Mictlan , how to play it effectively

[The Panther]

One of the problems with Mictlan is that you are pretty much forced to get growth if you expect the game to Last more than about 50 turns or so. With death scales + bloodhunting + patrolling, your provinces will look like Ermor was there in no time at all! With 3 hunters per province, zero tax rate, and no patrolling, you can just about balance the pop loss from hunting with 2 growth. Without population, you get no more slaves and you are totally dead. Just see how fast your dominion dies when you have no slaves to sacrifice anymore!

The other problem, pointed out above, is that the blood battle spells simply aren't useful at all. All those annoying blood slaves die in the battle, and you MUST have them because every blood battle spell uses a slave or two. Not to mention the intense micromanagement of getting the correct amount of slaves to the correct mages scripted to cast the correct battle spells. You are typically far better off using your slaves to make another devil/vampire or 2 (or 10 or 50)!

Another huge problem is the fact that after you pool slaves, you must go to ALL your sacrificing priests and put the 4 slaves (you have the jade knife on all your sacrificers, right?) back on them. Every darn turn! And you will always miss this a few times throughout the course of the game. Plus you will put your tax rate back to 100% inadvertently in the F1 screen and get instant high unrest more than once!

My strategy as Mictlan is to get 1-2 growth and put a set of four Mictlan priests in every single province between 4K and 8K population. One guy has the jade knife and a clam and sacs four slaves per turn. The other three have the SDR and a clam and hunt continously. With the tax at zero and the hunters only 90% successful, you almost never have the unrest go above 20. This nets you around 9 slaves, 4 temple checks, and 4 pearls per such province per turn indefinitely with 2 growth. Also, don't forget to get a cheap castle and put it in every single one of these hunt/sac provinces.

On all the low pop provinces, like below 2-3K, just hunt them to death and move on. Don't bother with a tower/temple/lab in those unless they have a gem income that you don't want to lose.