[Baalz]

Yeah, I played Lanka a bunch yesterday (studying up for a new MP game), and I’ve got a much better handle on them now.

1) At least the way I play them, Mictlan will always have significantly more blood slaves for two reasons. First, as previously mentioned the blood hunters are 50% less expensive, this makes a big difference when you’re focusing on blood and plan to be paying upkeep on lots of blood hunters and maximizing the amount of provinces you can use for blood hunting (as in don't have much income). Secondly all the other units are much less expensive. Obviously this is a trade off as you’re getting pretty good units for your gold, but every game I’m playing Lanka I’m strapped for gold as I always want more brawlers, more of the very expensive (non-sacred, high upkeep) random path mages to increase my path coverage, more of the expensive demon kings to lead my demons, etc (you didn’t want to reanimate corpses did you?). Not only are you balancing the spending of new gold, but also the upkeep cost for Lanka I find is much higher. This cuts not only into how many/how fast you deploy blood hunters, but also how many provinces you can devote to blood hunting. Again, this is more the way I play it than anything else, but I find Lanka is harder to really focus on blood hunting because of the opportunity cost. At the end of the day though, even if everything else was equal you’ll have 50% more blood hunters with Mictlan.

2) I don’t think Lanka can blood sacrifice, can they? If they can I must have totally missed that.

3) Lanka’s national summons are indeed pretty good, probably about par with Mictlan’s. I might give an edge to Mictlan on the low end summons as flying sacreds is a nice complement to their forces and solidly help against Jaguar warrior counters, while Lanka’s low end summons don’t really add a lot to their versatility (wohoo, more brawlers!). High end summons are probably comparable in power…gotta love that blood vengeance!

4) I maintain my point about Mictlan having an advantage due to not having to rely on random pics for the simple reason of economics. Again, this may change with my play style, but I found I had no problem having the paths I needed with Lanka but the tradeoff was that I spent a decent amount of money on expensive, high upkeep mages. With Mictlan, you recruit exactly what you need, no waste, and everybody is sacred so your upkeep stays low. When you’re really focusing on maximizing your blood economy it’s vital that you pinch every penny you can. With Mictlan I regularly end up with probably 80-100% of the territories between 5k-10k set to blood hunting, with Lanka I can’t come anywhere near that much blood hunting before the rest of my economy stalls from upkeep and a few necessary purchases per turn.

5) One other thing not directly related to blood magic, but very useful nonetheless for guarding your blood hunters is that Mictlan gets Jaguar warriors for PD over 20. If you’ve got a good bless (which you better with Mictlan) this can be an amazingly effective surprise landmine. 30-40 PD aint cheap, but I’ve wiped out some surprisingly large invading armies with it when they weren’t expecting any resistance (and had no jaguar counters). And you guessed it…no upkeep. Makes it easy to defend high risk blood hunting sites when somebody tries to take out your blood slave flow.

Again, I’m really enjoying Lanka and they’ve got some significant advantages, but in my mind from a pure blood point of view Mictlan is hands down a better nation because of the economics. When focusing on blood, it all comes down to economics since you’re essentially trading gold for blood slaves so Mictlan’s much lower overhead maintains their title as undisputed best blood nation.