Jasper I read what Illwinter siad on what they were trying to do with blood and in my opinion the scout thing is a major gliche. Thats why Alex made a big deal of pointing it out - so they could correct it. With scouts blood hunting its back to anyone having access to blood.
I have been playing blood hard for the Last few days, I have summoned Ice Devils, Arch Devils, Fallen Angels and every sort of little blood summon and my honest opinion is that blood is the worst path of magic. I have done worse in the games I have used blood than using Tien Ch'i Barbarian Kingdoms. I do better with Mictlan when I largely ignore blood and go for mass protection instead.
In PBEM I aim to play in games with a high level of experiance and the pace is generally fast and cut throat. This is not a style question but a survival question. In this sort of game I think blood is crap. Playing SP, for me, blood is crap because I do so much better when I ignore it. So for me blood is crap and thats very sad.
I think people got carried away on the whole anti-blood thing in Dom1 and there was alot of miss information around about what the problem was - many seem to think the blood SC's in Dom1 are simply overpowered as opposed to overpresent. My experiance using fuly equipped ID's is that they are very expensive and somewhat vunerable - and that was before paralyse.
Jasper have you played blood much? Your comments about blood SC's are just so wrong. Sure Ice Devils and Illearth are good SC's - thats one Illearth and some of the 7 ID's. The other big demonic summonings are not great for the job. In general ID's are nowhere near as good as people think. I used them as suggested in Dom1 and lost them. I learnt and used them in packs after that. A good army (including mages generally) will crush a small number of fully equipped SC's in my experiance. And this isn't even taking paralyse into account.
SC's have fallen along way in Dom2 and I suspect that even if you could still summon theorericaly unlimited numbers of ID's it wouldn't be a problem in practice. Blood used to be the mid/late game SC path but now mid/late game SC's are vastly weaker and blood is much weaker. The combined affect is under impressive.
When is blood good then? On a big map, in a slow paced game, using the dodgy (MM intensive) scout hunting trick.
I have tried really hard to make blood work. In the process I have managed to make Mictlan work ok but I still haven't got blood to work. Blood the only thing worse than Mictlan? Nah Abysia using blood is still better than Mictlan.
Cheers
Keir