[licker]

Originally posted by z0dd:
I just recently started playing with Blood magic, and have found the following.

- Blood hunt in provinces with high population
- Set taxes to 0 in those provinces
- Patrol the provinces you hunt in
- Building a lab in a high population province where you do all/most of your hunting is a good idea
- Blood slaves are units on the battlefield
- You can easily generate 50 slaves/turn with the right hunters/province/patrol
- Order 3 helps a lot with the upset caused by hunting
- The higher the blood skill lvl, the better the hunter
- Flying demon/devil/vampire summoned armies are brutal!!!

IMO, that Last item is the only one that makes blood magic useful.

Anyone have other suggestions?

Some coments on the above...

Blood hunt in provinces where you don't need the cash income, that could be high pop, but might be better off in a 6-10k pop prov (or two) rather than a 12k+.

If you set taxes to zero why bother patroling? Unless you need to recruit in the same province you already have zero income, so no need to patrol. I rarely bother to patrol any province I blood hunt in, unless I have extra air gems for call of the winds. If you need to get the unrest back down just move your hunters out completely to another province, after a turn or two you can go up from a zero tax to get some return, though if you plan it right you won't even need to bother with this.

Labs are good to cut down on micro, but 2 scouts per blood hunting province should work as well as long as they can get to a lab in one move.

Order3 does nothing for unrest, it has no effect on blood hunting at all (though it did effect unrest in Dom1).

Flying armies are useful to be sure, but there's more to blood than just hoards of fliers, unless you get mount chaining I suppose Lots of good items to forge as well, and good battlefield spells in the higher levels. Still blood is mostly about summoning units that don't eat and don't have upkeep. Nice that one.