economy going: It’s usually a good idea to research up to construction-4 before researching blood with Mictlan. The main reason is because up until around that point your mages are more useful researching than blood hunting. You don't need any blood summons immediately because your holy troops are tough enough to deal with whatever they need to initially, and you're capitol's natural income is enough to keep you blood sacrificing at first. The nice thing about using all those Mictlan priests to research is that the very turn that you finish researching construction-4 they can all forge themselves sanguine rods (which doubles their blood hunting effectiveness). Obviously you don't have many blood slaves at that point since you haven't been blood hunting, but you can easily have at least 15 ready by that time time by limiting how much you blood sacrifice and stockpiling the blood slave income from your capitol. From that point more or less send three new blood hunters with sanguine rods out each turn (aim to have three castles at this point as well), each "squad" setting up in a new province. Drop the tax rate to 0%, and place a lab there. So, how this works out is that just as you start having blood slaves flowing in you've still got a decent chunk of mages researching (blood now), so you start hitting those good blood spells relatively soon and with blood slaves in the bank. Also, since you've hit con-4 you can forge skull mentors and/or owl quills if you've gotten one of the national heroes (quite likely if you’ve taken high luck scales). Compare this with researching straight for blood. If you do that, you've got to split your mages between research and blood hunting (no point in having spells you can't cast!) - and the blood hunters are half as effective without the sanguine rods. No owl quils or skull mentors to help you out, and you're taking an immediate hit to your gold while you're sill relying on your national troops to take out the indies. I guess you could make this work, but it seems much more of an uphill battle to me. **** Blood sacrificing **** One interesting way that Mictlan is different than any other nation is that their dominion does not spread the same way. Other nations have their dominion (mostly) spread in four ways – from their god, from their prophet, from their temples, and from their preaching priests. Of these, only domain spread from the god works for Mictlan, and obviously this only kicks in once your god is awake. This can be a bit of a disadvantage, but if you’re aware of it and manage it you can turn it into an advantage under certain circumstances. What Mictlan does have (along with a few other nations) is the ability to blood sacrifice. In order to blood sacrifice you need a priest (the more priestly the better), a temple, and some blood slaves. Your capital will give you a small blood slave income initially, it is vitally important that you immediately (turn 2) set a priest to blood sacrificing in your capital (you’ll need to give them some blood slaves initially, but they’ll restock themselves). The reason is because certain random events will decrease your dominion, and if it drops to 0 you lose! That means you definitely don’t want to sit around with the 1 dominion you start with. Also, as you start meeting other nations a very weak domain is just begging for stealth preachers/prophets/pretenders to come in and remove you from the game without spilling a drop of blood. Now, that’s the downside. The upside is Mictlan can control the flow of their dominion spread like nobody else in the game. Dominion does not spread by itself, and you should think of blood sacrificers as concentrated temples that can be turned on or off(the higher their priestly level, the more concentrated). A priest of the sun wielding a jade dagger has the effect of 5 temples…you get a lot of flexibility. See “Mictlan tactics” below for an idea on how to use this offensively. Mictlan often has crappy to very crappy scales in an effort to get a good blessing. Being able to control your dominion spread allows you (if it makes sense) to leave a portion of your empire outside your dominion. This can be a bit dangerous if you’re not careful as it usually means that someone else’s dominion will pile up in your territories, which will give you potentially several disadvantages fighting there and also make you more susceptible to someone trying to dominion kill you. If you’re careful though, you can do things like take death -3, drain -3 and move all your mages outside your dominion so they don’t suffer from it – or better yet benefit from your neighbor’s growth/magic scales. ****Mictlan tactics**** Here’s a grab bag of useful stuff Mictlan can pull. Of course there are lots of other things you can do, but here’s some of my favorites. Either take a pretender with appropriate paths, or empower a sun priest and start cranking out the soul contracts. You’ll eventually have an unstoppable flow of free spawn devils every turn. Either take a pretender with appropriate paths or empower an indie earth mage (or hellbind heart, or seduce with a succubus to get one), forge a dwarven hammer and start cranking out blood stones. It’s hard for Mictlan to get into the earth game, but they can easily become an earth powerhouse once they do by creating a huge earth gem income which doesn’t show up on