My Mictlan strategy: okay, but needs work

[BigJMoney]

It seems I see everyone say that Mictlan isn't good for aggressive Dominion, but that just didn't jive with what I read about them, so I decided to see what I could do.

Pretender:
Blood Fountain 10 Dominion
3 Order, 3 Growth, 3 Luck, 1 Heat
6 Blood, 4 Astral
Watchtower

I picked Astral because I wanted to be able to craft rings of sorcery and wizardry to enhance my mages if need be. Also, there are a lot of ritual spells that use astral/blood that I thought could be beneficial.

My basic strategy was to use all the income to mad castle/temple/lab my provinces so that I could blood hunt and defend myself. I would then defend those provinces with buffed Priest Kings who could cast things like Haste, Mass Protection, Blood Rain and Rush of Strength on hordes of slaves. Eventually, it would be the H3 priest kings who would perform the sacrifices once their province was filled with troops.

The blood hunting seems to work. It turns out I've encountered a major bug, too. None of my provinces have my growth 3 scale!! They never did since the beginning of the game, but I never noticed. Still, I use 2 hunting priests in any province that doesn't have lots of gold. In provinces with gold, I simply build a lab and use the slaves from it. I have sacrifices all OVER the place and still have blood left over. That's the good part.

The defense armies suck. It turns out that capturing slaves takes forever. I'm nearing turn 50, and only a few of my provinces are filled with slaves. At this point in a MP game, I imagine I would be steamrolled right about now. The only thing going for me is the fact that the AI is either battling each other, or got a slow start versus the level 6 Indies, because my meager armies are still larger than theirs.

For offense, I use mainly blessed Jaguar and Eagle warriors, who get only +2 Str and +1 MR, but it helps. I also use a lot of light inf to absorb damage. Fanaticism typically wins my battles, because I take heavier losses, but manage to rout my enemies. I also have a Black Servant who is taking down whole armies by himself with a Wraith Sword, Horror Helmet, Dragon Scale Armor, Boots of Quickness, Bane Venom Charm, Dancing Trident. I'm tempted to make another, it's working so well. He got 5 stars his first turn in enemy lands. I'm not certain why, but I think the bane venom charm got him a lot of free kills.

So here is the deal: My economy is okay, but my plan to protect it with massive amounts of slaves seems flawed. I might supliment my castles with weak troops from cross breeding now and fiends of darkness later.

I'd like to find a good use for Hellbind Heart. It looks like a great spell, but I'm not sure when to use it. Also, I can't seem to get my mages to use reinvigoration. I had one mage go completely fatigued and get killed because he would not obey the script and cast reinvigoration! Also, I've never seen a mage use it automatically. It's a freaking AWESOME spell, considering how expensive battlefield blood magic is, but they don't use it! I'm also thinking about arming the blood hunters with a few slaves and setting them to sabbath slave. This is CB, so it's doable.

=$= Big J Money =$=

[Arralen]

- Bane Venom Charm : Killed pop counts as .. kills. Bug - Exploit.

- Use F9 bless with Jaguar Warrior, they will kill anything short of 100% fire resistant SC in the first combat turn. No need to take losses!

- reinvigoration is (partly?) broken in Dom2

- you need 5000 pop to hunt blood with 100% effectivity, but not more

- to get growth to +3 will take quite some time. There might be sites which give negative modifier, or ememy dominions encroaching

- research blood, summon Devils

[Ygorl]

There's a bug where +3 scales will sometimes disappear in the first or second turn of a game; not all scales are affected, and it doesn't always happen, but the game I played Mictlan I lost my Growth and one other scale and it took a while for them to come back. They did come back, but it was a shame to have missed out on them for much of the early/mid game.

Hopefully fixed in Domoinions 3...

[Wish]

how to use hellbind heart: load a mage up with a rune smasher and a penetration charm (also sorcery or wizards ring if you can spare it) then send them in against bogus the troll and his party or single SCs.

alternatively alot of weaker mages with plenty of bloodslaves and some light armies to act as a human shield, placed towards the front for range and hellbind to your hearts content.

(runesmashers and penetration charms still a plus)

[BigJMoney]

Ah, darn. The AI already got to Bogus and took him down, although they didn't finish the job. The Great Mother is actually in that province right now, guarded by 2 legendary lions. I guess I could settle for her, hehe. I wonder if she picked up his magic items. I know this because I set up a spy in that indy province permanently.

@Arrelen
It's interesting you say I need 5000 pop, because I seem to be doing fine right now when about half the provinces I hunt in are ~3000. The other half are maybe 5000-6000. Maybe it has to do with the amount of hunting I'm doing, overall. If a province doesn't have hoards of gold, it gets hunted.

I'll try to figure out how to get that F9 bless next time. I'll probably need a 0 point pretender that starts with 4 dominion and 3+ fire magic. I can't remember off the top of my head if Mictlan has access to that, but I'll look for it.

Is there any use at all for Mictlan's slaves? I thought I had a pretty good utility strategy for them, but they just aren't working out. Should I spam hire Tribal Kings now and hope I live through the next 25 turns? I do have towers everywhere.

=$=

[KissBlade]

Mictlan gets the moloch for f9 bless and also you cannot hellbind pretenders if I recall. Another thing is, it's inefficient to hunt below 5K provinces and slaves are used for patrolling blood hunt provinces =).

[PvK]

Mictlan has blood priests for 80 gold who are sacred so they cost half-upkeep and so are I think the best blood-to-gold ratio unit to use for blood hunting. Not that gold is necessarily the limiting factor.