[dirtywick]

Graeme Dice said:

I suggest that you should re-read page 69 of your manual where it describes blood hunting. The only effect that the population of a province has is that the blood hunt can fail if the province has less than 5000 people. Population has zero effect on the number of slaves captured, which is d6+blood skill. Hunting in your capital is an extremely bad idea, unless it's the only province you have, and you need blood slaves very quickly at the start of the game. The rest of your arguments seem to be based on the misconception that high population provinces have an effect on how many blood slaves you gather.

Well then I can't explain why I average more than you do. My mistake there though, and maybe it's just perception.

In the middle age, the nations that can teleport given the same conditions are Pythium, Ermor, Arcoscephale, Man (Cloud trapeze only needs air 2), Marignon, Mictlan, T'ien Ch'i (1/4 masters), Caelum, Vanheim, Bandar Log, Atlantis, and R'Lyeh. That's more than half the available nations.

So that makes it a negative? It's still half that can't too. Take away the Starshine Skullcap though, and you still have a 1/4 chance of using Teleport and still have flying mages, and I'm sure that list will get smaller.

The death scale has zero effect on blood hunting, except for the minor population loss. At 0.6% population loss per turn for death 3, it takes 49 turns to lose a quarter and 116 turns to lose 50% of your population in your home province. Your other provinces will take even longer to lose their population, since your dominion takes time to spread to them. The winner of even a massive game is almost always decided by turn 50.

Abysia is supposed to be relatively unaffected by the death scale, which is why they do not lose any income nor supplies from it. The problem, is that those two effects are minor and are negated by the increased affliction rate suffered by your mages.

You're neglecting to include that both blood hunting and patrolling kill population, so it'll be signifcantly sooner that you kill the population below whatever level you find acceptable to blood hunt, plus it'll never grow back as long as it's in your dominion. IMO Death is bad for any blood nation.

But, you know, at least we agree Growth is probably a better choice.

I don't think you understand how necessary it is to explode out of your home province. Ideally, you'd want to have captured 10 provinces by turn 10, although that can be difficult at times. If you're doing really well, you'll have captured 20 provinces by turn 10, especially if you took a dragon that can capture a province per turn starting at turn two.

You can have two armies fielded capable of taking provinces in 5 turns or less with Abysia, 20 Lava Warriors and a A. Dragon for divine blessing should mop up even knights easily. What you get for imprisoning your pretender is good scales and a good bless. You can get 10 in 10 turns easily, probably more if you took at least a moderate bless like B4F4E4 and use Lava Warriors, and be better off in the long run.

Not that I'm saying it's a bad idea to take an awake pretender and branch out early, especially if you're playing short games or small maps. Play how you want to, but other things work too.

Magic 3 is a strategy for people who plan to survive to the late game, I'd prefer to survive the early game through a powerful pretender, then have extra gold to power research, instead of spending design points on it.

Good scales will get you gold too and you'll probably be better off in the long run. It's two different ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Magic 3 adds up research quickly btw, you'd notice it when you have a couple of mages.

Abysian troops have a protection of 16, attack and defense of 10, and 15 hitpoints (not 20). This is virtually identical to every other heavy infantry unit. The 15 hitpoints is 50% more than normal humans, but only 2 more than the emerald guard, which also have a 13 attack, 15 defense, and 17 protection. With the guard's higher base defense they will also actually get to use the 15 protection from the shield in close combat.

Yup, nearly double hp. The Emerald Guard also has lower strength, a weapon that does less damage than most of the Abysian infantry, higher encumberance, a lower MR, half of Abysians have a higher battlefield movement, and EG costs more in both gold and resources (except when compared to Lava Warriors which are even more superior anyway), doesn't radiate heat and is vunerable to fire. Lava Warriors are universally better. Emerald Guards are great units, most heavy infantry is worse. That's supposed to be Abysias thing, great heavy infantry though, so no surprise that's exactly what they have.

Just about every nations starting army plus the first turns recruitment can do that on independents 5.

Just for comparison's sake, Abysia can do it on Indy 7 and sometimes 8 without even adding a mage or priest. Their starting army is really good. Most nations start out with a handful of ranged units and some of their weaker infantry and take a huge loss their first attack unless you beef it up a bit or send your pretender or a mage or something. Abysia doesn't need to do that.