the score graph (neither does blood slave income). There are several blood magic sites which give you a significant (40-60%) reduction in cost to rituals. I think a lot of people neglect searching for blood sites because they are a lot less common but just think about the impact of having a 60% discount while pulling in 100+ blood slaves per turn. It's worth some effort to look for. Summon an Onaqui, give him a brazen vessel and armor of twisted thorns. Set him to a monthly casting of ritual of the five gates. Do this 3 or 4 times depending on your blood slave flow. You’ve now got a steady flow of several different kinds of demons along with freespawning beast bats. Ice/Arch Devil SCs, you can have a whole bunch. Give an ice devil a ring of tamed lightning (and all the usual gear) and let him lead those lightning and ice fiends you’re getting from the ritual of five gates. He can run forward to whack on stuff while frost and lightning rains all around him. Reverse that with the arch devils, let the swarm of heat immune devils and demon knights go forward as he rains flaming doom down around them. Alternatively give him mad reinvigoration with items, and have him phoenix pyre his way around the battlefield virtually indestructible. Spam Rain of toads on enemy castles. Each casting raises the unrest by 40, so if you hit three at once that castle will be unable to recruit anything and take a big hit to income (perfect for the enemy capital). If you set one priest king (two if you think your enemy may try to patrol the province) to cast it every month at that point it’ll keep the castle locked down. This is very potent early on when your opponent may only have one or two castles. Follow the locking down of his castles with some hoards from hell on his high income farmlands. The combined effect from this will be a double whammy of a drastic reduction in his income, and an inability to recruit troops in his castles. The bonus is if he can’t deal with the imps they hang around and can keep taking provinces compounding the problem. Give jade daggers to 3 or 4 of your priests (the more priestly the better). Bring them to your border and have them all build temples and start blood sacrificing. As your dominion score will probably be high for recruiting sacred units the effect will be drastic, sudden and (hopefully) unexpected by your opponent. Use this to get a quick dominion kill if you see a neighbor with a weak dominion. For example, 4 priests of the sun blood sacrificing with jade daggers will have an effect similar to 20 temples, with the bonus that those 20 temples are concentrated right on your border rather than spread out. It can sure push your dominion in a hurry if you’ve got a 10 dominion score! Astral corruption, look into it. You’ll probably need your pretender to have the paths to cast it, but it’s one of those game-winner spells with the bonus that you should have enough blood slaves to make it practically un-dispellable. Make sure you forge some boots of youth for all those old dudes you’ve got running your kingdom. Mictlan province defense is mostly worthless up until 20 (though they are slingers, so they can inflict some damage on certain kinds of enemies), but every point above 20 gives you a Jaguar warrior, which will (hopefully) benefit from your righteous bless. 30-40 province defense isn’t cheap, but it does produce a credible threat with a good bless. This is certainly not going to stop a real army, but you can use it as a nasty surprise when an opponent is trying to attack your blood hunters or an apparently weaker army of yours. Plus, province defense doesn’t take any upkeep which really helps once you start blood hunting. Well, that’s all I’ve got to say about that. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Link to a similar guide to EA C'tis:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...art=1&vc=1 LA/MA R'yleh: http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...art=1&vc=1 |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Excellent Guide, Baalz. Can i put it into the dominions3 wiki ?
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Thanks man, good down to earth writeup for a Mictlan noob like myself. What do you recommend for a bless? W9 I'm assuming, but beyond that.. Fire, Nature or Blood? Maybe W9F9,N4 if swingable? I like the defensive staying power of E9W9N4, but as you said is the reinvig wasted?
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Nice start though I'm surprised you didn't mention the uber jag fiends in a Mict guide. Also, I'm not sure of the current validity of soul contracts. If I recall correctly, forge bonuses do not work on them anymore?
The "standard Mict bless" is f9w9. Usually extended by dominion controlled f9w9s9 (or air bless). You can actually get away with just a f9 IMO if you want to keep your scales. You troops still pack a punch but that's because I've never been fond of uber blesses usually. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Nothing on the Civateteo? Summonable by a Tlahuelpuchi with a skull staff/ +1 empowerment, an exceptionally good leader for non-flying demons (is undead herself, +ranks in death and blood), has ethereal/life drain/fear/sacred, and can be set to reanimate longdead to add 0 upkeep chaff to pull Banishments off your 0 upkeep demons. Not bad for 25 blood.
