Drugged Out Virgins Waiting to Have Their Throats Slashed (questions on blood hunting

[Immaculate]

Originally Posted by Baalz

***Blood hunting***

The thing to keep in mind when going blood hunting is that there is an opportunity cost to it� 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.

You�ll generally want to 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 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. This is something you have to start managing BEFORE you start blood hunting, even if you have the gold laying around think about it before you buy every unit. This is why you want to keep most of your troops sacred, and your army size relatively small. 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.

As far as where to blood hunt, basically how it boils down is that there is no difference in the blood slaves you get for any population over 5000, so blood hunting in a 10k population province will get you the same blood slaves as the 5k province, but (all other things being equal) will cost you twice as much gold. The other thing to keep in mind to is depending on your scales, and if you're patrolling to reduce unrest your population may be dropping, so if you start hunting in provinces real close to 5k you could drop under that before long and you start getting diminishing returns.

Where to blood hunt depends on a couple things. Always start with the provinces closest to 5k (with no mines or other gold boosting sites) as these will be the "cheapest" blood slaves. As you start wanting more and more blood slaves, start moving up the chain to higher and higher population provinces but keep in mind each one will have a higher cost in gold than the one before it. How high you go really depends on the strategy you�re following, you�re almost always going to need some gold so this is where you need to focus on balance. If you're going for a very tight blood focus (a good strategy with Mictlan), I find that in very general terms by the time I end up putting blood hunters in the territories close to 10k population my gold income has dropped to the point that I enter more of my �blood mode� and stop really recruiting troops (including blood hunters) and instead save the little gold I get for buying mages for specific needs and building labs and temples. By that time you�ve got enough blood slaves coming in that you can get a good amount of summoning done every round to compensate.

On blood hunting the provinces under 5k it�s more a question of the upkeep cost of the blood hunters because the gold income hit isn�t as much. This is where the Mictlan Priests really shine. They�re so damn cheap, I find it�s also worthwhile to put them in the 4k-5k population provinces as well, and even occasionally the sub 4k ones. You won�t get quite as many blood slaves (4/5 the blood slaves for a 4k population), but when your blood hunters cost 60 gold and are holy you�re not paying much for the blood slaves either. And again, it all depends on what your other options are, how valuable the blood slaves are to you, how easy it is to defend those blood hunters, what other territories you have, etc.

The thing to keep in mind is that you�re always �paying� gold for blood slaves, you just need to decide what price you�re willing to pay. The more blood slaves you want, the more expensive they are�but getting to the point that you�re sucking in 100+ blood slaves a turn is a pretty sweet spot if you can do it while remaining stable.

You�ll also need to keep in mind the protection of your blood hunters. Mictlan is very vulnerable to raiding by stealthy troops because your blood hunters are going to be spread out and not terribly effective at defending themselves unsupported. Place castles where you can, and pull your blood hunters inside them whenever you think you should to protect them. Ideally you�d like a castle on each province you�re blood hunting, but in practice that�s usually not feasible because of your restricted gold income. The 8th level blood spell Three Red Seconds is an expensive way to place castles using blood slaves instead of gold, so that may be an option in the later stages of the game. Scripting all your blood hunters to retreat from the back row will save you a lot of grief if you start getting raided.

Here�s an example strategy to get your blood economy going:

It�s usually a good idea to research up to construction-4 before researching blood with Mictlan. The main reason is because up until around that point your mages are more useful researching than blood hunting. You don't need any blood summons immediately because your holy troops are tough enough to deal with whatever they need to initially, and you're capitol's natural income is enough to keep you blood sacrificing at first. The nice thing about using all those Mictlan priests to research is that the very turn that you finish researching construction-4 they can all forge themselves sanguine rods (which doubles their blood hunting effectiveness). Obviously you don't have many blood slaves at that point since you haven't been blood hunting, but you can easily have at least 15 ready by that time time by limiting how much you blood sacrifice and stockpiling the blood slave income from your capitol. From that point more or less send three new blood hunters with sanguine rods out each turn (aim to have three castles at this point as well), each "squad" setting up in a new province. Drop the tax rate to 0%, and place a lab there.

So, how this works out is that just as you start having blood slaves flowing in you've still got a decent chunk of mages researching (blood now), so you start hitting those good blood spells relatively soon and with blood slaves in the bank. Also, since you've hit con-4 you can forge skull mentors and/or owl quills if you've gotten one of the national heroes (quite likely if you�ve taken high luck scales).

Compare this with researching straight for blood. If you do that, you've got to split your mages between research and blood hunting (no point in having spells you can't cast!) - and the blood hunters are half as effective without the sanguine rods. No owl quils or skull mentors to help you out, and you're taking an immediate hit to your gold while you're sill relying on your national troops to take out the indies. I guess you could make this work, but it seems much more of an uphill battle to me.

So, i've experimented a bit with blood hunting and then found this guide (thanks by the way Baalz) and realized that when i apply this system (three blood hunting units in a 5K+ province), i get rising unrest. (some turns it goes down but it goes up more then it goes down).

