HINNOM EATS EVERYTHING

[Baalz]

Kristoffer O said:
Keep up the discussions. I would like to know a bit more of the pop-eating as well. How much does it hamper the nation.

I think people are dismissing the pop eating a little too fast as trivial. I haven't played Hinnom in a competitive environment long enough for it to really be significant yet (you know the pace the PBEM games run at), but in the test games I ran to test out my theoretical strategies the population death from building up a stack of Ba'als in my capital was very noticeable and convinced me that it was something that I needed to keep an eye on. I get the impression most people are thinking "ok, I just need to stack my mages outside my capital, no big deal", and that's true for your capital, but what this significantly impacts is blood hunting. All your blood hunters eat population, which is a critical consideration for setting up blood farms. I haven't tested if there is much/any variation, but it seems like Kohen (your most cost efficient blood hunters) eat 20 pop per turn apiece. This means if you go with a standard 3 blood hunters per province you're looking at -60 pop per turn, which means that once you account for a few pop here and there lost to bloodhunting and associated unrest you're looking at the ballpark of -1k population per year in each of the provinces you're bloodhunting. That means if you target the provinces closest to 5k population (absent from this consideration the most cost efficient places to blood hunt) they pretty quickly drop under 5k and you start getting diminishing returns from bloodhunting (a 4k province will on average yield 4/5ths the blood slaves as a 5k province). Assuming you drop the taxes to 0% , if you bloodhunt in a 10k population province the "cost" in gold for your bloodslaves is twice as much as doing it in a 5k province. So, the impact of this on any major scale bloodhunting is to make the blood slaves more expensive and to make there be fewer appropriate bloodhunting provinces. To those thinking "well, ok so I bloodhunting in 6k provinces rather than 5k provinces", just think about how the population density usually falls out, what I think will commonly happen is the one 6k population province will be bloodhunted first, then for the second one the player is faced with a choice between a 5k one or an 8k one.

It's a subtle thing, but I think it really does add a decent bit to how much gold Hinnom "spends" to get blood slaves.

Kristoffer O said:
And Baalz, an Ashdod guide would be nice too I fear they are more powerful, at least after the early game.

Sure, I'll put it on my list.