Understanding Mictlan

[Strages Sanctus]

I thought only 1 priest a turn could sacrifice at a temple? How do you have 3 doing it?

[HoneyBadger]

Baalz, you do have a good point about the value of early expansion. Especially in MP but in SP too, you would probably do well using your starting cash to suppliment your initial army with enough troops to form a hard core, and then recruiting Priest Kings and using them to capture slaves.
That way, you'd have the numbers in an average fight, and with enough real troops, you should be able to take a good sized expanse of territory.

You wouldn't really need tons of Sacred troops for that, though, just lots of feathered warriors to give your slaves some backbone.

Example Strategy: I'm playing a game now with gold, resources, and supply all set to minimum.
I combine my starting army and put them all at the right side of the screen so they can charge together when they're done firing slings. The Tribal King in charge I put in the back because he's expensive and I want to be able to use him to capture slaves in the future. I set Magic to Construction because I want those clams, fetishes, Sanguine Dousing Rods, Skull Mentors, and Brazen Vessels.

I'm only able to recruit a couple of Feathered Warriors per turn, and I want to move fast, so I'm only going to wait a couple of months before I send them out.

By the second turn, I've recruited a Priest King and have a total of 10 Feathered Warriors recruited or in the quewe. I choose the Priest King for 3 reasons-1 he can blood-sacrifice, 2 he doesn't start out old, and 3 he can always act as a back-up slave levier if my tribal king dies.

Additional funds go towards Sacred troops, for the first 3 months. After that, I'm buying Priest Kings as often as I can afford them, which will depend mostly on luck.

As soon as I recruit the first Priest-King, I set him to sacrificing. I'll do this for atleast the next 5 Priest Kings I recruit, but after that, additional Priest-Kings will become my core researchers.
One will stay at home, while the other five will spread to neighboring provinces. If I happen to have more than 5 provinces connecting to my home province, then I'll put a Priest-King and a temple in as many as connect to me. I'll raise the defense of those provinces to atleast 25, as quickly as funds allow. I'll set up two castles-as you suggest-close by and put a temple in each one, again with a sacrificing Priest-King. Defense for these, and for my home province, I'll raise to a minimum of 40. That should be enough to give me a nice stable Dominion.

Spreading my priests out makes my Dominion a little more stable, while keeping a bunch close by helps assure that any major loss can be quickly recovered. It also helps spread my Dominion. I just have to make sure my temples are protected, but what else are sacred demons for?

I've got 2 fire gems coming in every turn, that's an extra 30 gold if I alchemize them-and that 30 gold is completely independent of scales. I use that to purchase troops, province defense, and Priest Kings until my Pretender shows up and starts making Soul-Contracts. 12 alchemized fire gems equal 1 Priest King and change.

I don't worry too much about taking the early hit in gems, because I'm going to be setting up a fetish-farm soon enough, and because Mictlan doesn't use a lot of fire gems anyway. Large amounts will come in handy later on when I'm making contracts or casting globals, or when I need lots of cash for province-defense, and that's what the fetish-farm is for.

If I ever get my Pretender empowered in Earth, I'll set up an earth-blood factory too, but right now, fetish-farm is easier (and it sounds more evocative).

I'm surrounded by a lot of tough independents-I set Independent strength to 9-but it looks like the weakest is a local tribe of Lizardmen. I could really use those heavy troops, not to mention lizard shamans, so I send my scout in to get the lay of the land.

It's now mid-fall of the first year.
I've got two Priest-Kings (one of which I bought with alchemized fire gems), and a decent army of 10 feathered warriors, 2 jaguar-warriors (with more on the way) and 40 or so slave warriors. I now Prophetize my second Priest King.
Yes, I could wait and make somebody else my Prophet, but he'll do for now, and I can always get him killed off later on if somebody better comes along. Besides, he makes a decent commander, able to handle 120 troops at a time, and I'm playing a numbers game. It also won't hurt to spread my Dominion.

That's something else you can do to help ease a 2 Dominion-on the first round, make your Tribal King or your Scout your Prophet. You can always switch whichever one out with a better unit once your Dominion is more stable.

My Prophet can cast Divine Bless and Sermon of Courage, and that's what's important right now, because I have a handful of sacred troops and also because all my troops could use the morale boost.

I see an opportunity and I take it. A neighboring province is ruled by a Mound King and held by 30 or so undead horsemen. I've got 3 Priest-Kings by late fall, including my Prophet, and that means lots of banishment opportunities.

