MA and Blood Economy Advice
 

Now I know there's a good guide somewhere to running a blood economy, but searching those words doesn't bring it up. Could someone point me to it?

Here's the deal, 3 of us are going to play a MA game and I'm the newbie. I'm looking to play either Abysia (hence the blood economy) or T'ien Ch'i. My opponents will have monkeys and Agartha. So, are there any guides for those nations in MA? Suggestions?

Re: MA and Blood Economy Advice
 

I was working on a strategy guide for MA Abysia but got bored:

The best use for sacrificedom is to extend the reach of a SC God. So take a domstr 10, awake Prince of Death (or you can take a Cyclops or a Wyrm or something but the PoD really is best.) Use your blood economy + sacrifice dom to push your dominion, whereupon your God becomes more or less unstopable.

There are 2 schools of thought when choosing provinces to blood-hunt:
1) Find provinces with a pop ~7000. Go there, hunt. Take half the number of patrollers I specified - by choosing provinces with relatively low population, you waste less gold if the unrest can't be controlled. OTOH, you'll push the population below the magic number (5,000) rather quickly, and have to move.
2) Go ahead and blood hunt in your capital - it saves your Warlocks the walk. While you're at it, raise the tax rate to 200% when you have enough patrollers. Idea is - blood hunting actually kills a fixed *number* of people, not a % of the total. So you might as well do it in a highly populated province and never worry about moving. Since you're gathering patrollers anyway, you might as well squeeze the people for gold at the same time (which is generally a worthwhile trade, since money now is more useful than money later.)

The rate of conversion is very approximately 3 patrollers to one pt of *reliable* unrest reduction.

This is at odds with the manual, but I find that a warlock with a rod tends to catch 12 slaves per turn. There's a modification for site frequency but I'm not sure exactly how it works. The manual seems to be right that those 12 slaves cause ~20 unrest.

Thus, at a first approximation, every 2 warlocks who are blood hunting need 3 indepenent commanders plus 120 militia (which are always what you should use for patrol duty like this, unless you have access to freespawn of some kind.)

Blood-based troops are not all that special, actually - so for the first stage of the game you'll just want blood slaves to sacrifice. Each anathemant dragon wants 3 blood slaves per turn, so 2 warlocks blood hunting should be enough to keep half a dozen temples supplied, easy.

If you end up with an excess, empower an indie nature mage in blood, and start cranking out jade daggers to use up the excess.

There are also a number of really good *items* to make with blood slaves -
1) Dousing rods are an absolute must, and the various blood-boost items (blood thorn, brazen vessel, etc.) are great - jade knives are worth empowering for.
2) In the late game, the Armor of Souls is the best armor, since MR is your only actual stat.
3) Several blood artifacts are crazy-good - Gift of Kurgi, for example.
4) The Flesh Eater is a perfectly decent magic weapon and it's practically free. If you are outfitting bargain-basement thugs, and you're running low on resources, they're a great buy.

At a certain point you will want to scale up your blood economy hugely - same pattern applies, but you'll want hundreds and hundreds of militia and most of your warlocks. You should save your blood slaves for the high-level blood spells - summon all the devils and heliophagii and whatnot and start tricking them out with items.

Sending Horrors at enemy armies is generally a better deal than summoning the actual blood troops, except with the level-9 horde spells. Oh, and Dark Vines are nice, but since you don't get BN on the same guy, hard to get.

Re: MA and Blood Economy Advice
 

I think Five Gates is pretty decent for troops. Around 35% of Warlocks are B4 and so can boost themselves to B5, plus the B5 is useful for Infernal Disease too.

Not that there's anything wrong with Send Horror! It's nice too. Even Send Lesser Horror is great for messing with PD provinces, especially any un-castled temples.

Re: MA and Blood Economy Advice
 

I'm not a fan of five gates at all. The troops it produces aren't terrible in terms of cost, it's just that since they are all quite different, there's very little synergy. You'd effectively need to cast it many times then make 3-5 different armies using them.

Re: MA and Blood Economy Advice
 

First of all thanks. Unfortunately I don't understand how to do all of this - blood sacrificing extends the Dominion. So start giving priests blood slaves and they do this automatically, or is it an order? Will they get slaves out of the labratory?

10 dominion with an awake pretender, well that usually means some negative scales besides the 3 heat. Scale recommendations?

Do you reach a point of diminishing returns on the patrolling militia when upkeep costs are equal/greater than the gold you will save (or of no return aka your gold economy crashes and your upkeep exceeds your income)?

Re: MA and Blood Economy Advice
 

I've got a step by step blood hunting guide linked to in my sig. It's written for Mictlan, but most everything translates for any good blood nation.

Re: MA and Blood Economy Advice
 

Though I agree with your point that you need to cast it several times to make sense, that's not entirely true about the synergy. Storm demons and frost demons are both basically archers, they do pretty well backing up cold/lighting immune thugs/SCs (like equipped Ice Devils). Demon knights and devils are both fairly stout and fire immune so they work well together supporting fire mages (Arch Devils are good, though Abyssia doesn't lack for fire firepower). Shadow fiends are kinda the odd man out, but reasonably tough, flying, stealth troops kinda demand their own (flying, stealthy) commander anyway to really take advantage of them. The cool thing is the very diversity which turns you off is what I like - you end up with an army to deal with most anything requiring just a single path of magic to cast.

Re: MA and Blood Economy Advice
 

With a Dom10 Death5 PoD and heat 3, you have 175 points left - so 4 net positive scales. Any more death magic, and you're leaving atleast 30 points unspent after scales.