Blood FAQ?

[sector24]

I'm not blood expert, but I too found the manual to be totally inadequate in teaching a player how to get a blood economy running.

Generally, putting 1 blood on your pretender to start a blood economy is a waste of his other talents. But obviously you just want to test stuff out. So if you have a unit with 1 blood you want to find a province with at least 5000 population and relatively low income and blood hunt there until you get enough slaves to make a dousing rod. To keep unrest down you will want to reduce the tax rate, possibly to 0.

Once you have a unit with a dousing rod, continue to blood hunt until you can empower, and either empower a new unit to blood 1, or empower your existing unit to blood 2. I'm not sure statistically which is more profitable, I would tend to think more along the lines of what could the empowered unit do in the long term, such as summon ice devils or storm devils, or forge the armor of thorns that boosts nature and blood.

So it's a lather rinse repeat scenario as you slowly build up more and more slaves to empower more and more mages. The dousing rod is obviously a very good deal and every blood hunter should have one.

You should be able to fit 3 or 4 blood hunters (maybe more) in the same province with taxes set at 0 and keep the unrest down. It may help to build a lab so you can cash in your slaves every turn. Eventually you will have to find a 2nd province; again you want 5000 or more population and the lowest income possible.
--------

Now if you have 0 blood and want to start from scratch, just recruit the cheapest commanders possible (scouts) and put a whole bunch of them in the same province blood hunting at 10% until you have enough to empower 1 commander. This can take quite awhile, and it's generally not worth it until money is no longer an issue for your nation. Once you get to this point, just follow the instructions above.