It takes me two turns to capture it, but I beat them and the first province is mine! YAY

[Shovah32]

In and around his home province, not all in the one province. In theory badger that should work but, iirc, each slave sacrificed causes a temple check and at dom2 that dosnt mean much.

[HoneyBadger]

Sorry Stranges Sanctus, et all. I wrote that last post wrong the first time. It's corrected now, atleast I hope it is. What I meant was I'd have atleast 3 in provinces neighboring my home province and 3 outside of that, but close by.

[HoneyBadger]

Well, Dom 2 is definitely a tradeoff then, but if it wasn't then my strategy might make Mictlan too powerful, and that wouldn't be good either. If you want to use the above suggestion, then you might want to consider Wishing your Dominion a little higher when you're able to, and maintaining a vigilant program of temple-building and blood-sacrificing.

I'm actually happy to be able to say that it's not perfect. It's not meant to be.

[Aleph]

Some good feedback here. Not a unified response, but good food for thought.

I play entirely single player games, and I like long games. I'm definitely going for a sustainable blood economy, so I'm thinking at least Growth 2 to offset patrolling losses and to drive compound interest. I'm also entirely behind Turmoil 3 / Sloth 3 / Luck 3 - the cash and magical profits derived thereof (allowing for both more rapid expansion, and the upkeep of more mages to balance the myriad roles of hunting/casting/forging/searching/researching/sacrificing), plus the added enjoyment of better Crossbreeds when you want your Priest Kings to summon in bulk, seem useful enough.

That said, the Smoking Mirror is a nice base for a sustainable approach as well, and I missed out on how good he could be as a bless base when looking at him earlier. Lots of mixed options with F9, Dominion in the 5-6 range, Turmoil/Sloth/Luck 3 and Growth 2-3, including water/blood/astral/death 4 for nice well rounded boosts or dropping death to 2 and taking earth 2 for forging utility. While I like W9 as a blessing, Mictlan lacks any pretenders able to really take advantage of it and still have a breadth of options.

Other queries
1. Does Nature bless give regeneration to all your blessed troops? I thought there was a bug that it only added to spell based regeneration.

2. Can you assume that you're going to have empowered a Moon Priest with Earth before an imprisoned Pretender can wake up? Can Onaqui or Nahuali end up with Earth as a random pick? (What does the Nahuali ?0 pick even mean?) Someone needs to make the tools necessary to bootstrap pretender astral levels higher and to kick off the Blood Stone creation.

3. Why does a Nahuali want to be a turkey?

[HoneyBadger]

Nauhatli wants to be a turkey because everybody likes turkey, especially around Thanksgiving!

Nature bless does give regeneration to all sacred blessed troops, it's mighty fine.

Earth empowerment (you can empower any commander), if I were doing it, I'd empower a Priest-King or better yet, my Pretender. Pretender because many items and spells must combine with other magical paths before you can create them. Priest-King because Moon Priest can suffer from old age, and the paths of earth equate a bonus to natural protection per level.

[Taqwus]

It shows ?0 in this case because it's only a 10% random. If memory serves, if you get that 1-in-10 one-point bonus, there are four possible paths -- click on the question mark to find out which ones.

[mivayan]

Random fact: No matter what forge bonuses you have, a soul contract still costs 65 blood slaves and 5 fire gems. Why? Game balance. And it's fairly thematic.

Random fact two: You always need more (on average) blood sacrifices to spread dominion if you started with dominion 2 than if you started with 6, even if you have 100 temples. This might be a bug since the manual disagrees.

[Aleph]

Honeybadger - I was more asking about whether people bother empowering someone with earth before an imprisoned pretender wakes up, since it takes some time and in the meantime I'd like to be working some better forging mojo. There's some decent earth/astral mixes, so that's where my mind went.

I'll keep that in mind about the regeneration. Not a huge deal for rank-and-file if you're only pushing 5%, but probably a nice boost for the larger nationals and the affliction prevention can't hurt. While we're on the topic, can you or someone tell me how the game handles fractions? Are they kept, rounded up, or rounded down?

Seriously, man - some part of me wants to play an uber-broken turkey-mage strategy, and if you've any guidance I'd love to hear it.

Mivayan - someone was saying in another post (possibly my newb undead post) that high initial dominion is always stronger than low initial dominion, no matter how templed. I can't verify that for sure, but when I play LA Ermor with Dominion 10 I definitely run roughshod over the dominion of my enemies, even when they have lots of temples.