I might also suggest a quick detour to Conjuration 1 after Construction 4 to grab Jaguar Toads. Nahaulli can spam these guys like mad, and they are sacred poison spitting tramplers (albeit fairly ineffective ones) for 1 nature gem apiece. Very nice guide. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Sure put it on the wiki, reproduce it wherever you want.
KissBlade, I did mention the jag fiends, just didn't go into much detail as it was already running long. Aleph, I'm just not inspired by the Civateteo. By the time you get her she's competing for blood slaves against some really good stuff, and she doesn't bring much to the party. She doesn't have enough hit points to be a fighter, and doesn't have enough magic to be a good mage. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Jutrea, the thing about the Mictlan sacreds is you have to think of them much more like a brightly burning flame...they're not meant to last. No matter what you do, at the end of the day they're low protection without all that many hit points. The best defense is a good offense. Going with a earth bless is just cross purpose, and doesn't really buy you much. They don't have much encumbrance so the reinvig doesn't really help, and you're not really making a significant difference in their protection. I actually find that the astral bless is surprisingly effective at improving their staying power. The first hit is negated by the blessing, and at least one other hit is negated by the shape shifting, so you end up having to hit them many times to take them down (not easy if they've also got a water bless)...while they're wailing away at you with a huge sword quick sword. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Plus, as I mention there are some other real good reasons to take astral.
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Quote:
I agree with astral bless, twist of fate on your sacred warriors and on your sacred mage/priests really increases there surivability. Which saves you gold btw, always useful for Mictlan as Baalz points out. A S9W9 dual bless is I think on a par with F9W9. Also you have a astral lvl 9 mage with your pretender which is fantastic for the end game. The additional MR also helps your sacreds against magic later on and the shroud of the battle saint becomes a real bargain for 5S gems, combo it with boots of stone to get high protection as well, obviously difficult to do with a lack of earth but you never know. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Oh yeah, forgot to mention the MR buff really helps out the sacred demons more than the jaguar warriors.
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
I do not use the blood path, and old age is not an issue with Pangaea, my flavor of the month race, but blood can be used to reduce old age. Is that not a viable option for Micitans priests that get old?
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Re: Jaguar Warrior
So does anyone know how many HP these bad boys have? By this I mean the following: 1. How much damage must they sustain for the transformation? Does it only happen on death? 2. Does any of the damage he had before the transformation go to the were-jaguar? I'm not 100% sure how it work, but I have a suspicion. They seem to have a tremendous number of HP. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Nice, I'll try these guys out after my flav of the month nation, Pangaea as well, gets stale.
Is Mict considered a face hugger? Any staying power in a long game? Everything else being equal, etc,etc in general. There are some interesting convos going on the "heavy bless strat" thread and Mict got mentioned a bit. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
I would think Mictlan would be both a facehugger and a longterm threat - the triple bless Mictlan more of a pure facehugger, but the right dual bless (LA Mictlan with Fountain for F9S9 or W9S9) or 1 major/multiple minor bless strats (Smoking Mirror is a great F9/W4/B4/S4/D2 base) can definitely leave a lot of room for Mictlan to take beneficial scales (ideal IMO is sloth/turmoil/luck 3 growth 2 magic 1). As Mictlan is the premiere blood nation, you can in a sense "buy off" some of your bad money scales by switching over to blood. Your random luck income will continue to roll in, you won't hunt in provinces which pick up good mines, and the opportunity cost for each individual blood slave is less (since the province is producing less gold through taxation than in an order setup and still has reasonable chances to give hundreds or thousands in random events).
Blood is an exceptionally strong long term strategy in my mind because it allows you to convert your gold income (generally used to buy troops with upkeep costs) into blood income (used to summon demons without upkeep costs). The longer the game lasts, the more your army size and power increases. Finally, as mentioned above, in the late game Astral Corruption is pretty much an "I win" card. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Baalz,
First off, awesome post! I've been following your posts on Mictlan for a while, and it's really great to have everything brought together here in this guide. I have one more noob question: is it a stupid idea to take death scales when you're playing Mictlan? I like to play MP games on large maps (20+ provinces per player), and it just seems that on maps that size, once you get some momentum going, you just never run out of provinces. On this basis, any nation that is successful past turn 40 will have enough provinces and a large income, that they can afford the negative impact of the death scales. But maybe its just my limited MP experience that leads me to this conclusion. Or maybe it's my noobishness that has me playing on such big maps. Either way, I'd love to hear some informed comment on death vs. growth scales in MP play. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Well, the growth/death scales for Mictlan are not in the no-brainer category. I think it's probably better to take death scales for the reason you mention as well as some others (the impact to income is reduced for death scales, same as turmoil), BUT there is a trade off there that the death scales compound the population loss that you get from blood hunting. Yes, you will hopefully have a flow of fresh provinces, but there is a cost to moving your blood hunters - setting up a new lab, lost turns in moving them across the map, less easy to defend them closer to the front, etc. Also, high death scales will really hit all your old priests up until you can get boots of youth (all the way at construction-6). So, it's really more a question of how you want to play it. Death scales will give you a better early game by sacrificing some of your late game...usually a good trade off but more of a personal playstyle preference.
