Blood Nation Woes

[Kuritza]

One thing about Mictlan - most likely, you dont want your dominion to spread. Vice versa, your domain is so terrible, you want to conquer somebody as fast as possible with your blessed jaguars and live in his dominion from now on.
Just make sure you have some candles in your home province, and you will be fine.

[NickW]

Kuritza said:
One thing about Mictlan - most likely, you dont want your dominion to spread. Vice versa, your domain is so terrible, you want to conquer somebody as fast as possible with your blessed jaguars and live in his dominion from now on.
Just make sure you have some candles in your home province, and you will be fine.

That's actually not a good way to play Mictlan. I much prefer a milder bless with decent dominion. Not using Mictlan's ability to power-spread dominion and thus not taking advantage of the potential bonuses from fighting in friendly dominion is workable but it's ignoring one of Mictlan's strengths.

[thejeff]

You shouldn't be cutting your income in half blood hunting anyway.
Bloodhunting is most effective in provinces above 5000 population. It doesn't get anymore effective with higher population, so concentrate on provinces just over 5000, to allow for losses.

This leaves your big high income provinces untouched.

[Baalz]

Yes, but generally provinces with more than 10,000 population are pretty rare. I find that if I blood hunt in every province that has a population between 5k-10k that it often cuts my income about in half as the ones under 5k don't give that much income and the ones over 10k aren't very common. That's an expensive trade off, but in exchange you can easily get 100+ blood slaves a turn with which to do all kinds of nastiness. Again, in general, this is about the maximum you can effectively blood hunt unless you don't care about the diminishing returns of blood hunting in more populous provinces.

[Meglobob]

Baalz said:
Yes, but generally provinces with more than 10,000 population are pretty rare. I find that if I blood hunt in every province that has a population between 5k-10k that it often cuts my income about in half as the ones under 5k don't give that much income and the ones over 10k aren't very common. That's an expensive trade off, but in exchange you can easily get 100+ blood slaves a turn with which to do all kinds of nastiness. Again, in general, this is about the maximum you can effectively blood hunt unless you don't care about the diminishing returns of blood hunting in more populous provinces.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying here Baalz, should I blood hunt in 5,000 - 6,000 pop provinces or in 5,000 - 10,000 pop provinces or 10,000+ pop. provinces. I consider you an expert when it comes to playing Mictlan by the way.

Also do you recommend as Mictlan researching construction first for dousing rods/jade knife? I figure if you go with a double/triple bless for your sacreds your very safe the first 20 turns or so...

[Meglobob]

If anyone else knows the answers to the above questions in the post, I am keen to know...

[Folket]

You should start blood hunting in 5k provinces and working yourself upwards.

I think the post meant that you can afford to blood hunt in all 5-10k provinces unless you have some 10k+ provinces that will give you income.

[CharonJr]

Meglobob said:

I am not sure I understand what you are saying here Baalz, should I blood hunt in 5,000 - 6,000 pop provinces or in 5,000 - 10,000 pop provinces or 10,000+ pop. provinces. I consider you an expert when it comes to playing Mictlan by the way.

Also do you recommend as Mictlan researching construction first for dousing rods/jade knife? I figure if you go with a double/triple bless for your sacreds your very safe the first 20 turns or so...

As Mictlan I would go all the way to to Const6 since a F9W9B4 (maybe add a D5) bless will make you fairly safe with a Dom of 8.

This way you get the rod, jade knife and boots of youth for your High Priests in addition to all the nice path boosters and other goodies. Depending on the circumstances I might find myself forced to go for blood or summons earlier, but mostly try to stick to Const6.

In addition I would leave 10k+ provinces alone (in order to get gold) and bloodhunt in the 6k-10k ones. Most often I try to use 6k-8k ones.

5k-6k provinces go below 5k way too fast and this might lead to some bad hunts. And when I (effectively) exchange RPs for blood I want my exchange ratio to be as high as possible

Usually I can get 100+ slaves each turn by "just" farming 5 6k-8k provinces which should not be THAT bad a drain on you income (likely "wasting" between 200-400 gp depending on where you hunt).

CharonJr

[thejeff]

This also depends on your scales.

With death you'll need to use larger provinces since the population will drop below 5000 faster.

[CharonJr]

Yup, and scales should depend on the length of the game, but even for fairly short/small ones I would try to avoid death with Mictlan due to old mages (getting everyone of them boots of youth will get expensive in slaves and wasted research time for forging) and bloodhunting.

CharonJr