Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

I always liked the Fountain of Blood, but reading some strategy guide it seems like a common strategy just to take it to have it hunt blood slaves.

Is there any nation I'll regret taking it with, and how should I or how do you set it up?

If this gets interesting responses, maybe I'll ask about other interesting pretenders, like the Lady of Fortune.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

The fountain has a really good blood hunt boost. Thing is, you'll get a lot of unrest in the hunted province. This can be painful if you hunt in your capital. It's presumably a good thing to take A2 or S3 if you're planning on hunting with it more than once in a while, because then you can move the fountain to a more appropriate location.

Edit: Lady of Fortune and a couple of others have a % chance of caqusing a good event in the province they occupy, IIRC.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

Well, the fountain is nice, but being immobile you need Astral (or Air) to be able to blood hunt wherever you want through teleport/cloud trapeze. Personally I prefer a mobile pretender, but the immobile ones simply can't be used as early combatants, which means there isn't the temptation to make SCs or site-searchers out of them, which means it's easier to justify putting them to dormant.

You can technically speaking give any pretender blood as a magic path if all you want to do is blood hunt. The other good plus to the blood fountain is that under the CBM mod it generates blood slaves every turn.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

Another note, the Fountain gets an income of 3 bloodslaves every turn in CBM, which can be useful for starting some blood stuff without having to hunt your cap.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

I did not know that the Fountain of Blood could use Cloud Trapeze, I assumed it had to teleport.

But it also seem to be able to hunt out a province by itself, often filling itself up on blood slaves every turn (30/turn). While this might not be OK in the first few turns for your capital, I could see how it might be OK for a short while if you had to research something other than moving the FoB, just because with a fire path the FoB can forge Soul contracts fairly regularly, even if you don't yet have other stuff to forge with the blood slaves.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

You can blood hunt and patrol your capital at 100% taxes, pop loss will be less than growth-3 scale. If you've got free patrollers its not too painful to bloodhunt in your cap.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

The blood fountain also makes you vulnerable to a 10% poploss bad event in the province it is in. That event used to be bugged and triggered on the presence of unit 665 (Principes) instead of unit 656 (Blood Fountain), but it was fixed in about patch 3.20 or so.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

Has the Fountain of Blood ever let you any of you down?

No one made any indication that the FoB was ever a bad choice of pretender, and I asked that specifically, so, I thought that that was very interesting.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

like most immobile pretenders, its good as a bless chassis, or otherwise custom tailored to some special purpose. It doesn't really have any general uses. As such, its hard to be let down by it if you build it to do what you want.

That said, there are some roles that it cannot fill. So if you need, eg, a forger or an SC out of your pretender, its a bad choice. But you wouldn't even think about taking it then.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

With pretenders like the FoB, you build it around its weaknesses. Obviously if I were to, say, build a FoB without teleport capability then I'd be a little pissed off that it couldn't move if I needed it to. But since you knew that from the start, it's not so much "let you down" as already compensated for its weaknesses. If I wanted an SC + blood magic, I would have taken a Moloch, or if that wasn't available, maybe a Wyrm with added blood.

One thing to keep in mind is with only misc slots the FoB can only use certain boosters. No Earth Boots for example, or Starshine Cap. This is more relavent for astral pretenders like the Oracle or the Monolith as it affects how you climb the astral booster tree up to Ring of Wizardry and then to Wish. For other pretenders like the FoB, it can affect what boosters are available for summoning uniques or casting globals.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

An awake Fountain of Blood is great only in Blitz games when you intend to lock out the opponents capital with Rain of Toads as soon as possible. A cheap trick which has no counters really (few people would go for the domes initially in a blitz), but can give a nasty suprise to anybody who intends to use some super-troops who are capital only. Of course your troops have to be able to halt the initial attack of the opponent, but if you can manage until you've researched Blood 4, you are safe. Then just let the toads rain (with the free slaves the fountain has attracted during the time spent on research) on the enemy capital and feel clever. You won't make many friends with this strategy though...

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

Thats not true. An awake fountain of blood can be very useful in other roles as well. A B8 blessing is very nice for some nations, particularly if you combine it with a second one like W9 or F9 (you hit often and hard). For instance, you might take a F9 B8 awake blood fountain with Mictlan and patrol with slaves, letting you tear stuff up with your jags and eagle warriors while you B-lined up to jaguar fiends with no need to go up to construction for sanguine rods, nor slow your research by having your mages blood hunting. A score of jaguar fiends with this blessing are incredibly nasty early in on year two just as your jags are making it to the enemy cap.

Rain of toads is definitely another great play with an awake blood fountain.

An early blood sac push is also a good move that can catch otherwise very strong nations off guard. This is great with, say pangaea b-lining to jade daggers and moving in stealth preachers with a (relatively cheap) dom-10 blood fountain blood hunting and maenads patrolling.

You could also use it to bloodhunt and forge soul contracts every few turns - having 3-4 of them out in year one is a game changer and as your other blood hunters come online it can slowly transition to forging one each turn.

You could also...well, I'll leave some as an exercise to the student, but suffice to say an awake blood fountain features quite regularly in my builds.

Re: Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?
 

I tend to think of the blood fountain as one of the nicest "sites" in the game. While it causes and awful lot of unrest, it also produces a lot of blood slaves.

It produces so many that I tend to want to design its support group in a way that maximized their spell casting and its blood hunting.