To Blood Magic, Or Not To Blood Magic

[Goblin]

I have been playing a couple of games to familiarise my self with the costs and benefits of Blood Magic as the core strategic spell path. My question to those who have experience at both using Blood Magic and having it used on them is: What are it’s strengths and weaknesses?

Some that jump to mind (please feel free to expand on or tear these apart) are:

Strengths:
1. Accessibility of Slaves over Gems: Unlike Gems where you can luck out in finding sufficient of a particular type on which your strategy relies on, Blood slaves can be found easily in any province with population of greater than 8k.
2. Duel Purpose School: The Blood Magic research path has spells that are useful in both battle and as ritual casting – though the ritual ones are why I would follow it.
3. Versatility of troops available through Blood: You have fast flying troops, solid front line troops and host of top quality commanders and spell casters available to be summoned.
4. Maintenance Costs: Nearly all the troops summoned have no maintenance cost.

Weaknesses:
1. Opportunity cost of income: When drawing Blood slaves from a province you effectively write off any income that you would other wise receive. In order to keep unrest low you need to drop tax to zero (or have unrest rise to the point that you generate no income from the province any way).
2. Opportunity cost or research: While your mages are happily rounding up slaves for the slaughter in the fields, they are not in the labs developing new spells.
3. Cost of maintaining & defending Blood Slave factories: The maintenance cost of the mages, any defences needed to keep them safe and infrastructure (lab and possibly castle) in each province you farm for Blood Slaves.

I would especially like to hear from players that have used the school to devastating effect – or had it used to devastate them. Any suggestions on its best use or ways to counter it are also sought.

Regards,
Goblin.

[quantum_mechani]

Goblin said:
I have been playing a couple of games to familiarise my self with the costs and benefits of Blood Magic as the core strategic spell path. My question to those who have experience at both using Blood Magic and having it used on them is: What are it’s strengths and weaknesses?

Some that jump to mind (please feel free to expand on or tear these apart) are:

Strengths:
1. Accessibility of Slaves over Gems: Unlike Gems where you can luck out in finding sufficient of a particular type on which your strategy relies on, Blood slaves can be found easily in any province with population of greater than 8k.
2. Duel Purpose School: The Blood Magic research path has spells that are useful in both battle and as ritual casting – though the ritual ones are why I would follow it.
3. Versatility of troops available through Blood: You have fast flying troops, solid front line troops and host of top quality commanders and spell casters available to be summoned.
4. Maintenance Costs: Nearly all the troops summoned have no maintenance cost.

Weaknesses:
1. Opportunity cost of income: When drawing Blood slaves from a province you effectively write off any income that you would other wise receive. In order to keep unrest low you need to drop tax to zero (or have unrest rise to the point that you generate no income from the province any way).
2. Opportunity cost or research: While your mages are happily rounding up slaves for the slaughter in the fields, they are not in the labs developing new spells.
3. Cost of maintaining & defending Blood Slave factories: The maintenance cost of the mages, any defences needed to keep them safe and infrastructure (lab and possibly castle) in each province you farm for Blood Slaves.

I would especially like to hear from players that have used the school to devastating effect – or had it used to devastate them. Any suggestions on its best use or ways to counter it are also sought.

Regards,
Goblin.

First off, I have to say I have yet to see anyone make good use of a blood battlefield spell apart from summon imps, blood vengeance and leech(and the latter two quite rarely). That aside, blood magic is extremely potent for summons and items. With non-blood nations, I almost always set mages with blood randoms to hunting. The most common uses for blood include:

*Lifedraining weapons
*Soul contracts for free devil generation
*Lifelong protection pacts for assassin and general battlefield use
*Fiends of darkness for all around great troops, and stealth raids
*Gaining access to other paths of magic, and great SCs through the demon commanders

[archaeolept]

Hellfire is eminently usable; as well, hellbind heart has it's specialty use, and reinvigoration as well. Generally, however, it is very weak in battlefield magic, and the Sabbath circle is completely useless base game.

[quantum_mechani]

archaeolept said:
Hellfire is eminently usable; as well, hellbind heart has it's specialty use, and reinvigoration as well. Generally, however, it is very weak in battlefield magic, and the Sabbath circle is completely useless base game.

Forgot about hellbind heart, hellfire is only good in Zen's mod.

