Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

I'm trying to figure out the best way to blood hunt as MA Abyssia in an unmodded game. Here are their blood mages with the stats I think are pertinent to blood hunting ability (all cap only.)

Warlock Apprentice
130g, B2S1, old

Warlock
270g, B3S2?1, very old

Demonbred
260g, B2F2H2, sacred, flying, not even close to old

Obviously the warlocks are your heavy lifter blood mages, not bloodhunters.

So the competition is between Warlock Apprentices and Demonbred. For 130g extra (sacred so upkeep is equal) you get flying and don't have to worry about old age. That said, once you get to const 6 you can have the apprentice forge boots of youth his first turn for 10 slaves (7 w/hammer) which removes the old age issue.

I'm thinking apprentices in the beginning since early on 130 gold can be alot. But once you get more gold coming in and have const 6 researched I'm not really sure.

Some other issues:
Sanguine dowsing rods? I'm not sure if these are worth the slaves+turn spent forging when your hunters are B2.

How many hunters per province. When playing as Lanka I'd use three, but again I'm not sure when the hunters are more expensive and B2.

Should I build labs in blood provinces? I'm thinking that depending on luck it will take a hunter 3-5 turns to fill up on slaves, so if you didn't build a lab you'd be spending 2/5 to 2/7 of your time walking back and forth to your deposit province (and that's if they can make it in one turn.)

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

It really depends on your scales. If you, for thematic reasons, massively take death, then Demonbred would be your go-to option. If you have some growth, then the Apprentices become viable, as with good growth, you generally won't lose too many to disease.

Finally, SDRs are definitely worth it. Along with the +10% chance on your blood 2 hunters, you also get +1 blood slaves per turn guaranteed. Forging with a hammer, it pays for itself in 7 turns (just with the +1 blood slave and with a Dwarven Hammer).

As for labs: you can if you have the gold (because they do cut down on micromanagement, alot). Personally, I use indy commanders and scouts to ferry blood slaves around for me if I'm tight on gold. 30g/20g and 2-1 upkeep means that they're economically more cost-efficient then labs; unless of course the game drags on for 235 turns, of course.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Two things.

1. Use the apprentices and give them dousing rods. You'll want either 2 or 3 in a province. 3 will require a bit more micro, turning the tax down to 0 if they all get a big hunt find. 2 should be fine with auto-taxes on.

2. Don't build a lab. Hire a commander to walk back and forth. Generally you shouldn't be blood hunting too far from a fortress + lab to make this round trip take more than 2 turns. Even if it does, you can just hire a second commander. The upfront gold cost + minor upkeep won't come close to building multiple labs in your blood hunt provinces.

Jazzepi

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

I can't believe I didn't think of this.

Thanks for the responses. Death seems pretty bad for Abyssia even if it doesn't hurt their income. I went growth 1, so do you think I can ignore the old age issue on apprentices?

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

I wouldn't take growth as Abysia. Someone did an interesting study with lots of mages who had old age over 100 turns. The difference between G3 and D3 wasn't HUGE but it was significant. The difference between G1 and G0 was very small.

Since you don't get any income bonus for having the growth scale, the only thing it gives you is longer living mages. I think in the long run, you'd be better off spending points somewhere else.

I'd focus on production, order, and maybe an awake pretender. Cyclops seems like a good choice. You could give him a bit of earth, and then some air to give him mistform. I've found A2E3 awake cyclopes to be extremely inexpensive for what you're getting. Though, at the end of the day, I'd rather have an A4E5-6 if you can afford it. The extra protection, and the ability to sitesearch for level 4 sites, makes a big difference.

Jazzepi

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

I agree with Jazzepi, except once you get into the mid game you should have switched to demonbred from apprentices, since they have more uses. I prefer to take an N-4 bless and give shrouds to the apprentices if they get sick, rather than spend a turn forging boots in advance. Only my warlocks get boots.

A pop-5000 province will give better results if you leave taxes at 20 or 0, I think. The extra slave income makes up for the small gold income you get from auto-taxing. Watch out for gold mines and gem sites though, don't hunt there.

And hire scouts to walk back and forth, if possible, not regular commanders. There's less chance of sneaking units losing slaves in events or attacks when your slave bus is sneaking. I hire two for each blood hunting province, so there is always one coming and one going. Depending on magic scales and luck, it's possible that you could get slave overflow with just two hunters, if you're running just one scout bus per blood hunting province.