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
ok, thanks again Baalz, this is very helpful stuff to us noobs!
What you're saying makes perfect sense, I've seen the old age impact on sun priests from testing in SP, but I think I can live with that. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Great guide, thank you for pulling this together.
So, if I read it right, for provinces with populations of less than 3K, you leave them alone and let them produce cash. You mention searching for blood sites and the use in reducing ritual cost. Are there any/many that bring in a steady supply of slaves? Obviously, I can not plan around that, but I was curious. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Well, the real factor that starts coming in for sub 3k provinces is the value of your mage's time rather than upkeep. You'll average a little over 16 blood slaves per turn for a 5k province with 3 Mictlan Priests with rods. You'll get half that for a 2.5k province, and it's costing you 3 mages that could be researching (if nothing else). Really, the cash generated by sub 3k provinces is negligible anyway, its a factor of if you have something better for your mages to do (you almost always can use more research).
You will be getting much more blood slaves from a single blood hunting province than you can conceivably hope to get from all the magic site income. There are very few magic sites which produce blood slaves, and none produce very much. They can produce quite a savings on the spending though. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Excellent Guide! I'll be going back to this once I really have to tackle any blood nation...
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Baalz, any tips on blood hunting when burden of time is up? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Well, now that you mention it...
Use a priest king to forge a thistle mace and armor of twisted thorns, stick them on a lizard shaman (fairly common), use him to forge a moonvine bracelet. Now forge a second armor of twisted thorns, place it with the other two nature boosters to a priest king and cast Gift of Health. Follow that up with Astral Corruption and place in a 350 degree oven for 1 hour. Mmmmm, screws over hard pretty much everybody but you.... |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Most helpful.
One more question. You wrote about 3 priests with rods per province. Have you found that that is the best rate of return for you? I was playing last night and was wondering if/how multiple searchers in the same province worked out. If you put more than 3 per province, do you get reduced success? Ok, another question. Is there a limit to the number of slaves one commander can have? Is there a rush to consolidate slaves? It seems that I kept getting 30 per priest. As you stated, getting over 100 per turn was not hard, even on a medium map. I have a lot to learn about how to spend them well, but look forward to trying things out. Thanks! |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
A single commander can only hold 30 slaves/gems at any one time. 3 basic priests with rods is the best way to get slaves without destroying your provinces.
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Well, if you have more than 3 priest bloodhunting in one province you need some way to reduce the unrest other than dropping the tax rate because you'll accrue unrest faster than a 0% tax rate will relieve it, and unrest reduces your ability to blood hunt (at 200 unrest you can't get any blood slaves). If you're desperate to concentrate your blood hunters (perhaps you're being aggressively raided) you can stack many blood hunters in a single province and have it patrolled by a large force. The downside here is that this will fairly rapidly deplete the population in that province.
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Very helpful again, thank you. I will avoid the patrolling.
If I have labs in each blood hunting province, I can pool the slaves nicely. However, if I do not, I have to shuttle them around with cheap or highly mobile units. If a lab costs 500 gold, it seems that a scout or flying turkey mage are really the most cost effective methods over quite long time horizons. Micromanagement saves cash… However, what if my mages are full and still hunt? Do they not collect, because they have no place to store them? Then there is a higher cost to not having a lab. Given that I usually have other things to do with my 500 gold, it does seem that buying extra scouts would be the cost effective way of handling this. Unless you have found a sneaky way around the problem you would like to share with us… |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
I think you should use indy commanders to shuttle your blood slaves when you cannot afford a lab. I do not like to take any turns where my home province does not build some sort of priest. Indy scouts are best, Horse tribe commanders work well too, and even the regular Commanders, Mounted Commanders, and Barbarian leaders are okay.
