[Baalz]

Yes, your blood income is going to be more modest than one of the real blood powerhouses. You've got an awake vamp queen with B6 to help you get off the floor, and later on vamp lords, helophagi and demon lords are going to give you a handful more blood hunters when they're not doing other stuff, but by and large you'll be limited to less than one warlock a turn to bloodhunt and you're not going to be able to use all of them for blood hunting. That's OK though because not only do warlocks make excellent bloodhunters you don't need nearly the same amount of blood slaves as one of the nations who are really reliant on dumping large amounts of slaves every turn into summons. Lets take a look at some numbers.

Your vamp queen is going to have limited usefulness helping with early expansion before you have any buffs researched so its a good idea to have her help with some blood hunting. Lets say that in year one you manage to task 6 warlocks with bloodhunting. 6 warlocks over 3 provinces with a vamp queen supplementing will, lets say conservatively pull about 35 blood slaves per turn starting turn 6 (it'll start off slower, but the vamp queen will be doing more blood hunting as well). This is just ballpark numbers, but 30 bloodslaves per turn puts you at 450 blood slaves over the next 15 turns hitting my benchmark of 7 soul contracts inside year 2 with some slaves left over for blood sacrificing. I think this is a fairly reasonable minimum, its not hard to see how you could do better if you focused on bloodhunting and had reasonable luck.

If you manage to add another 6 bloodhunters in year two this will put you at 70 slaves per turn, roughly hitting my target of cranking out a soul contract every turn. Take a couple turns off of soul contracts in year 3 to pop out a bunch of boots of youth, and a you shouldn't have much trouble scaring up a handful more for a few demon knights.

As your soul contracts start hitting critical mass (15-20) you'll phase them out of your assembly line with hopefully about 100 slaves per turn to play with for the other things I suggested as your vamp queen hits the front lines full time. The really nice thing is all those devils generating each turn require no upkeep and no more blood slaves so you can use your slaves for more exotic things than standard troops. You really only need to pick 1-2 per turn out of empowering, summoning arch devils, vamp lords, wide spread horror air raids, etc.

Now, you could maybe do better than this, maybe do worse but it's the right ballpark. My strategy also calls for very modest research in the early part of the game, really nothing that can't be handled almost completely by mages from secondary forts. You need constr-2 for the soul contracts, and....well, that's pretty much it aside from whatever you decide would be easy and helpful in whatever early wars you find yourself in with maybe a bit of alt research to transform your pretender into a real terror. Over year two you pick up augury and get your fire income pumping while setting up a couple more secondary castles and chugging steadily along construction research. Your gold income is modest, but so is your outlay. You're leaning heavily on your free (well, gold free) devils so most of your income goes to mages and getting castles set up. It's a slow process to get to constr-6, and you're very likely going to be in the bottom half of the research charts...but that's OK because what you have (devils & flaming infantry with fireball/prison of fire/paralyze/smite/etc.) is quite effective enough at this stage of the game.

Once you start cranking out the lightless lanterns your research will pick up a bit, and before long you'll have vamp lords and the D gems will start trickling in if you want to supplement this with skull mentors. You are generally going to be trailing a bit on research regardless, but that's totally OK because you have such awesome efficient leverage. Fire immune recruitable troops with strong fire immune free spawn with strong flying maneuverability with very good early combat spells means you can do a whole lot with not much research. As the game progresses a modest amount of force multipliers goes a long way given the troops you've got, so just dropping blood lust blood lust on some devils is more than enough to contend with most nations dropping much more advanced buffs. You don't need to blaze up the conjuration/blood research tree fast to get good summons - you've got them popping out your capital for free each turn early in year one. To be sure, research is important, but you can be extremely competitive against somebody who is leading you in research by a significant amount.