Mictlan , how to play it effectively

[Jim_Parker]

The Panther said:I also wonder about your mass sacrificing at strategic points thing. A huge problem is that only one priest at a time can sacrifice in a province with a temple. I simply cannot see how mass sacrificing will work at all.

What I was assuming was a constant 5 slave sacrifice over a few turns would really start to turn the dominion around. That's why I was saving up rather than just sporadically cutting a few throats.

As for the population loss thing, your pop is dying if you don't have growth. Write down the population in a provimce from one turn to the next and see how much it goes down each month. Every blood slave you create results in a loss of a minimum of 2 people per slave. The virgin and her mother perhaps???

So, 3 hunters in a single province over 5K population will lose you 30-35 people each turn for the 15 slaves on average that you get. Add in a -0.4% loss from death 2, and you would be losing 50+ pop per turn.

Hmmm, I'd better look more closely at the figures I'm seeing. Is there another factor involved, like migration perhaps? I've seen a few migrations from my lands before due to misfortune events...do those people actually go elsewhere? Even if they do, I can't quite understand why they'd choose my empire instead.

By the way, I did have my level 5 prophet with the jade knife successfully sacrifice 8 slaves per turn, just as it is supposed to be. Even then, though, I could not get my dominion to expand. Probably because I am squeezed between a 10-dominion Ermor and a rapdily expanding Caelum...

I dunno...there must be a constant effect thing in progress surely? The province I'm currently blood hunting/slaving in had a -1 dominion (as I said, it's right next to the Caelum capital) to start with. It rapidly fell to a -3 but went straight to -2 the turn I built a temple. It's now -1 and I haven't sacrificed a single slave all game or 17 turns overall. A clarification on how Mictlan's dominion worked would be a good place to start I think.