[Peter Ebbesen]

Nagot Gick Fel said
Correct, if you assume the Acolyte loses all his usefulness as soon as the Mictlan priest reaches the end of his own life expectancy. Otherwise, it's pretty bad maths, and since living Acolytes are more useful to me than dead priests, I'd be glad to keep on paying the former's upkeep.

Be nice. You have not done anything to show that the Acolyte should have a longer average life expectancy than a priest save the hypothetical "if an average Priest lived 10 turns shorter than a 30 turn average Acolyte due to fires from afar", which is almost certainly not the case in practise as that would require an immense number of Fires from Afar assuming a decent mass of priests and lots of slave troopers (as postulated earlier), since most blood hunters that die tend to be either a) wiped out by mass casualty spells (like murdering winter) or battle (and an Acolyte will not be able to retreat from a castle defense any more than a Priest will) You could argue it based on better hitpoints and fire resistance, and could then assign an arbitrary increased average life expectancy to stuff into the cost equation but I reject the 30 round vs 20 round until I see some voodoo mathematics to support it.

Nagot Gick Fel said

That's bad math again. Assuming U is the upkeep/turn spend on bloodhunters, I is the total income/turn, and assuming this 36% figure is correct, we're comparing (U / I) to (U * 1.36 / I) here, which is definitely not the same thing, unless U is big enough when compared to I.

No it isn't - bad math, that is. I just happen to be measuring a different quantity than you.

I was not saying it was a 36% differential of your upkeep compared to income (the calculations you are making), but a 36% differential of blood per gold. I.e. I was measuring the relative usefulness of investing gold in order to get blood (which can then be scaled by however much gold you want to invest), not the impact relative to your income.

Your actual income does not factor into the blood/gold relationship - it is only truly releveant when you want to find out how much to scale by or in case you want to make specific examples (e.g. including extra temples purchased to find out what is best in a specific situation).

Then there's the fact that bloodhunters don't hunt 100% of the time. When unrest comes out of hand (and this may happen even in heavily patrolled provinces), it may be a good idea to have your hunters perform magic research for a turn or 2 if there's a lab in the place. The point here is that a 40% advantage over a degraded value isn't as impressive as a 40% advantage over an ideal value.

True. On the positive side, it gets some research done that would otherwise have required somebody else (who also cost money to recruit and maintain) to do it, so it is certainly not wasted. In fact, under magic 3 the Mictlan priest is one of the best researchers in the game in terms of RP/gold, nearly matching the sage - you can never have too many priests - there is always a use for them.

Wyvern2 said:
Wow, someone taking Peter on in a battle of math. Have they no fear

Why should they? Nagot Gick Fel makes some very good points regarding income reduction that I have conveniently ignored. Of course, that cuts both ways. Just as I ignored the long term income reduction from hard blood hunting early in the game, he ignored that Mictlan can run Order 3 while Diabolical Faith has a forced Turmoil 1. In all likelyhood, not only is it cheaper to get priests in the early game for Mictlan, but Mictlan will also have more money to do so and will continue to have a massive advantage in provincial income until such time as provinces are laid waste.

(The thrust of this discussion is so funny because both of us started out only discussing unit vs. unit, but as it is obvious that the entire theme is important for a thorough investigation, we have both begun selectively to use the facts that support our case. Hey, it happens, and the nice thing is that I learn things about Marignon that I hadn't thought of, since it is not a favourite nation of mine.)



This will to some degree be countered by the "but Marignon will preach via inquisitors instead of building temples" issue, though an inquisitor is 110 gold (plus upkeep of 3.67 gold/turn) vs a temple's 200 gold cost and 0 upkeep (and requires a lab, a temple, and a fortress to be recruited just like the Mictlan priest). Of course an inquisitor is mobile and a more useful general purpose unit than a temple, but then again, he does not count towards boosting the maximum dominion either. So while using inquisitors instead of temples is certainly a useful advantage for targeting of dominion, I am not certain that it is a great saving in money and doubt that it is enough to make up for the significant difference between turmoil 1 and order 3.

As for the very real need of mass sacrifice for Mictlan, I really ought to have included it though it is hard to get a good estimate since. The best guess would be about 1/2 priest output per turn per province in a very competitive game where everybody else is dominion pushing, but that is certainly not the sort of massive sacrifice I would do for the major part of the game. Still, it certainly does reduce the advantage - I am just unsure how much in practise.


As for the ever increasing income from the example, that does not continue to hold in Dominions 2 once the independents have been killed and it is time to face organised opposition. In fact, what with population reducing spells that can make the world end up a wasteland, it is a pretty safe bet that the wealth of the world and most realms within it will decrease over time once independents have been killed.* In fact, if one was bloodminded enough, one could argue that it was better for a player to kill his population by himself for personal gain than wait for somebody else to do it with a few gems and a targeted spell. (Which is why I am always tempted to choose death 3 in MP because my projections suggest it is the best allocation of points in nearly all circumstances, but it is just too damn unthematic for my tastes)


* Except at such time in the late game when excessive clamhoarding and a fever fetish fetish completely dominates the economy. However, when that becomes the case the arguments concerning the long-term economic damage done by mass bloodhunting becomes even less compelling.