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.

=$= Big J Money =$=