Blood Simple?!

[Graeme Dice]

spirokeat said:
BUT ! thats not why I said 8000. I suggest that because it gives your hunters a reasonable stay in one province before the pop does hit 5000 and below and you move em.

There's no need for that. The population effect is that if a number chosen between 1 (maybe 0) and 5000 is less than the population, the hunt passes the check. So even 4000 people is 80% as effective as 5000.

One of the things that I do find a pain in the *** is when I pool my blood slaves and I then have to go to each Blood Sacrifice priest and give him new slaves.

Don't pool your blood slaves. Go to each bloodhunting province, make a selection group of your hunters only, and press ctrl+z.

In terms of equiping your hunters. All they get is a sanguine dousing rod. And I tend not to use anything but basic priests either. if I recall you can actually push unrest up despite tax 0, if you use higher level hunters. Three blood 1 priests with dousers seems the best.

A dousing rod raises your blood skill by 1 for the purpose of hunting if you already have 1 blood skill. The base chance that a hunter will succeed is 10%+(bloodskill*40%). So a blood 1 Mictlan priest with a dousing rod will succeed 90% of the time in a province with 0 unrest and 5000 people. Unrest is a percentage failure chance. The blood slaves you find are 1d6+bloodskill.

Plus your good priest is 390 gold a pop, giving you a basic cost to preach basic dominion of 790, plus a 5 slave, 5 nature knife. and then about 8 slaves per turn to keep him going, for every single province you want up. not too cheap.

That would be the equivalent of about 8 temples in that single province, so that's kind of overkill. A single H2 Mictnal priest without a jade knife sacrificing two slaves a turn should be good enough if you picked a high dominion (7-8).

[Ironhawk]

Graeme Dice said:

A dousing rod raises your blood skill by 1 for the purpose of hunting if you already have 1 blood skill. The base chance that a hunter will succeed is 10%+(bloodskill*40%). So a blood 1 Mictlan priest with a dousing rod will succeed 90% of the time in a province with 0 unrest and 5000 people. Unrest is a percentage failure chance. The blood slaves you find are 1d6+bloodskill.

That amount of slaves captured cant be right. I've had B1 and B2 mages pull in 10-15 slaves on a really good day.
Or... is that 1d6oe? I suppose that would be reasonable.

[archaeolept]

yah, its OE

[Ygorl]

I'm pretty much with Graeme on this one. I played Mictlan on Large Faerun, expanded into T'ien Ch'i, Machaka, and Atlantis' territory, and didn't need to spend more than 2:25 per turn in blood-related micromanagement. Given that turns could easily take an hour or more, this was a trivial amount extra.
One thing that helps reduce the pain a lot is to make sure that you don't use all your slaves in a given turn. If you keep a pool at least as large as the number of slaves being sacrificed, your sacrificers (the ones at labs anyway, which in my opinion should be all of them) will automatically replenish their stores. Also, I've found that three hunters in a zero-tax province can pretty much be ignored when it comes to unrest. It's a self-regulating process; when they're very successful, unrest can really jump, but this makes them less successful in successive turns and so overall you do okay. If you take growth, you also don't have to worry about the population loss, and things really become easy.
Different people have different play styles, certainly. The management involved in supporting mine is pretty minimal. If you like to play in a way that makes blood no fun, either don't play it or experiment with new tactics. At some point there is a tradeoff between being absolutely optimal despite the user interface and enjoying the game.
As a note, in maybe 3000 province-turns of blood-hunting (with three dowsing hunters per) I've *never* noticed all of them coming up empty. Since blood mages share virgins, you're pretty much assured of having enough to summon some imps if need be.