Warlocks are good for blood hunting too, if you don't have anything else useful for them to do the current month, maybe because you're casting a couple of huge summons that eat up all your slaves for the turn.

Once you're at blood-7 you should be casting Curse of Blood for Vampire Lords, especially if you're playing CBM, and they can hunt too.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

I wish demonbred were recruitable at every fort. MA Abysia has such poor options for mages outside of its capital.

I suppose a low level blood spell to summon Demonbred for Abysia would be more thematic (how many slaves? 20-30-ish?).

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

That's fair. N4 on a pretender is nice for personal regen and resist elements. Though, a cyclops with N4/E3-5/A2 would be rather expensive.

Jazzepi

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Summoning a Demonbred for 30 slaves sounds like it would really help Abysia a lot, in a fair and balanced fashion.

I haven't done MA Abysia in MP, but in SP, what I've ended up doing, is 2 Apprentice per province (3 per until you get SDR), get them boots ASAP. I use Apprentices exclusively for hunting, because they get useful randoms, and I set the "special" ones aside in my capital for forging purposes. I only recruit Demonbred for combat duty, never for hunting.

Oh, and I take 2 Death. You have no income penalty, and 2D is quite survivable, you just can't sit inactive for huge lengths of time.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Apprentices don't get randoms, just Warlocks do. And any unit out in the field hunting is automatically on combat duty. :) You can script Apprentices for Leech or Hellbind Heart, but that won't help against Gargoyles or Golems, etc.

Demonbred in the field scripted for Infernal Prison (they can cast it with 2 slaves) is a pretty nice disincentive for raiding SCs.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

I almost never recruit anything in my capital other than demonbred or warlocks, and the former most of the time. They are the best thing about MA abysia due to their versatility. There is an argument for apprentices purely from a blood hunting perspective, but you can use the demonbreds for so many more reasons, I reckon it's bordering on crazy to recruit an apprentice unless really, really strapped for cash.

In term of death scale, I also tend to growth 1. Not just for old age, but to stop pop decline, especially when blood hunting a lot. MA Abysia isn't a great rapid expander, and the mages are expensive. I really hurt when taking death. If you go death, plan to expand rapidly and extensively.

Surprisingly production is the optional one for me. Yes production rocks early, and it is hard to expand fast without it, but past the early game your infantry don't do that much for you other than act as chaff - they are too slow. Where they remain great is in soaking damage and being fire resistant, and the lower resource humanbreds can do that. It is your mages and blood summons you have to rely on more if you are to do well, which growth supports better than production.

In terms of pretender, cyclops can be ok, but I've tended away. All he does is make your strengths a little stronger, enabling your sacred infantry and mages to fatigue more slowly, he doesn't do anything to address your weaknesses. I've used a rainbow in a few games, for site searching, early research and diversification, which works ok. Fountain of blood is another option that is cheap, affords high dominion (important for abysia), and can quite cheaply get you the paths for soul contracts & bloodstones, which can both be very powerful for you. And he rocks as a blood hunter, enabling high production early while maintaining decent research. An awake cyclops I don't think is giving you enough for the cost.

Vanmpire lords would be sweet, they are just hard to get into, unless you take death on your pretender. There is merit in that, helps your mages a lot, I've not done it in a while but it is certainly viable.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

I pretty much consider Dragar the world's expert on Abysia. I think he's played them in every game to the point when I see them, I just assume its Dragar. :)

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Demonbred are very, very good, but I have to say warlocks are one of my favorite mages of any nation. I generally recruit a few demonbred here and there for specific roles but primarily crank warlocks nonstop from my capital. Put a lab where they're bloodhunting and any of them can easily contribute forgings/rituals as needed while bloodhunting by default rather than researching. Here's what I see with the different random warlocks:

Blood - These are some of the best blood hunters in the game. With a sanguine rod these guys are pulling in 3-5 more blood slaves apiece vs a b1 hunter with a rod which is quite significant (say, a "free" hoard from hell per turn once you've set up a few bloodhunting provinces). Stick a blood booster on them and you've not only upped the blood output again, you've equipped a battery of disease demon spammers. You're also dropping ritual of the five gates and hoard from hell (stockpile your blood slaves over a few turns then swap the blood boosters over to non-B random warlocks to drop 10 or so in a round for a ridiculously effective *side* strategy to whatever else you were doing). Starshine caps and you've got a bunch of teleporting blood rain/bloodletting casters.

