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Graeme Dice said:
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Jim_Parker said:
The amount of blood required for that cannot possibly be viable.
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It certainly is viable, and Mictlan actually has to be careful to not overwhelm the dominion of your neighbours.
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I must greatly disagree with the Dice Man here. This overwhelmence is late game only. You are SO darn far behind spreading dominion early that it lingers well into the middle game. There is essentially zero chance of overrunning your neighbors with dominion for at least 40 turns into the game. You must fight like crazy for a long, long time just to try and hold your own dominion from getting crushed. The only solution to this early on is getting 9 or 10 base dominion, which is typically a misuse of pretender points.
And you really, really want to spend your slaves on anything but wasting them on dominion spread. Like IDs, ADs, devils, vampires, etc, and etc, and etc. Being unequivocally forced to sacrifice on the order of 20 slaves per turn JUST TO STAY EVEN with any other race is no fun at all. I can assure you that this hurts bad in my current Mictlan game.
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Graeme Dice said:
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Jim_Parker said:
Not to mention the time spent hunting for slaves when other dominions can be actively preaching against you.
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No dominion can actively preach against you unless they've already conquered your provinces. Preaching does not spread dominion outside of the province that it happens in.
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The Dice is mostly correct here, though there are races with stealthy preachers. Getting 10 PD everywhere, while expensive, puts a stop to the stealthy business. But the point is that other races passively spread dominion into Mictlan territory just by building temples on your border. Mictlan cannot do this passively. He is forced to waste the blood slaves anywhere he wants to push dominion.
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Graeme Dice said:
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Jim_Parker said:
As things stand, those temples look like a huge waste of cash that you are unlikely to be able to afford considering you'll be running blood provinces.
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They are easy to afford once you've stopped purchasing troops and switched over to Mictlan Priests and capital-based mages.
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Jim Parker has a good point here. Just because you can maybe afford them later on in the game does not change the fact they temples are pretty much a COMPLETE waste of gold for Mictlan. And just because you need them to recruit the Mictlan priests does not change this fact either. I mean, you will NEVER be able to afford to build a priest in every single province with a temple that you are forced to sacrifice from. If not for the requirement of needing them to sacrifice slaves, I doubt any Mictlan player would build very many temples at all. They would put them in grudgingly only when they want to get to the next set of 5.
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Graeme Dice said:
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Jim_Parker said:
Mictlan is weak and needs too much micromanagment to be viable.
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Mictlan ain't weak, and the micromanagement consists of little more than selecting your hunters in each province and pressing 'Z'.
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This is both right and wrong.
Mictlan does suffer from more micro than any other race. And it it not as simple as selecting your hunters and hitting 'Z'. I tried that and it simply does not work. It is a start, but you must also baby every single hunter based on the current unrest level in each hunting province. With less than 5 unrest, you can have 3 hunters. With about 10 unrest, you need to put one hunter temporarily on research. And when you get one of those outliers of high unrest or a bad event, or get attacked by knights or barbarians, then they all hunters in the province must go to research while you either wait with zero tax and/or patrollers to clear it.
You must move your patrolling slaves around where needed the most. You also must switch hunting provinces around as you use up population. You also must decide each and every turn on exactly how many slaves you can afford to sacrifice this time.
But I will certainly agree with Dice on one thing here: Mictlan is not weak. If you can survive through the harsh middle game, it can be very strong in the end game with its IDs, ADs, devils, vampires, and the ability to crush other peoples dominions almost at will.
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Graeme Dice said:
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Jim_Parker said:
Even the AI gets mullered with it most games :- I've seen one strong Mictlan AI in about 100 games.
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That's not a surprise, since the AI doesn't play blood nations effectively at all.
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Amen to this. You really can't base the true strength of the races based on how the AI plays. I mean, the AI plays Caelum probably worse than any other nation (beside Mictlan, I mean). And Caelum is actually the best nation, based on the results of that informal poll in another thread. The play of the AI is mostly based on how strong the national troops happen to be, since that it what it uses the most by far. Ermor is an exception here because, while the AE/SG troops are weak, the AI can get so darn many of them and micro the heck out of them.