I think it may be best to build labs only where you are intending to eventually build a temple and a fort. I try to build forts where they are cheapest, in the forests and mountains. You need to build all of these somewhere in any case, to churn out even more priests. Might as well provide some protection for your hunters while you are at it. (If you're playing SP you might be better off to just take castles from the AIs.) You can also build another temple instead of a lab, and sacrifice where you hunt. The sacrificing priest can take some of the overflow if your hunters get close to limit. This option is best if the province is in the plains and can recruit indy priests (for sacrificing with a jade dagger), since this frees up even more of your priests for hunting and researching. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Nice one, I had not noticed the cost variation between locations. I normally go for strategic value, but cost will infulence that. If I find a blood site that lowers ritual cost, that has to be a strong candidate for a fort/lab/temple.
I was just thinking the call of the winds commander would make a nice transport unit. Once your empire gets a bit bigger, you need that strategic movment. I will take a look at the mounted commanders, as you suggest, as they are much more common. |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Now I see why I get ***-run over when playing MA Mictlan. It sucks ***.
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Are you sure? I'm just playing MA MIctlan. I lost my first important battle, and have fallen to bootlicking. Bootlicking is a viable tactic, especially if your nation is considered weak. I'm quite confident I will end up as ruler of the world http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
All Hail the Lawgiver! ehm... eternal Servant of the Earth Monster. |
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Thanks for a good guide, I was wondering something. When blood hunting, would you also keep a small force to patrol the province, or is it usually enough to put taxes to zero?
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Quote:
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
As Velusion says, its a much better idea to set yourself up so that you don't need to patrol. Patrolling will drop your population much faster so it's not a viable long term solution. It is, however, possible to do scorched earth blood hunting by doing massive blood hunting in a province while a large army patrols. This is really more of a tactic to screw up land you don't think you're gonna be able to keep, but can also be used as a last ditch effort for emergency blood slaves. For example, if you're hard pressed and absolutely desperate for blood slaves you can use the dozens of researchers in your capital to blood hunt (assuming they're at least B1 mages) while you patrol which will give you a quick boost of blood slaves but nuke your capital population. This actually might not be as bad as it sounds, once you hit late game with a heavy blood economy focus you really don't have a huge use for gold as you'll be summoning virtually all your units and mages.
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
I usually have 3 B1 mages with divining rods, and only ever have to stop hunting when theres a bad event, or a particularly lucky haul.
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Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Hi,
Isn't turmoil 3 slowing the initial expansion (few money to recruit jag warriors and build forts / temples) and the switch to blood economy (few money to build castles/temples/labs and recruit blood hunters) ? I've tried (SP) and found myself very vulnerable for a while (almost no armies), I'm lucky the AIs were elsewhere. Any ideas to build armies able to stop an eventual early aggression ? I also thought of an early rush to Alteration 5 / Conjuration 3 to cast Mother Oak. It should work only with a magic scale and a bit luck in finding nature sites. The Oak may allow to summon 17 sacred jaguars / 2 turns and compensate the lack of recruitment. Don't know if that's worth the research cost though ? |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Jaguar Warriors are very very cheap, at 25 a piece with dom6-8 you can easily recruit max Jaguar Warriors each turn even under Turmoil3 and Sloth3 while you're at it. also, since you're only using sacred troops(Jaguar Warriors) your upkeep doesn't get as large as nation that rely on their national non sacred troops. another thing, you're starting army is pretty useless, so use it to patrol your capital while setting taxes to 150% for some additional gold early on, will allow you to get your 2nd, 3rd and even 4th castles pretty early if you keep on expanding, easy with your Jaguar Warriors under a good bless and with H3 Priests Divine Blessing them if you need a mass.
personally I go for const4(SDRs for Mictlan Priests) than Blood all the way to 9 pretty much. not much point getting anything else early on as your Jaguar Warriors are capable enough on both offense and defense, and your power lays with Blood magic... |
Re: Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting
Okay, I should try again. I do set the taxes at 150%, even 200% for the first 3 turns. I was playing late era, with is much similar to early though, but all castles are 1200 gold (except the too rare Hillfort at 800), maybe that's where were my financial difficulties.
I push the early search to construction 6 - lightless lanterns to boost research. More useful with drain 2 than magic 1 though. I use slingers as arrow catchers - with indies at 8, they cut the jaguar warriors losses. |
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