Astral - second best horror spam in the game (after Hinnom), easy gateways for those map move 1 troops, and teleporting support before you hit const-6 for those early elephant aggressors.

Earth - Bloodstones baby! And demon knights. Bloodstone + earth boots + crystal shield + earthpower = E5. Slap a starshine cap on for teleporting heavy earth support which is *oh* so tasty for Abysian heavy infantry.

Fire - well, these guys are probably inferior to the demonbred, but they do bring some nice niche uses to the table. Teleporting banish to inferno, soul contracts, and astral fires are all solid in their own niche.

After you hit const-6 the old age thing isn't an issue, it's trivial to slap boots of youth on your one per turn warlock recruitment.

All in all, demonbred is not who I think of when I think versatility and MA Abysia. I also think it's a very good idea to stick labs under your warlock bloodhunters and use them as heavy lab mages as well as bloodhunters, something you can't do with scout bloodslave-shuttles. It's really nice to be able to drop 15 lesser horrors/disease demons/hoard from hells on a turn's notice.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Damn me for not checking. Had them confused with the EA Warlocks. Been awhile since I messed with em, but I was working on an EA strat last. Bah. :p

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

My usual strat is opening with a few warlocks to get a couple of E randoms to go manually site search, then demonbred blood hunters until cons 6, then pure warlock recruitment from then on. They're very obviously the best way out of the 1-path wonder that is Abysia's non-cap mages, offering astral and blood magic, which you'll need to counter anything with a 3-gem fire resist ring and decent protection.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Don't think that makes me an expert until I actually win a game or two. Until then i'm just a try-hard ;)

Baalz - agree on the usefulness of warlocks, and getting a couple with E is critical (i just scored a natural E2 in one game :) ) with bloodstones an early must. However, most of their uses are late game.

Once I have a few different warlocks, esp E ones, demonbred are btter in earlier days because they :
- won't get diseased on me
- are sacred therefore better researchers
- less powerful but faster/cheaper hunters
- mobile
- have high leadership
- can give combat support early and fly away if in trouble
- Have holy 2
- Lastly, they are very good devil carriers :)

After a couple of years I'll tend to hire more warlocks due to their capacity with rituals, availability of blood slaves and blood research and great value of astral against thugs, whereas fire is an easy option against troops early in the game

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

[quote=Dragar;682587]I don't know that I agree with that. To be sure, I'm not for a second arguing that demonbred are not excellent units, nor that a reasonable person couldn't decide they're the way to go over warlocks for some situations, but I think warlocks are very, very useful early on and just get better as the game goes on. Now, I can't really argue with Micah's general plan of not recruiting them heavily until const-6 is researched, but if you bite the bullet and accept a couple losses from old age they contribute mightily from very early.

Consider where you're at around the end of the first year. Your heavy infantry is tough enough to ward off most threats, but there are a couple things you're vulnerable to if you don't have mage support. Elephants and thugs/SC pretenders who are fire immune are the most likely threats and astral mages are the most obvious answer. An early thaum research along with around a dozen warlocks gives you on average a couple guys who can teleport in and spam paralyze (soul slay) which transforms you from a one trick slow pony into a very mobile and flexible threat who nobody can really even easily conquer your PD. Level 4 research is not exactly late game, and that opens up everything (depending on your early direction) from bloodstones and soul contracts to demon knights and blood rain. A single level 5 could also arguably be grouped into the early game and that's hoarde from hell, bloodletting & send lesser horror - all of which are *wickedly* effective early on fueled by a blood economy jumpstarted by powerful blood mages. To my mind it's just got a wonderful synergy, your warlocks (ignoring cost effectiveness) are the absolute best choice to get your blood economy jumpstarted, while also being the absolute best choice for casting rituals, and the absolute best choice for combat. The more you recruit, the more likely you are to have a couple with the random you really want earlier. You sacrifice a bit of cost efficiency, particularly before you can forge boots of youth, but cost efficiency is not generally the top concern when considering capital only mages. I guess that's the big part of my feeling about recruiting warlocks, if you recruit 12 warlocks in year one, then the chances are good you've got a couple E randoms to site search, a couple S randoms to teleport around, and couple B randoms to supercharge your bloodhunting and forge your boosters. Having less warlocks means you're much more likely to have a run of bad luck and not have landed the guys you really want by the time you need them. It's not *that* uncommon to go 10 rounds of recruiting without getting ie an earth random to prime the pump with site searching....

