Bad Monkeys; Or how to jump-start the blood game?

[Carcaroth]

I looked around through the strategy thread, but nothing looked especially appropriate, so I thought I'd start this one: It's common practice to use the pretender to jumpstart expansion into new paths, and I've done this pretty effectively with death and nature.

But how can you manage it with blood? You have to have blood mages to hunt effectively, so you can't use turmoil or a site to eventually pay for empowerment or a booster item to really begin things. In particular I'd like to get blood going with Patala, because they have access to Lanka's summons, while they lack good thugs, but I can't quite seem to get things going without any national blood mages. Any help would be appreciated.

[Baalz]

Bootstrapping a blood economy with no blood mages is definitely an uphill battle, and no, it is seldom efficient to have your pretender blood hunt. Not sure what you meant by turmoil, but there are a few magic sites which produce blood slaves, though they're few enough that you certainly can't count on them, and you're never gonna get too many slaves that way even if you're lucky.

The good news is, you can always start bloodhunting with any nation and never need to get your pretender involved. The great thing is that with traditionally blood nations you're not really reliant on blood for your bread and butter - you can just let your blood slaves stockpile for awhile to be used every now and then for something shiny.

There are three ways to do it. 1) Find an indie blood mage you can recruit (these are fairly rare, but keep your eyes open, the ones who can get a blood random are not nearly as rare) 2) If you're in a MP game trade somebody for 50 blood slaves to empower your first blood hunter (try to get them to throw in a sanguine dowsing rod). 3) The hard way: stick about 10 scouts in a province with more than 5000 pop and have them blood hunt for about 10 turns until you've scraped up 50 slaves.

[Micah]

Does anyone know how many brute-force hunters a province can support and keep the unrest manageable? I know 2 real blood hunters seldom get it to spike too high, and you can often cram 3 in a province, but does anyone have experience with brute-force?(at 0 taxes, no patrols)

[Hadrian_II]

I thin 3 blood hunters is the most you can get into one province, as even with 3 you need sometimes to pause the bloodhunting to let the unrest settle down.

[Baalz]

I use about 10 and it stays manageable until you get a couple lucky rolls and they actually pull in some slaves two turns in a row at which point its best to rotate them out to another province. Thing with the brute force is it's so variable its harder than it's worth to try and just smooth it out so you don't need to rotate.

[Velusion]

Baalz said:
I use about 10 and it stays manageable until you get a couple lucky rolls and they actually pull in some slaves two turns in a row at which point its best to rotate them out to another province. Thing with the brute force is it's so variable its harder than it's worth to try and just smooth it out so you don't need to rotate.

This sounds about right as I've used 8 in a province with little problem.