[licker]

Originally posted by Zen:

quote:

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Originally posted by licker:
Scouts suck period. I find it hard to believe that it is more cost effective to use 4+ scouts than 1 decent mage with blood on them (and the dousing rod, which if I recall correctly doesn't help non blood powered commanders anymore). Beyond that your blood mage can switch to summoning demons when needed, the scouts can't do squat, well they have their value as scouts, but that's only useful outside of your provinces...

Scouts can be useful to ferry slaves from hunting commanders in provinces without labs though...

Scouts have quite a few benefits over most nations blood hunters.

1.) They are not capital only. Any province with a Scout can make a blood hunter cheap and effectively.

2.) With the variance of the blood hunting process, 5 scouts (100 Gold) will hunt up more slaves than 1 Mictlan Priest, though it may be sporatic (meaning one or two turns you might get only a few, and another turn you could get 20+).

3.) Scouts are stealthy, most blood priests are not.

4.) Scouts can hunt in a province you are still taxing and not get unrest because of the variable system in which they are used. Thus if you want to have 1-2 scouts in every province 5k+ in population and set the tax to 90% you can do so, without reciving much in the way of a unrest hit. This also provides a way of hunting across your empire and not getting your blood hunting interrupted by a CotW or CotWild that hits your hunting provinces.

Scouts are far superior in my mind, as well as being able to blood hunt earlier. While getting and placing hunter with Blood Magic and Dousing Rods is something you do to increase your Blood Hunting Capability, more often than not, I'd rather just make a bunch of scouts in 3 or 4 provinces and make a new mage in my castle provinces.

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Good points Zen, I'll still disagree that scouts are *better* blood hunters in general though. It does depend somewhat on what kinds of provinces you have, and what access to blood mages you have. Diabolical faith has a 90gp 1F1B mage for example, also useful for pumping out scads of Demon Jesters when needed.

The most slaves I've ever gotten with a Scout was 4, that was in a 10k pop province. Mostly my scouts get 2 or 3 slaves, and thats every 4th turn or worse. A 1blood with a dousing rod (and what true blood nation isn't going to employ those...) averaged 6 or 7 every turn. That equates to more than 4 scouts... Well that's my experience anyway, sure you can use scouts to blood hunt, and you may even be better off in the short run using them before you can muster up enough blood mages to do the work for you.

As to stealth... well I dunno, but for pure blood hunters I don't think stealth is really all that much of an advantage. There is something to be said for spreading your hunts, but I'm not convinced you get zero unrest hits for unseccusful hunts, in fact I'm pretty sure this isn't the case, I've had unrest up in provinces with scouts who were unsuccesful, perhaps not as much as if they were successful, but the unrest will still accumulate, and for a zero return at that.

Anyway, I overstated that Scouts suck (imagine that, hyperbole on a message board ) but I still think the case for them in lieu of blood mages is poor, then again, alot depends on the actual dynamics of the game and what you can and can't do