[Micah]

The reason for my preference for demonbred over warlocks early isn't due to cost, but due to maximizing your capital slot use. Pumping out enough blood hunters while still leaving enough warlocks around to do warlocky things can be a challenge depending on the map, and I favor the demonbred merely so that you don't end up losing any potential blood hunters. They also do work well early when you have less gold to play with, and since they'll be pretty much exclusively blood hunting you do save on upkeep as well. If you find recruitable blood hunters early on I would likely swap to warlocks immediately.

I'm not at all a fan of labbing blood provinces, since it provides any attackers with a nice prize on top of taking out your blood hunters, and it also greatly adds to the expense of your operations. If I was labbing I would be more tempted to get warlocks as well to leverage their diversity, but I'm quite content having 10 demonbred out in the countryside doing their thing with shuttles so I don't waste any cap recruitment turns by having disease deaths.