Quote:
Graeme Dice said:
Blood spells require more slaves to get an equivalent effect to other magic paths, and the boots need to be put on dozens of mages, so you'll need to spend thiry or fourty blood slaves a turn just to equip the new mages you'll be purchasing.
Abysia blood hunters are warlock apprentices, which are capital only and prevent you from recruiting a more generally useful Demonbred or Warlock in the middle age. This is even worse in the early age, where you have to make the choice between an Anointed of Rhuax and a warlock apprentice.
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Well, you don't need to give the boots to
every mage, just the important ones with good picks, HOF abilities, or prophets. And besides, you should have plenty of blood slaves, if you don't you're not bloodhunting enough, it's not uncommon for me to pull in more than 100 a turn with 6 hunters if you give them Dowsing Rods if you're picking the right provinces.
Once you have access to the boots, though, you'll only need to purchase a handful of Apprentices and forget about it as they're not good for much else and anything they can do a Warlock can do better. And if it's that much of an issue, you can use the Warlocks and Demobreds (who won't get old) to do the hunting for you temporarily if you really can't recruit an Apprentice for whatever reason.
Another thing is Warlocks and Demombreds are easy to get them to where you need them either through teleport or flying, so you don't really need as many as a nation that has difficulty moving their mages around the map. Just keep your blood hunting close to home so your Apprentices don't have to go far and it's not that much of an issue.
I don't know, old age can be a pain, but I find that with rejuvenate, Growth scales, the boots, maybe building a pretender that can cast Gift of Health, Abysia actually has an easier time dealing with old age than most nations.
Think about it, Abysia doesn't need the early game help of mages or a pretender, their national troops crush indies easily so you can imprison your pretender and take good scales and get a lot of researching done. Then later in the game every other nations mages are still dying of old age and yours will be able to either cast spells to be young again or not age at all, and the cost of that is a tougher early game, but so what? You're not really having a tough time anyway as your nationals can take most conventional armies easily. I think Abysia is balanced really well in that regard.