Cost efficient blood hunting

[Huzurdaddi]

Originally Posted by Baalz

And another angle to consider is the loss in income from the province, not just the upkeep of the mage.

This is actually the most important point about bloodhunting in Dom3 and is one of the big changes in bloodhunting from Dom2.

The increase in gold/province is a large boost (relative) to less elite blood hunting nations as the majority of the cost of blood hunting is the lost gold from taxes (assuming you blood hunt in stable state by setting taxes to zero, if you patrol it is difficult to compare).

Just for comparison consider two blood hunters:

Mitclan Priest (upkeep 2.66) average blood ~7
Jotun Skratti (upkeep 16.66) average blood ~8

It seems like the Mitclan Priest is far superior. Indeed from the chart above you are getting 2.5 slaves / gold with the Mitclan Priest and only 0.4 slaves / gold with the Jotun Skratti.

However if you blood hunt with 2 per province, in a 5000k pop province (~70 income) the numbers turn out quite different:

Mitclan Priest ~5.3 gold / slave
Jotun Skratti ~6.5 gold / slave

Mitclan still wins, but they are much closer.

PS: the increase in gold / province is actually a rather large nerf to all blood hunting nations, which was noted when Dom3 was released (there were actually multiple nerfs to blood in Dom3 vs. Dom2, most relegated to devils). Given that blood is still considered very powerful in Dom3 this was almost certainly a good thing (along with the nerf to life drain which was excellent).