Blood Nation Woes

[UninspiredName]

Thanks much. Very useful posts, linked or summarized. I'm sort of inept at bless strategies, but practice makes perfect, I suppose.

[Aleph]

If you're having trouble with bless, LA Ulm might be a good place to start (in that they don't use it).

You might also try MA Abyssia for a low bless blood hunter nation - ridiculously good fire mages recruitable everywhere and no friendly fire on your own troops + demonbreds from capital make for good bloodhunters (costly, but sacred, highly mobile, and excellent in battle). Again, you'll be mixing regular troops with blood to get your power (and demonbreds are too expensive to go pure blood anyway), but boots of youth, demonbreds leading five gates raiding parties, infernal disease, and eventually Astral Corruption (backed up by Infernal Prison to let your ubermages still cast non-blood overland spells, although you'll also do fine with just fire battle magic) will let you experiment with blood while also annihilating enemies hand over fist.

[Nick_K]

Blood has some excellent low-level summons. Fiends of darkness don't require any other paths and you don't need many to make a big difference early on. Spine devils are excellent in terms of raw combat stats for the price, but don't fly. If you have elemental magic then any of the 4 elemental/blood lesser demons could be good. I especially like devils (best raw combat stats) and demon knights (huge prot, fear... easily better than, say, Ulm's black knights)

I dislike blood battle magic - the micro needed when every spell costs slaves is just too much hassle. I also don't like serpent fiends or bone devils.

[Edi]

Serpent Fiends are ok, but pale in comparison to the Mictlan low level blood summons. Bone devils are completely useless. A longdead with a few more hitpoints, two attacks and no armor and dies in droves.

Edi

[Baalz]

Another thing to keep in mind when going blood (which I mentioned briefly in another of those threads) is that there is an opportunity cost to blood hunting – the gold you could have had if you weren’t doing it. This is quite different than other gems which are more of a bonus – there is no trade off. What this means as far as your strategy is that whenever you “convert” a province from giving you gold to giving you blood slaves you need to adjust how your economy functions. Every time you crank up your blood slave flow, you need to adjust the rest of your strategy to the lower gold flow to keep from grinding to a halt.

In a practical sense, that means the more you blood hunt, the less you can recruit troops for gold. Done properly you can switch recruiting nationals for summoning demons (a pretty good trade off), but done haphazardly your economy will crash leaving you unable to support enough of an army to defend yourself. Since you specifically mentioned trouble balancing your economy I’m guessing this is what you’re running into.

Specifically from a blood economy point of view, try this. Do minimal blood hunting initially, use your gold for troops and your mages for researching. Always keep in mind when you start blood hunting you’re giving something up, so don’t do it until you can get a payback greater than the cost. What this point is depends on what nation you are and what your strategy is, but will generally be a certain level of research in construction or blood. Also keep in mind that there is going to be a lag from when you start blood hunting to when you get that payback, so switching to blood hunting when in an intense war is a decision that takes quite a bit of thought.

Another thing to keep a close eye on when you start giving your gold economy the axe is upkeep. If your upkeep is running 40% of your income you’re fine, but if you cut your gold income in half when you start blood hunting suddenly you don’t have enough gold to replace that lab that just burned down because your upkeep is 80%. Mages in particular, but don’t recruit any troops just because you’ve got the resources for it – once you switch to blood let the demons be the workhorses (and this is something you have to start managing BEFORE you start blood hunting!). Of course, this isn’t an either-or question, you can crank your blood up just a bit and keep some gold flowing in, but you’ve always got to keep in mind that balance. If you start blood hunting much with Lanka, for instance, that means less of those kick-*** national infantries so make sure that fits the strategy you’re pursuing. If you’re reliant on a steady stream of them for a war you’re fighting, blood hunting will grind your nation to a halt.

PS.
I keep seeing people mention Mictlan's need to blood sacrifice as a significant drain to their ability to blood hunt. I don't really see that when I play Mictlan. It seems like Mictlan is just made to seriously focus on blood hunting, and when you've got 30 or so blood slaves coming in from each blood hunting province (for the upkeep cost of 3, holy, 60 gold blood hunters!) 5 or 6 slaves per month blood sacrificing just doesn't seem significant. Because of the cheaper upkeep of your blood hunters you can have more of them, which I find more than compensates for the drain of the blood sacrifices.