Did you noticed.......

[Taqwus]

HJ --

I seem to recall that the devs have stated that the sanguine dowsing rod no longer helps non-blood commanders find blood slaves (haven't checked this yet in the demo personally).

This will make it a LOT harder compared to Dom I to really get a blood economy rolling...

It used to be possible to hand out SDRs (cheap at 5 blood slaves, once you get a blood mage -- e.g. certain indies and magical sites provide them) to cheap commanders and harvest. The SDR would boost their base chance of finding slaves from something like 10% to something like 50% (!). And once you got started, more SDRs could be cranked out, and you could feed the machine with yet more cheap commanders.

Now you'll have to use genuine blood mages to do well in blood -- which means either having native mages, or getting quite a few relevant indys / sites, unless you relish empowering non-blood commanders at 50 slaves a pop.