[Baalz]

That’s silly Chris. If you look back at my guides there are several
where people question the feasibleness of my (deliberately fuzzy on
hard details) opening where I come back and give a very concrete,
numbers based example demonstrating it. Furthermore, most of my
guides are more or less outlining the actual results I got in a MP
game, or at a bare minimum stuff reliably repeatable against the AI.
If I’m able to pull it off when others don’t see how it can work this
seems like a good place to write a guide. Is it going to play out
smoothly every time? Of course not – some times you just can’t find
suitable provinces to blood hunt, sometimes Bogus sieges your capital,
sometimes every one of your warlocks gets diseased at the end of year
one, sometimes you stumble on indie mages that blast your first
expansion party with orb lightning, and sometimes your neighbor comes
in with a rush you have difficulty dealing with. On the other hand
sometimes your neighbor is fighting off his other neighbor giving you
easy pickings while you find mount chaining and two sage sites while
your other neighbor took an imprisoned pretender with a low dominion
score. My guides are fairly fuzzy to give you an idea of where you
want to generally be heading, not a spreadsheet showing how many
provinces/blood slaves you should have on a given turn. At the end of
the day is it really a deal breaker if it’s turn 25 before you manage
to get 7 soul contracts rather than turn 20? Maybe you’ve instead
managed to make an early dom kill by sneaking your vamp queen into
their cap and blood sacrificing more aggressively? You have to play
the game as it comes, roll with the punches and take the opportunities
that show up.