IMHO (In My Holy Opinion
)
Base abysia is the best blood nation. Take a good combat pretender (that wont be fried by your +3 heat dominion in combat = is heat resistant) and use him and a couple of abysians to initially carve yourself a nice kingdom. Then start blood hunting asap.
For blood hunting I prefer the "enviromentalist way", that is, not emptying provinces. To get this, use growth +3, hunt with 2 or 3 of the abysian cheapest blood mages per province and set taxes to 0 when hunting. Best provinces to hunt are the ones with most population = high population not only means that blood hunting has better results, but the growth also replenishes population faster. Research construction-4 asap and forge sanguine dousing rods for all slave hunters. Remember that high dominion is good for eliminating unrest, so some preaching/temples at your slave hunt sites could also be a good idea. Only patrol provinces when you have to, because patrolling kills off population much faster than slave hunting. Start by ferrying slaves home with scouts, but when you get more cash build labs at hunt sites to speed it up. This way you can build a decent blood income that will not vanish over time.
What to do with all that blood then?
3 choises.
1st, turn them directly into devils (blood magic 3 or something), pack them with demonbreds and send them to battle.
2nd, use good blood mages to cast hordes from hell (blood-5 iirc) and use them to take over territory.
3rd, use a pretender with earth-3 and blood-4, forge a dwarven hammer and the item that gives 1 blood magic and give them both to him. Then use him to forge soul contracts (it's the more expensive one, 80 whopping blood slaves, or 60 with the hammer) Give all produced contracts to scouts (only 1/scout to reduce losses to horror attacks). Every soul contract produces a devil every season, at first the production is low, but when you reach 10 contracts you start to get rather many devils every turn. Couple them with demonbreds and send them to the front. if you ever reach 35 contracts, that basically means 1 very powerful (almost) upkeepless army every turn.
random abysian notes:
1: make demonbred as your prophet. This way it flies and moves a lot quicker than normal abysians would, and is still able to cast fanacitism.
2: if indie strenght is very high, use slayers to take the most well defended provinces, it's cheaper. (after you have slain every commander, all the troops will flee even if the province is attacked by a sole slayer)
3: Normal abysian soldiers are better than the stats show, because the heat radiance will seriously harm any troops trying to hit them. In early game mix them with humanbreds to get the best effects.
4. Abysians have no natural archers, but can very easily cast the spell "flaming arrows" that makes even shortbows very effective. Put a castle up in a resource-rich archer-province, and augment your armies with them. Remeber to keep them separate from abysians on the battlefield!
5. Abysians have very good priests, always have one just casting fanacitism in a battle to kee your units from routing.
6. Abysians have abysmal precision
, this makes firebaals and such rather ineffective on the battlefield, especially if the mage casting them is on the very rear of the map. Flares and fireballs do have uses, but in most cases the cash spent on the mages casting them would have done better in troops.
7. Abysians are immune to fire, so when using only abysian troops you can use some damn effective fire spells without fear of friendly fire
. Fire storm and flame storm jump to mind...
8. Salamanders (not the mage, the beast) suck. Really. Especially if you do blood, money is your prime concern, and salamanders suck any coffers empty in no time. Just dont use them.