[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by militarist

Just tried them.

Sleeping blood fountain , empowering S2 mages with 1b.
Early expansion with with atavi archers/bandar warrior/ cold blasts (I use them much more then bolts or salor's death, if I have good archery or mages)
Later - horrorspam/horrormarks. Didn't use sacred warriors at all at these stages. Without strong bless - I think just forget about them until high level Alt research is a good idea - you can mass them later in all castles, just will have spear version wich is not so bad anyway. Horrors are really funnier and less expected. Btw, horrors, lowering morale + your AWE troops + panic/siege items = a cool synergy.

Blood fountain is needed just for horrors to fill the early-mid period, and has a lot of usage later- you are free to experiment with pretender magic paths - you will have quite a lot of points with sleeping pretender, even with magic +2. So you can still take not bad bless. I'm not a big fan of Air bless, as it looses it's value with time, but still in such situation if you really can't live without sacreds (I can !) it's not a bad idea to use it. If your main weakness is early game, why not to sacrifice some points to minimize your risks here?
Even the minimal usage of fountain - forging and horrors is very nice, and in late game you can build blood economy, which sometimes is a good idea. Especially for a nation which wants peace to get to high alt and gets a chance to live in peace.

Lowering morale also makes repel effective.