One other thing, there are some really good blood magic sites if you plan on doing a lot of blood sorceries. There are a couple that reduce the cost by 40%, and one (I think) that reduces it by 60%. That's a huge difference if the bulk of your army is blood summons....
Whooo man, I'll say I'm way too scared of dominion death to go with a 2 dominion! A couple of stealthy preachers, or a stealthy/tough enemy god and it doesn't matter how tough your sacreds are. Is this something you use against other players, or against the AI?
As you say, different strokes for different folks, but I find I usually pour all my efforts to researching rather than blood hunting until I get up to the pretty good summons around blood-5 (I just feel like it's a waste of resources to summon bats...they're barely better than my nationals). For my play style at least, I've got plenty of time to get up at least 3 castles well before my blood economy gets going, and 25-30 jaguar warriors, even moderately blessed, coming out every turn go a long way towards buying me the time I need to get the good stuff. I'll take 25 fairly strong jaguar warriors over 2 uber blessed ones (or even 6) every time. Plus, as I mentioned, having extra castles lets you build up a whole lot of the cheapo priests which you can very rapidly switch from research to blood hunting when the time is right. PLUS having castles over a decent percentage of the provinces you plan on blood hunting in gives you a whole lote more resiliance to all the crap that the enemy is gonna try to do to your blood economy.
Interesting how different people's take on the same nation is.
