Some sacrifice/preaching questions

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by SurvivalistMerc (on the Assassination and Sacrifice thread):



(Effect of blood sacrifice = 1 temple effect per slave - I assume this is in addition to the normal temple effect for Abysia/Vanheim)

This is interesting. Might be something I would do if a major battle were next to a province where there was barely enemy dominion and I wanted to change to morale effects.

But I don't think I will be doing blood sacrifices a lot. I have much better use for those slaves (when I can get them).

Wait until you play Mictlan.

In any case, it sounds like dominion strength is even more important for gods of Mictlan, since it gives you more dominion per blood slave (and you get less benefit from building a lot of temples, so you probably won't). And here I thought that since their dominion strength was automatically reduced to 0 for all its normal effects, it wasn't important.

Still, if you sacrifice all your base 3 slaves/turn, you won't even equal what a god of the same dominion strength sitting in his home province gets for free - without a prophet! (The god gets 10 + 2xS, the temple gets S and the home province gets S; Mictlan gets 10 for the god, plus (slaves sacrificed)xS, so to achieve parity, they need to sacrifice 4 slaves per turn).
So you really need to start slave hunting and get a HPotS.


One more question about Mictlan - why is the "Ceremonial Faith" theme available to them? Does it also boost priest levels for the purpose of determining how many slaves a priest can sacrifice per turn? (For Abysia and Vanheim too?) If it only affects preaching (and not blood sacrificing), Mictlan shouldn't be able to take it - they can't preach. (You could argue that nations whose national themes have no sacred troops shouldn't be allowed to take Water Cult, either - but at least they could use it with independents. AFAIK independent priests recruited by Mictlan still don't get to preach.)

And since I brought up Ceremonial Faith, how does its bonus interact with the inquisitor bonus, if both apply at the same time? The manual doesn't have detailed preach mechanics (does a temple boost the effect of preaching in addition to the maximum level you can preach to and its own free dominion boost? How does the inquisition bonus work in the first place? Does CF have any effect without a temple?)

Maybe it would be simpler just to give an example showing several of the relevant factors, for example a High Inquisitor prophet with Ceremonial Faith preaching in a temple in enemy dominion. (There should be at least three dominion effects, if I understand correctly: the temple's passive effect, the prophet's passive effect and the preach/inquisition effect.)

[LordArioch]

I think sacrifices should come directly from the lab if possible...its annoying to need to redistribute sacrifices everytime I pool blood slaves...also I haven't been particularly impressed by the dominion spreading capability of blood sacrifices, probably because I can only get 1 slave sacrificed occasionally no matter which priest I order to sacrifice.