[Baalz]

Awww, thanks Bob. Basically how it boils down is that there is no difference in the blood slaves you get for any population over 5000, so blood hunting in a 10k population province will get you the same blood slaves as the 5k province, but (all other things being equal) will cost you twice as much gold. The other thing to keep in mind to is depending on your scales, and if you're patrolling to reduce unrest your population may be dropping, so if you start hunting in provinces real close to 5k you could drop under that before long and you start getting diminishing returns.

So, to answer your question as to where to blood hunt, as always this depends on a couple things. Always start with the provinces closest to 5k (with no mines or other gold boosting sites) as these will be the "cheapest" blood slaves. As you start wanting more and more blood slaves, start moving up the chain to higher and higher population provinces but keep in mind each one will have a higher cost in gold than the one before it. How high you go really depends on the strategy you’re following, you’re almost always going to need some gold so this is where you need to focus on balance. If you're going for a very tight blood focus (a good strat with Mictlan), I find that in very general terms by the time I end up putting blood hunters in the territories close to 10k population my gold income has dropped to the point that I enter more of my “blood mode” and stop recruiting units every turn and instead save the little gold I get for buying mages for specific needs and building labs and temples. By that time you’ve got enough blood slaves coming in that you can get a good amount of summoning done every round to compensate.

On blood hunting the provinces under 5k it’s more a question of the upkeep cost of the blood hunters because the gold income hit isn’t as much. With Mictlan specifically the blood hunters are so damn cheap, I find it’s also worthwhile to put them in the 4k-5k population provinces as well. You won’t get quite as many blood slaves (4/5 the blood slaves for a 4k population), but when your blood hunters cost 60 gold and are holy you’re not paying much for the blood slaves either. And again, it all depends on what your other options are, how valuable the blood slaves are to you, how easy it is to defend those blood hunters, what other territories you have, etc.

The thing to keep in mind is that you’re always “paying” gold for blood slaves, you just need to decide what price you’re willing to pay. The more blood slaves you want, the more expensive they are…but getting to the point that you’re sucking in 100+ blood slaves a turn is a pretty sweet spot if you can do it while remaining stable.