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

The reason for my preference for demonbred over warlocks early isn't due to cost, but due to maximizing your capital slot use. Pumping out enough blood hunters while still leaving enough warlocks around to do warlocky things can be a challenge depending on the map, and I favor the demonbred merely so that you don't end up losing any potential blood hunters. They also do work well early when you have less gold to play with, and since they'll be pretty much exclusively blood hunting you do save on upkeep as well. If you find recruitable blood hunters early on I would likely swap to warlocks immediately.

I'm not at all a fan of labbing blood provinces, since it provides any attackers with a nice prize on top of taking out your blood hunters, and it also greatly adds to the expense of your operations. If I was labbing I would be more tempted to get warlocks as well to leverage their diversity, but I'm quite content having 10 demonbred out in the countryside doing their thing with shuttles so I don't waste any cap recruitment turns by having disease deaths.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

yeah i only use labs in the field if I have mages there I want to cast rituals with, which is unusual. There is some value if you get unexpectedly high unrest for a turn, due to a random or great hunting turn - you can then switch your mages to research briefly

I think a lot of the preference is situational, we all agree both units are good. Certainly, if facing an early SC or trample threat, hitting up thaumaturgy and warlocks is king (although bonds of fire isn't bad). And if i don't get an early warlock with Earth I'll keep recruiting them. But I always almost find that after 2 years I have probably 2 demonbreds for each warlock - cash is an issue for abysia early, massed warlocks are too expensive in upkeep and disease loss.

One other note on blood items like Boots and sanguine rods. While they appear very cheap, especially with hammers, you won't have a lot of hammers, if any, to go around, and it still takes a mage's action. Forging a SDR costs you the 8 or so slaves that would have been hunted with that caster, or the 10 rp. I tend to make boots earlyish only for the special warlocks, with E1 or 2 or S4. It is of course to kit them all up over time, but there are often competing interests for slaves. Naturally a nature less alleviates the risk, but I find that nature rarely makes it on to my pretender for MA aby.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Blindness can be great early on against SC rushes. It's just Alt-2 and any of your non-cap mages can cast it, and I don't think FR helps. MR resists of course, but if you have 5 casters, one will probably get lucky. It's really short range so you need troops protecting your mages -- but you need the troops anyway to kill of the SC once its attack and def drops to zero.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

I was gushing at Ballz about blindness early. I think it's one of those sleeper spells people just look over. 90% of even late game thugs/SCs can have huge problems when their attack, AND defense drop to 0. Makes it much easier for units to land critical strikes, and makes it much harder for that SC to drop units swarming it. It's nearly as good a paralyze, and every one of your mages can spam it easily.

Jazzepi

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

nice thing is at level 2 you can just switch research to it if a need arises, no advance planning required. Of course that's just CBM, way harder in vanilla

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Doh! Forgot the CBM disclaimer. Thanks, Dragar. :)

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

[quote=Baalz;682603]I'd argue that demonbreds work even better in that situation. It's easy to have 9 or 10 Demonbreds and blood 3 researched by the end of the first year. So you have casters that can cast Summon Imps, Blood Boil, Agony and summon devils. With a bit more research, you'll have Hellfire if you think you need it. Facing an elephant rush? Vector in a dozen demonbred to chain cast summon imp and fatigue them out in your heat 3 dominion. Facing ethereal opponents, bloodboil will kill singes, hellfire can wipe out whole groups. Facing someone with Glamour troops? Agony has a nice big area of affect for a cheap damage spell that ignores armor/defense. Facing an early SC, I don't think there are any out there (early game) that could stand up to a swarm of 20 devils.

