Understanding Mictlan

[Jack_Trowell]

Dragonlord said:
[...]

What still puzzles me from some of the stuff listed earlier in this thread:
What is a fetish farm?

It's about massing the fever fetish (fire and nature construction item). The fetish diseases the commander you equip it with, but generate fier gem almost all turns.

In dominions 2 , it was usually equipped on undeads, as they don't die from disease, but to prevent that, now it still works on undeads but the gemsare produced less often than with a living commander.

Fetish farming is just trying to amass a large fire gemproduction by micro-managing fever fetish (don't forget to remove the fetish on diseased units with only 1 HP left as they will die the next turn)

How do you define a Blood economy ?

Choose a province with ideally 5000-6000 population, and no money producing site.

Drop the tax level for this province to 0 (to reduce the unrest to come)

build a lab in the province (so you don't have to move your commanders to get the blood slaves)

put 3-5 blood mages (with the item "dousing rod" equipped as soon as you're able to forge them) set to "blood hunt" in the province.

If the unrest grows too fast even with 0 tax, you eitheir have too many blood hunters in the province, or need to start using other commanders to patrol (fast or flying units are best for patrolling)

Warning : blood hunt lower the population (not much, but still ...), and patrolling too. That's why having at least growth 1 or better is good for blood nations. If you have enought income and province, just put less hunters on the province so 0 tax rate is enough to keep the unrest down, and create another blood hunting province.

A lone hunting province can be enought to produce ~20-30 blood slaves per turn, more thant what you probably get from any of your gem incomes.

What is an earth-blood factory?

Thee's an intem forged wth earth and blood magic (blood stone) that increase the earth magic of the wearer, and create one earth gem each turn.

If you have access to both earth and blood magic, it's a good way to create a massive income in earth gems (more stable that the fever fetish, as you don't have the diseases to manage, but earth + blood is a more rare combinaison)

What is a Soul Contract? I searched the manual for a spell or item named liked that and didn't find it...

Soul contract is an item (well, sort of ...) that once equipped on a commander (warning : it's cursed and can't be removed) start producing one devil / turn.

This thing with clams (?) and uber globals seems to be aimed at a very late game, which I never reach in SP but so far I have always won the game by year 6 or so...am trying to make it harder now with 10 AI's all set to Impossible, on Dawn of Dominion map.

This is because those tactics/strategies are mainly done for the late game in Multi Player (MP) games, where the increase incomeor units is what can give you the edge against other humans players.

But it can be fun too in SP games : you can make a nation that is harder to play from the start, but with the objective of a late game come back.

[Aleph]

Soul Contract also exposes your commander in question to horror attack, so be sure to hook him up with some bodyguards (Devils come to mind), and possibly some cheap survival items granting luck, protection, or an attack with paralysis (Vine Bow makes sense as a cheap item but I rarely hit with it at any range).

Playing against the AI on a large map, there's definitely a long lag between "I've effectively won" and "I've actually won." I tend to use this lag time as a sort of workshop for experimenting with SC combos (through Wish/Gift of Reason) and attack based globals. So far I find the most utility in the gem producers (especially Maelstrom, Well of Misery, and Arcane Nexus), Forge of Ancients, and Strands of Arcane Power, but get far more enjoyment out of Ghost Ship Armada and Lure of the Deep, at least until I own all coastal areas.

[HoneyBadger]

One area where EA Abyssia has a leg up over EA Mictlan is in the body of it's devil assassin commanders. They make ideal chassis for soul-contract, since they have long lifespans, can fly (retreating very quickly) and are relatively tough, for only 100 gold a piece. In addition to being contract-carriers, they also make great last-ditch defense for your home province, and they can fly with stealth, so you can quickly stash them anywhere, keeping your human enemies from targetting them.

[Baalz]

Yeah, the Abyssian demon breds are one of my favorite units. Another cool trick is that since they are also priests, can fly, and Abyssia can blood sacrifice (in addition to it's dominion spreading normally), if you have the foresight to take a high dominion (which helps push your heat anyway) you can fly in 3 or 4 blood slave laden demon bred to strategic locations (with jade knives if you've managed to get some nature magic), each build a temple and start blood sacrificing and in 3 or 4 turns you've pushed your dominion so aggressively and unexpectedly that it can be a quick kill if your opponent has a low dominion. Hmmm, as I write that I'm now not sure if that's true of EA Abyssia, or if the MA demon bred are different. Anyway, that strategy works well for MA for sure.

With EA/LA Mictlan you can do something similar with their national summons. I don't remember if one of the cheaper summons has priestly powers and flying, but that bad boy (sorry don't remember the name) at blood-7 is a level 3 priest and can forge his own jade dagger, as well as pretty effectively defend the temple all by himeself while auto-generating summons every turn.

[HoneyBadger]

Unfortunately, EA Abyssia Rhuaxians aren't flyers. They are powerful priests though. The demonbreds are rather weak, but their commanders are fine assassins. I'm going to create a mod which adds some more national summons to Abyssia, and maybe a couple of these will priests.

[PhilD]

I don't think any of the Mictlan summons have Holy 3; at least in MA, they Blood-7 one (requires B4 to cast, costs 101 slaves, autogenerates sacred flying demons) is only Holy 2 (pretty important since it's the difference between Blessing and Divine Blessing).

At least in SP, I've found that a pretender with Blood can be used to turn MA Mictlan into a decent Blood nation, even though none of the national mages have Blood (OK, one of them has something like 2.5% chance of having B1). And, you get the benefit of normal dominion spread, plenty of Sacred summons and national units; yummy!

[Baalz]

Ah yes, that's what I get for posting from memory. Assuming the manual is correct, the blood-7 summon (Onaqui) is just holy-1 (he's blood-3 which is what had me confused), but on the up side as I mentioned he can definately have a jade dagger for this strategy, wheras that can be pretty hard for Abyssia to come by. The Onaqui is just all kinds of awesome for a number of other reasons to. They're flying, stealthy badasses who make great leaders for your demonic troops (they can cast blood lust and blessing among other things...if you've got a blood magic pretender that's plus 8 or 9 to strength for all your holy demons). Even better I find they are great to equip with a brazen vessel and armor of twisted thorns, then plop them down on one of the blood summoning sites you've hopefully found by the time you can summon them and have them cast ritual of the five gates every month. When you figure in their auto summons if you put 2 or 3 of them doing this you get a ready bake, diverse demon army every other turn for about 80 blood slaves (depending on what, if any, blood site you've found).

[NickW]

I like having the Onaquis hang back and just research or summon. The auto generate sacred bats things is awesome, especially if you park them in high dominion. Backed by a nice bless (say F9) those bats are nasty and they an ugly surprise to someone who wasn't expecting Mictlan to show up with flying sacreds.

I've won some big battles I shouldn't have in MP because I had a squad of those bats set to hold and attack archers. They got in the backfield, ate all the archers, and then ate all the commanders for routeriffic goodness