Bandar Log advice

[gowb]

Haha, I hate misfortune but as long as you took some Order you shouldn't hurt too bad. You did take Order right??

[K]

Expect to take your first province on turn 3. Four white ones, your crap army, and your Prophet smiting can take a tribal province(you will lose a ton of your crap army and some of the white ones). For tougher provinces, ten white ones is a recipe for indie battles with 0 losses (avoid barbarians and elephants which need masses of archers, and use screens of markata for calvary).

[K]

Misfortune 2's only real problem is no free gem events from luck and barbarian attacks. The attacks are aren't a big deal as long as you keep an archer army around home for that.

[secretperson]

So what's generally considered the safest bad scales to take? Sloth? Heat/Cold? Drain?

Death seems pretty heavy to me and I don't think I've ever take it in a long game unless I was playing an appropriate nation ie Ermor.

Misfortune seriously scares me. Maybe I haven't had enough experience with it but nothing annoys me more than a temple being destroyed or a lab burning down or barbarians! But that brings up another question- I remember reading that random events may be tied to what scales you take, is that true?

[Zenzei]

Heh, I honestly think misfortune is the best bad scale to take because it doesn't give you any "hard" penalties such as minus to income. Sloth is pretty good pick too but once you play with misfortune a bit, you don't even notice it's there. With heat/cold one step further than the nation preference is also my standard procedure.

[MaxWilson]

I think most people would go with Sloth. Aside from the minor hit to income all it does is force you to build more fortresses--most nations are more gold-limited than resource-limited anyway.

Yes, events are known to be tied to what scales you take. An (incomplete) list from Dom2: http://www.freewebs.com/dominions2/events.html

-Max

[MaxWilson]

K said:
Sure. Regular commanders can get blood slaves, just at a very very bad rate (1-20, in my calculation). Scouts are the favored unit since 20 of them is only 400 gold.

It's actually not as difficult as you'd think to bootstrap into blood. There's two components to blood-hunting cost, the cost of the units doing the blood-hunting and the reduced income from unrest/reduced taxation. An unsuccessful bloodhunt causes d6-1 unrest, a successful one causes IIRC d(number of blood slaves found x3 plus 4) unrest. In most cases a successful bloodhunter will get 4-5 bloodslaves and cause ~10 unrest, so you can support ~3 bloodhunters in a 5000-pop province indefinitely by turning taxes down to 0. You can support 8 or 9 scouts blood-hunting (poorly) in that province. The scouts will produce only 1/6 as many blood slaves as the real blood hunters, but you can probably get enough blood slaves to forge into Bloodstones or something. I don't know if you can get enough to support Kailasa's national summons.

-Max

[K]

MaxWilson said:

It's actually not as difficult as you'd think to bootstrap into blood. There's two components to blood-hunting cost, the cost of the units doing the blood-hunting and the reduced income from unrest/reduced taxation. An unsuccessful bloodhunt causes d6-1 unrest, a successful one causes IIRC d(number of blood slaves found x3 plus 4) unrest. In most cases a successful bloodhunter will get 4-5 bloodslaves and cause ~10 unrest, so you can support ~3 bloodhunters in a 5000-pop province indefinitely by turning taxes down to 0. You can support 8 or 9 scouts blood-hunting (poorly) in that province. The scouts will produce only 1/6 as many blood slaves as the real blood hunters, but you can probably get enough blood slaves to forge into Bloodstones or something. I don't know if you can get enough to support Kailasa's national summons.

-Max

Bootstrapping into blood means empowerment on a massive scale. Once you have a Blood 1 guy, you have him make a Sanguine Rod and you empower more as needed

Ideally you empower one Death guy to summon vampires who are very good at blood hunting at only 77 slaves; lamia queens sometimes pop up with Death 3 and Blood 1 so with a Skull staff and minimal empowerment they are perfect for this tactic, and Bandar Log is very good for summoning lamia queens.

Blood is a mid-game advantage at best, but if you bootstrap into it then it is a late-game advantage. Basically, the only reason to do it is that it is so cheap and at the very least it is a few extra mages for research.

There are several decent guides on the subject in the strategy section.