As someone mentioned earlier in this thread, the advantage of demonbreds is their versitility and movement. They can switch from blood hunting to researchers to combat mages to devil factory to raiding (with a couple of devils) as you need them. Warlocks can do a lot of those things too (sometimes better), but you can't mass them for combat nearly as fast since they'll probably be scattered doing blood hunting.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

There is something a bit messed up with the quoting there, those were Baalz's comments

I agree with the sentiment about demonbreds and the efficacy of the tactics you describe, but it isn't feasibly that achievable that quickly. Abysia isn't exactly a research powerhouse. Unless perhaps you have a high research rainbow awake and hitting the books straight away, with all of your demonbreds either blood hunting or casting blood spells, and even then..

20 devils = 140 blood and 20 casting turns. Summon imp costs a slave, and you won't be casting much hellfire/agony/bloodboil without a heap of slaves for fatigue. Remember also that demonbreds have awful precision, so a lot of these spells don't work well early when you are only fighting against small armies and have no way to boost precision. They are only really combat effective with the later blood spells, and in casting battlefield wide spells like blood lust and blood rain.

I believe that blood is the key for MA abysia in the mid game and onwards, but in the early game you need your mages researching and site searching a bit, and using non-blood casting in combat support. Thaumaturgy, evoc, constr all get a look in before I start on blood, which then becomes the driver. You will need to rely on your excellent infantry through the 1st year minimum unless you have to pull something out against an early SC or trample rush.

In terms of blood summons I don't think summoning devils is worth it, I only grab them through soul contracts. Even demon knights are a bit iffy for a mage's turn, you will be really struggling to keep up the research. Only the higher level blood summons are really worth it except in emergencies.

Efficiency is key for abysian mages, and to compete you have to maximise your mage turns, so:
- alchemising fire gems early if you need it to keep producing a good mage each turn
- soul contracts to build up some good troops without taking heaps of turns
- lanterns for efficient research
- SDRs for efficient blood hunting
- using indy commanders to ferry your infantry around to the front lines

The ideal is to find a nice indy site with good research mages, which can turn your game around, but that's complete luck and with your limited paths for site searching don't bet on it!

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

It's feasable to get Blood 3 by the end of the first year w/o a pretender, but yeah, you won't have any blood slaves in reserve because your mages will have spent the first year researching, not bloodhunting.

My perspective is somewhat biased by the pretender choices. I prefer either an awake enchantress or a dormant lich (either of them with at least 5 magic paths). I want to be able to leverage the late game blood summons to give me my magic diversity.

6 demonbred blood hunting my first 3 captured provinces seem to average about 120 blood slaves by the end of the first hear. It admittedly comes at a heavy price in terms of gold income but it adds up to a nice reserve. I don't have to turn them into devils or use the slaves for combat magic but it's nice to know they're available if I need them. Converting those slaves into Devils would only take 2 turns. Also, demonbred, unlike warlocks, tend to start the fight with blood slaves because if I have to commit them to combat then they probably just flew over from their blood hunting province and have a load of slaves on them.

If we were talking about EA Abysia, I'd agree with you but I'm not convinced that that's true in MA. I seem to be having the best results when I start my research with Blood 3 then Construction 4 (for SDRs).

The operative words there being 'except in emergencies'. :D It isn't worth summoning devils if you're just building a standing army, but if I've been recruiting Demonbreds instead of warlocks then I have the option to summon devils if that emergency arises. But you need a critical mass of demonbred to make that possible.

I do think you underestimate the sinergy between devils and demonbred. Devils alone aren't that useful but combine them with a flying commander....

Maybe I just need to tune my early game better for Warlocks but right now I just can't make them work as well as the demonbreds even if they are better researchers.

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

Oh I get the synergy between demonbreds and devils :) I tailor my pretender to get soul contracts happening as quickly as possible to build them up that way, otherwise the cost in demonbred actions is too high.

Bloodhunting your first 3 provinces surely leaves you absolutely destitute? What do you expand with?

Re: Blood Hunting as MA Abyssia?
 

You probably won't be hunting your first 3 provinces all the time (intially) since you don't have the blood hunters for it. By the start of turn 6 you should have 3 provinces, 2 taken with your starting army and 1 taken by your prophetized slayer. Without SDRs, you can run 3 bloodhunters per province so it takes you 9 turns of demonbred summoning to get set up in 3 bloodhunt provinces.

You won't have the money to build a 2nd castle anytime soon or to buy a lot of salamanders but as long as you stick to buying demonbred and infantry, money shouldn't be a problem.