[Graeme Dice]

dirtywick said:
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.

The right provinces are any province with a population of around 5000, so that's not too much surprise. I think you're greatly overexaggerating how many slaves you get, however, since 6 B3 mages will average about 7 slaves each per turn. Those 6 mages also represent the total commander production of your capital for six turns, which is the real weakness of Abysia as a blood nation.

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.

You need three apprentices for every province you conquer that has a population of about 5000 if you want to seriously invest in blood magic.

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.

Blood hunting with warlocks and demonbred means that those units aren't available to cast rituals or forge items, or lead your summoned devils respectively. It also means that you've essentially devoted the turn that you recruited that mage at your capital to blood hunting, since you still have to recruit an apprentice to replace the expensive hunter. Then you have to constantly recruit replacement warlock apprentices as they die of old age. If you want 15 blood hunters to support a good blood economy, you'll be spending almost half of the first 30 turns recruiting those blood hunters and their replacements.

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.

How many nations have real difficulty moving their mages around? Most have serious problems recruiting sufficient quantities of their capital only mages, but that's a different problem from getting them where they need to be.

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.

Keeping your blood hunting close to the capital is another way to say that you won't be seriously blood hunting.

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.

Abysia should be playing with death 3, not a growth scale, and yet trying to take advantage of their death scale resistance hurts them more than almost any other nation thanks to their universally old mages.

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.

You'll be buying a mage every single turn in every castle, so researching won't be benefitted that much from imprisoning your pretender, and you'd get twice as much gold to purchase your mages and troops with if you had a pretender to help you expand.

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.

I think you might want to compare Abysia's troops to those available to other nations. Abysia pays double price for units that are immune to fire and radiate heat. Their other statistics are nearly identical (except for hitpoints) to humans of half their cost. Compare them to Emerald Guard to see what they have to go up against for similar cost.