[Psycho]

Good old blood sacrificing. It is definitively bugged with the two checks per blood slave and if that's not on the bug shortlist, it should be. And due to this bug and the fact how preaching is weak, it is definitively overpowered. I am a bad person, since knowing all this I still tried to use it twice.

First time I was playing Sauromatia. I had two strong opponents - Rlyeh and TC, late game, everyone filled with gem gens. I started stockpiling slaves for the push, but the game ended by concession before I started. The point of this is that I would have a very very hard time defeating them militarily, since we were all about the same strength, but there was pretty much nothing they could do against the dom push. Two opponents in late game, roughly equal in strength, but where one has the option to blood sac are not nearly evenly matched.

Second time I took MA Pangaea. I wanted to make dominion push my main strategy. Nice cheap stealthy H2 priests, 200g temples, blood sac, I took vamp queen with high dom for the pretender to spawn an army of vampire lords. Then 20 turns into the game I realized that MA Pangaea cannot blood sac, it's only EA version that can do it. And then Vanheim became my main opponent and seeing my horde of vampire lords he started blood sacing to limit their effectiveness. Oh boy, was it hard to defend from this, even with my 200g temples and nice cheap priests. He would teleport a Van thug into my lands, then next turn summon a dark citadel there, build a temple and start blood sacing in the middle of my territory. My dominion started crumbling fast.

The best defense from this is to raid - constantly raid his blood hunters. Golems are nice, since they are immune to most blood spells and can teleport and return. Unrest spells are good. Assassination spells work well against some blood nations (Vans are pretty much immune to them). Revelers are also nice if you are Pangaea, but there are also other nations with spies and stuff. Blood hunters in castles are the toughest, but if you take the province during magic phase, they lose two turns of blood hunting. When you take the province their order are reset for the current turn and on the next turn when they regain the province the blood hunt order can't be issued.

When I put up the Gift of nature's bounty and started spamming temples and dryads everywhere, thing started looking better and I even managed to push his dominion back. A group of about ten dryads stealthy preaching on his castle was able to stop blood sac dominion spreading from there. I don't know what his dominion score was, though. But still, I had to overpower him in priests 10:1 to start fighting back.

Ideally what I think a patch should do is reduce the temple checks to one per slave and move preaching to the same step in the turn sequence as other dominion spread. That way preaching would actually be useful against blood sac.