Mictlan , how to play it effectively

[Boron]

PDF said:
Well, you've to choose *either* to play Mictlan *or* play effectively !
More seriously, Mictlan is hard to play and not that powerful : it screams for some high Bless strategy with the were-warriors, and requires full power to Blood economy to get hordes of Devils. Blood and dominion management requires serious micromanagement, with eventual frequent mistakes !
Overall Mictlan is rather disappointing ...

yeah i agree .
i wanted to try something new and now i play mictlan in my 3! new mpgames . was a serious serious fault
each with other pretender / tactics but so far none is satisfying .
the sacrificing for dominion is bad .
i think i like abysia more when i wanna play blood

[NTJedi]

Mictlan is definitely the most challenging to play. Anytime Mictlan is setup in a game as a computer opponent he almost always dies early.

[archaeolept]

easy strat 101 for Mictlan:

1. design a stanadard supercombatant for indy expansion
2. research alt 3 and enchant 1 (most probably)
3. research const 4 for dousing rods
4. cover as many 4-8k pop terrritories w/ packs of 3 bloodhunting priests w/ dousing rods
5. summon

or, if you're playing competitive MP, ignore construction, bloodhunt anyways, have blood and 3 water on your pretender, and rush the ice devils.

[Cheezeninja]

Mictlan starts with the bind fiend spell, so no research is really needed to start conquering provinces, just a few bloodslaves. Conquer 1 province with troops, bloodhunt like crazy and summon fiends.

[cydius]

quick question for mictlan.

when selecting scales, does mictlan gain any benefit from Restless Worshipers???

thanks

[Graeme Dice]

cydius said:
when selecting scales, does mictlan gain any benefit from Restless Worshipers???

They don't, which is why you can't select it.

[The Panther]

Some more random thoughts on the subject of Mictlan.

1. It seems the above consensus from several folks is that a slave sacrifice is worth 1/4 that of a temple from any other race. In my experience, this seems correct to me. Whether it is a feature or a bug, I can't comment of that one. But it sure seems to work this way, for spreading dominion as Mictlan seems almost impossible to achieve against any decent player. Most especially Ermor.

2. The population loss from blood hunting is supposed to be fairly simple. For each captured slave, you lose a minimum of 2 population. For each killed brigand from patrolling, you also lose at least 2 population, and this is compounded on top of the blood slave loss. I believe the way it works for real is that you lose 10 population for 1-5 of either brigand or blood slave, 20 population for 6-10, 30 loss for 11-15, and so forth.

3. Losing 1000 people in a single turn is farfetched to me. I think there is an accidental added zero in there. Using the Huzur method of having your free slaves patrol with lots (meaning more than 3) of blood hunters, you lose on the order of 100 pop per turn, just as he has stated above. So, if you intend to rape your capitol, it will Last quite a while indeed. But I believe that you really need the capitol income to spread your watch towers in order to protect your other hunters and sacrificiers, and also pay upkeep for all your priests.

4. Mictlan has the highest level of micro-management of any race. I can fully attest to the truth of this, for I am currently playing 5 different races in 5 separate MP games. My Mictlan game definitely does, on average, take the longest time to move of the group. All games are approximately in the mid-game phase with 1 closer to the latter stage of the game.

5. In my next MP move as Mictlan, I will conduct an experiment. I will sacrifice only ONE slave per temple on this next turn and see if my dominion drops down on the graph. I will report the results in the next few days. I am hoping that 1 sacrificed slave works as well as the 4 I have been doing each turn, for I have invested a ton of slaves in this game for so little apparent benefit in dominion spread.

Cheers

[cydius]

Original post:

when selecting scales, does mictlan gain any benefit from Restless Worshipers???

Graeme Dice said:

They don't, which is why you can't select it.

just wanted to let you know you can select both Restless Whorshippers and Ceremonial Faith as Mictlan.

[Truper]

archaeolept said:
easy strat 101 for Mictlan:

1. design a stanadard supercombatant for indy expansion
2. research alt 3 and enchant 1 (most probably)
3. research const 4 for dousing rods
4. cover as many 4-8k pop terrritories w/ packs of 3 bloodhunting priests w/ dousing rods
5. summon

or, if you're playing competitive MP, ignore construction, bloodhunt anyways, have blood and 3 water on your pretender, and rush the ice devils.

Un-equipped Ice Devils are good, but not that good. Unless you intend to rush to them and then use em as researchers until you can equip them, I'd advise going with construction first.

Oh, and you really want to hunt in provinces with at least 5k population, not 4k, since there is a formula breakpoint that comes at 5k.

[archaeolept]

well, the point of a rush is to grab them before someone else does. equipping comes later

and while above 5K is optimal, a 4K province will return 80% of what a 5K province does. Actually, a bit higher than 80%, if you hunt like i do, w/ 3 priests w/ dousing rods, since that will, on average, drive the unrest up slightly.

so 4K is ok, while 6K (since it can Last a long time), is optimal. But, for instance, in my current game I have no 5-8K provinces, so my choice is between doing 4K provinces or 9K