Quote:
Originally Posted by WraithLord
Also, vampires as blood hunters, I assume you mean vampire lords (or whatever their name). Aren't they more useful auto-summoning, or fighting or casting spells. Besides, they come into play mid to end game, by then you either have an established blood economy or you'll probably never have one.
|
Realize this is a deep resurrection of a post in a topic that was already necroed, but just getting back into Dominions after some time away and wanted to comment on this.
LA Ulm's Vampire Counts are the vampires I think of as blood hunters - 44 blood slaves for a B2 hunter, or 49 blood slaves for the equivalent of a B3 via an SDR. Granted, from a pure blood economy perspective they are notably less efficient than Mictlan's Tlahuelpuchi, however:
a. Mictlan's comes at Blood 6 while LA Ulm's comes at Blood 0, which makes them available at very different points in the game.
b. Vampire Counts are a spammable unit that can take on many roles throughout the game, while Tlahuelpuchi are likely only worth their cost as bloodhunters and in rare cases assassins (as they compete against Infernal Disease at the same blood level). In particular, on top of the advantages of immortality, regeneration, and slightly superior stats across the board, Vampire Counts make significantly better demon leaders than do Tlahuelpuchi.
c. the freespawn of the Counts plays an integral role in LA Ulm armies as chaff for Ulm's excellent Rangers. (However: does someone who knows the game better than I do know if thralls have gold upkeep? Used to have EDI's database bookmarked, can't find it now)
d. Vampire Counts are likely the best that LA Ulm can do for a bloodhunter, while the extreme efficiency of the Mictlan Priest makes him quite difficult to out-do (save for MA Mictlan, as mentioned elsewhere).
All that said, anyone better at math than I am want to throw in on efficiency of maintenance-free summons as bloodhunters? As more recent posts are looking at opportunity costs of bloodhunting, we should be able to calculate an average initial gold expenditure per bloodslave, then multiply that by number of bloodslaves spent to summon the creature. That will give us the total "lifetime" gold cost of the summons, which can then be used comparatively to see how long it takes a particular summon to surpass a non-summoned hunter, both in terms of his initial gold cost AND upkeep (earlier comparisons seemed to bypass the former, which does matter). How long, for example, would it take for a Vampire Count to out-efficient a Mictlan Priest? A decade? A century?