[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Freyland:
I need to find blood slaves (LOTS of blood slaves),

Mictlan Priests with a Sanguine dousing rod are one of the most efficient blood hunters available. Put a few of them in a province with between 5K and 10K people, then reduce the taxes to 0. You can use a scout to transfer the slaves to a lab until you feel like building one in the province. After that, you can either use the "pool slaves" button on the gem screen, or you can select your blood hunters in a group and press 'Z'.

I have poor researchers,

Mictlan priests are quite effective as researchers if you have a magic scale, as they are both very cheap and sacred.

I have to patrol provinces,

You only have to patrol provinces if you want to blood hunt them very severely. Otherwise you can just set the taxes to 0.

Furthermore, I am having a very hard time raising troops. Speaking of recruiting sacred troops, I noticed for the first time on the recruiting screen there is a Category "Holy".

You are likely having gold problems because Mictlan goes through a lot of troops, and can produce a lot with limited resources. Order 3 is a very good pick for them for this reason. The "holy" number corresponds to your pretender's dominion rating + one fifth of the number of temples you have. It limits the number of sacred non-commanders you can recruit in a province per turn.

When performing blood sacrifices to raise dominion, does the level of the priest make a difference? Does proximity to the edge of your dominion border make a difference, or can you just do it all in your capital?

The level of the priest determines how many slaves can be sacrificed per turn. A jade knife will increase this number by two. The location matters, as each sacrificed slave counts as one temple in that province.

The Call Lesser Horror spell requires 2 blood slaves and results in 200 fatigue. My Moon Priest, for 230 gp, has the required skills, but does not use more than two blood slaves to reduce his fatigue so he can run.

Call lesser horror is one of the "suicide" spells that are out there. You could always try send lesser horror to save the gold costs.