So the questions are:
1) Does that matter? I mean, its not like (usually) we need the gold or resources...
2) If it DOES matter, at what point does it become critical?
3) If it DOES matter, should one patrol to off-set it?
4) If it DOESN'T matter, why not use much more then 3 blood hunters per province?


If you think these are stupid questions, please remember the age-old saying i tell my students:
"there are no stupid questions- only stupid people"
and then answer anyway.

[thejeff]

Are you setting tax to 0?
Unrest matters mostly because it cuts into your blood hunting results.
If you're using Mictlan, using a few kings to hunt up slaves to patrol with it reasonably cheap and effective.
An alternate approach is just to take a turn off blood hunting when a province gets too high.

I think 3 hunters is a reasonable compromise between getting the most in every turn and not driving unrest up so quickly it shuts down the hunting.

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Immaculate

So the questions are:
1) Does that matter? I mean, its not like (usually) we need the gold or resources...
2) If it DOES matter, at what point does it become critical?
3) If it DOES matter, should one patrol to off-set it?
4) If it DOESN'T matter, why not use much more then 3 blood hunters per province?

1. Yes. The manual details the blood hunting mechanics, and they are correct as far as I know. (page 69)


2. Unrest increases the chance of a failed blood hunting check. So that doesn't mean less slaves that turn, it means no slaves at all.

Unrest of 40 gives a 10% chance of failure (from the manual formula). So I'd guess somewhere around that level of unrest is probably where it starts to get critical. (since 10% chances tend to happen more than 10% of the time in Dominions )


3. Patrolling to reduce unrest is always a call that needs to be made, and usually has a lot to do with various factors.

a) What the growth scales of the province is. (which is not necessarily what your national growth scales are)

b) The population level of the province. If it is between 4-5k, then patrolling will likely send the population below 4k pretty quickly (with no growth scale) at which point you will start noticing a lot more failed blood hunting turns.

c) The availability of cheap effective patrollers. You will already be getting zero or minimum income from blood hunting provinces. And if you are then also having to pay 100+ upkeep per turn for the patrollers, then it quickly starts to hurt your economy.

So while on the one hand patrolling helps keep the blood slaves flowing by preventing unrest from building up, on the other hand patrolling to reduce unrest also kills population. So at least in my experience, it is never a case of you should always patrol, or you should never patrol, as each nation, game, and indeed province needs to be considered separately before deciding to patrol or not.


4. If you could just stack as many hunters into a province as you like without consequence, then blood hunting would become easy to abuse. Hence the mechanics that are in place to prevent that. 3 hunters is considered a good number to bring in a decent number of slaves, while also not letting unrest get out of control (if the tax rate is 0%)

[Immaculate]

thank you so much for the useful and prompt responses.

[Louppatient]

Originally Posted by Calahan

1. Yes. The manual details the blood hunting mechanics, and they are correct as far as I know. (page 69)

Except for the fact that the magic site rating seems to impact the result, no ?

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Louppatient

Except for the fact that the magic site rating seems to impact the result, no ?

Yes, you are correct. The manual makes no mention of the affect the magic site frequency setting has on blood hunting. Neither from a quick check can I see it mentioned elsewhere in the manual.

I am not 100% sure of the affect myself, but from testing I did for the 'Forge of Godhood' game (which had magic site frequency 0), I found that the chance of a successful blood hunt stayed the same, and it is just the number of slaves obtained that is affected by the magic site frequency setting. (with a lower setting meaning less slaves).

[Micah]

And as an addendum to the site setting influencing the number of slaves caught, the number of slaves caught influences the unrest generation.

Thus, while I haven't run tests, I'm guessing 3 hunters with max sites will likely spike your unrest into the stratosphere at 0 tax, while 3 hunters under 0 sites will probably only bump it up on exceptional turns and it will return to 0 shortly thereafter. It's possible that LA default sites mean 3 hunters is more optimal while EA causes the unrest to grow. Other minor factors are if you're hunting with B1's with rods or B2+ with rods, as that adds another 10% chance of failure, etc. I guess the best advice is just to run a test game with your nation and site settings for the game in question and see what works. Blood hunting has a lot of moving parts, but in the end is mostly a game of averages.

[Illuminated One]

Hmm, I've also noticed that some of my bloodhunting provinces decreased in population (mostly where there were b3 bloodhunters after rods).
I'm not sure what's the cause but neither do I patrol nor have I death scales.

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Illuminated One

Hmm, I've also noticed that some of my bloodhunting provinces decreased in population (mostly where there were b3 bloodhunters after rods).
I'm not sure what's the cause but neither do I patrol nor have I death scales.

Ummmm, blood hunting decreases population. Since those slaves have to come from somewhere

[Fantomen]

One thing I´ve noticed is that if you have very easy access to hordes of free patrollers and growth 3, like the wolves and thralls of LA ulm, it can be a better idea to blood hunt provinces with very large population.

For example I am playing LA ulm (with growth3) in a game where I have blood hunted my capital heavily since year one. I have a couple hundred wolves and thralls patrolling so there is never any unrest and population has increased by a few thousand. Taxes have been 100% all along.

Same thing in 5 other provinces with 15k+ population.

This way it is quite possible to maintain a blood income of more than 100 per turn without any noticable loss of gold.