[Goblin]

Both Soul Contracts and Lifelong Protection give the holder a Horror Mark - as such I have avoided these. How does one protect against a horror attack (infact - what actually happens - is it an assassination or a general battle)? For that matter how likely is it to occur?

Goblin.

[quantum_mechani]

Goblin said:
Both Soul Contracts and Lifelong Protection give the holder a Horror Mark - as such I have avoided these. How does one protect against a horror attack (infact - what actually happens - is it an assassination or a general battle)? For that matter how likely is it to occur?

Goblin.

Yes, they both do that, but it is more than worth it. The horror attacks work like assassinations, and with the contract marks they are quite rare. You will usually be putting them on cheap units like scouts anyway, so all you will have lost in the event of being unlucky would be the forgeing cost.

[Goblin]

Thanks Quantum,

I will give that a try and see how it goes (once I save up 80 slaves to forge the item). Any suggestions on the best Slave harvesting strategy? I currently look to use low level mage's with a Sanguine Dousing Rod, with a max of 3 in a province.

Goblin.

[quantum_mechani]

Goblin said:
Thanks Quantum,

I will give that a try and see how it goes (once I save up 80 slaves to forge the item). Any suggestions on the best Slave harvesting strategy? I currently look to use low level mage's with a Sanguine Dousing Rod, with a max of 3 in a province.

Goblin.

If you are using the soul contract strategy, you should at the least have a dwarven hammer to shave 20 slaves off of the cost. As for hunting strategy, depends very much on nation and other conditions. As a rule, always use SDRs on your hunters if you have construction 4, though it is more important for level 1 blood mages than higher levels. I consider any province of 4000 or so pop fair hunting game, particularly if I don't have to shuffle mages from where I recruit them. As for how many in one provinse, I tend to intensly hunt a few provinces with 3-6 mages, and drop taxes and patrol. For long term with a growth scale spreading the hunters out is probably a better idea.

[Alneyan]

Blood battle spells can still be used I think, when you have your back behind the wall and must deal as much damage as possible, since you are going to bite the dust before long; other than that, I wouldn't make the majority of them the cornerstone of any strategy. Blood has two spells increasing the strength of troops, and it's not particularly expensive as far as battle enchantments go, so you might wish to try using these spells (especially the demon variety, available very early). Blood also has a massive battle empowerment spell (+2 to all magic paths, if memory serves), but has the unfortunate tendency to bring in horrors, and only a Blood 4/Blood 5 mage will be comfortable using it. Still, if the horrors aren't too bad, it might work for a mage having a lot of random magic.

Other than that, Blood is a magic school you can usually get without a lot of work, unlike virtually every other magic school out here (Water being the other easy one to build from scratch). If you can get mages with a random pick in Blood, you can start up a very nice Blood economy at once, even with a low amount of blood hunters. Getting to level 2 will only cost you 30 slaves, and then you should try to reach level 3 by various means; once you are at level 3, you should have all your Blood needs covered. Besides, you can empower a mundane mage in Blood at a fairly low cost (50 slaves is easier to come by than 50 gems), allowing you to get all those summoning spells and to join in the fun.

In short, I would always try to build up a blood economy, unless playing Ashen Empire or something to that effect; lifedraining alone is good enough to warrant the expenses, and I would rather keep my Death gems (Wraith Swords, the other only option in town for lifedrain) for other purposes. Add to that all the other benefits of Blood, and you have a pretty strong case.

[Boron]

In Vanilla the best way to bloodhunt is to clamhoard and wish for blood.
As a side effect of this strat you will search your lands with accashic record, thus if there are any sites with boni to alteration or blood you will find them and they will further speed up your rapid growth of power in lategame.

For this strat Ryleh and Pythium are very well suited.
You won't have blood till something like turn 60 but after that you will swim in blood. With 4 wishers you get e.g. 1000 blood per turn.

For conventional blood hunting i now like mictlan most. Just do gather 200-300 slaves, patrol a 20k population province and hunt with 15-20 priests with sdrs.
After something like 20-30 turns this province will be reduced from 20000 to something like 3000 population and you have to move on but this way you have only to hunt in a few provinces and not in many.
Mictlan is basically the only blood nation which can do this kind of patrol+bloodhunt.
If you also do a bless strat you can use your money on the excellent mictlan sacred troops.