[Wendigo]

This thread has moved quite a lot, let's see if I can pick up:

Originally posted by apoger:
As to the gold cost of the scout strategy...
Gold costs of taxes lost, scout costs, and upkeep = 3005 gold (approximate, I had to estimate the times of acquiring some provinces, but I'm pretty close)

For this 3000 gold I got 420 blood slaves.

That comes to 7.14 gold per slave.
Think of it as 214 gold for a Horde from Hell or perhaps 392 gold for an Ice Devil.

You forgot adding the cost of researching those spells in a exclusive magic field good for little else.

As per Pocus's "20 turn challenge", it seems that competitive play yields a turn 20ish income of about 1500.

This is also incomplete. Obviously you will be missing the income (and the snowball effect) from the provinces harvested for slaves & the resources invested in such harvesting.

I think this might help put things into perspective. [/QB]

I am afraid I am still unconvinced, & you are still overstating your case, IMO of course.

I still mantain that setting up a blood economy will be more expensive (as in trade-off for the investment) than in Dom I when all it required was to get a cheapo Blood Fountain pretender. You have rightfully pointed out that gold economy has taken a severe hit, yet you have ignored gem economy & the dependences between gold economy & blood economy. That harvesting does come at a cost.

I also mantain that the product from such blood economy will be 'less', in the sense that the requirements have been upped in both research & cost, and the availability limitted.

The point of whether there will be enough counters available will need much more info than what we have right now, tho indeed new counters are showing to make up (or not) for the lost ones.
It's easy to spot the lost ones, not so easy to spot the new ones with our limited info (for example, Dom I undead demons benefitted from undead invulnerabilities in addition to the weaknesses, we will have to check if those invulnerabilities are still there in their new demonic-non undead form...).

By all means keep testing and writting essays, regardless of whether I agree or not with your points you are always a good read.