Guide: LA Ulm: Goths Gone Wild! or, Flying Immortal Vampire Harbingers of Dooooooooooooooom!

[chrispedersen]

Ok.. 22 games played to the end of year 3.

Three competeing philosophies:

1. Mine: Heavy blood/nature awake pretender. Luck scales.
2. Licker: Moderate awake pretender. Luck scales.
3. Dedas/Tolkien: Sleeping pretender. Order scales.

So here is what I found - all things considered, I thought my strategy was the hardest, with the slowest ramp up. Plus sides on mine:

A. Fully kitted out SC: Blood thorn, armor of souls, horror helmet, Eyeshield, Luck amulet, Boots of quickness, Amulet of MR.
Prophet.

HP: 55+. MR 30 ish; mid 20's. Regen like 13. With the blood thorn shredded even beat 4-6 bless niefles.

Occassional game breaking luck events: Each of the games got Incredible luck events. I have seen the 3000 gp event almost once per game. Magic item events - ring of wizardry!
Animists, and sometimes frost fathers.

B. National heros. More than 400 blood in the bank. Highest research.

2: Better gem income. Better scales meant better early expansion, 1 more castle than option 1. Still, slow slogging first year.

3. Much easier first year expansion. Magic averaged 280 pts less research than option 1. Gems in the bank was comparable to #1, due to luck events for #1 - however per turn income was higher due site searching with asleep pretender (when it awakened)

More than *twice* as many castles on the average - with 13 at the end of year 3. However, I still had yet to cast my first sanguine heritage; no vampires no counts, and no real blood economy. No national heros.

The question is - how would it fare against human opponents.

In my games - I always try to transition to SC's. Yet I have to say, that I think the transition happens to early in my strategy.

So overall, I am convinced that despite the design challenges of coming up with the extra 40 points, an asleep rainbow pretender with order scales is probably the best strategy.

I'd like to offer a small refinement to Tolkien: Obviously you wish a pretender with death access for your sanguine heritage spell. However, also valuable early on for your ability to lead
your ghoul guardians.

So, in short. I was wrong. I still think my strategy cool, neat and nifty. Just not optimal.

[chrispedersen]

For the sleeping pretenders, I used a crone with accross the bord 4's except earth and air. Dominion 5.

Fire is important for flame arrows.

[Tolkien]

Ferrying around Ghoul Guardians? I would use Counts for that, since your pretender is better used for research/searching/forging boosters: ferrying around ghouls is something for the common commanders to do, not a god :P . Also, if you delay major research in the first year, you should come up with enough blood slaves with Second Tiers for a count. Once you get a count up, your blood economy should scale up nicely from that point: much slower as compared to having an awake blood pretender searching, however. You won't overtake Mictlan, but you'll still be in the running: and unlike Mictlan, you aren't sacrificing everything else just to be top dog in blood.

I'll go back to refining my strategy.

[chrispedersen]

Mictlan doesn't sacrifice anything (well except virgins) to be the top dog in blood = ).

In the first year, you are *very* busy with capital intensive commanders. With your build, in my best attempts, I was *never* able to get my blood economy going in any serious way in year 1 or 2.

[licker]

Interesting analysis Chris.

A couple questions, was this with CBM or vanilla? Was the pretender used in my test case a true rainbow or the DB FoB?

[Tolkien]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Mictlan doesn't sacrifice anything (well except virgins) to be the top dog in blood = ).

Touche.

As for the blood part: I've gotten the slaves. To do it, you'll be spending your time recruiting mostly Second Tiers in your first year (as wolfherds and fortunetellers come up after you get your new forts up, because we need reliable blood mages and they have +1 RP over the fortunetellers; even if the FTs are more cost-effective) and patrolling your capital, but I've done it. I get enough slaves with 4ish (give or take one) blood hunters on my capital or mid-sized provinces with a bit of patrolling to summon a count by the time you wake. Once that is done, you can start sending your Second Tiers to research.

I'll do some trials on it tomorrow when I get some free time.

[chrispedersen]

Yeah, I have no question you can do it - but the cost is falling even farther behind on research.

[Tolkien]

Well, Magic 1 helps, but the main thing is that even if you focus all of your mages to research from Turn 1, it isn't going to be extremely significant.

Alright, working hypothetically: We're building 4 Second Tiers in the first four turns and sending them blood hunting. Assuming a mid-sized province without unrest (or capital with patrolling), each has a 50% chance of getting d6+1 slaves (at least 2).
Turn 1: No Blood Hunting.
Turn 2: 1 Blood Hunter. (patrolling as we wait for another turn of rangers)
Turn 3: No Blood Hunting. (move the Second Tiers to capture a mid-pop province with your commander).
Turn 4: 2 Blood Hunters, 2 50%. (we move the next two hunters to another province).
Turn 5: 3 Blood Hunters, 3 50%.
Turn 6-12: 4 Blood Hunters, 4 50%.
(you can also just use your capital and patrol that, which speeds up expansion, but means you can get unrest in your cap if you get lucky with the d6 of hunting, and that can hurt abit).

I've also just run a couple (lost count, a few dozen) test runs in SP, up to the end of year 1 following this.
Depending on how luck goes, you should easily be able to pull up 44 slaves by the end of turn 12. I've done a few test runs and 4 might even be too many: I've pulled up 44 by turn 7 (with a bit of luck on the d6+1) on a few trials and always gotten the 44 by the time my pretender awakens. That still means you have 8 turns to recruit mages for research or commanders to lead expansion armies.

The research lost isn't too important at all. Ulm in Year One isn't dependent on magic to expand: you aren't Bogarus with the crappy troops and where research is ESSENTIAL to your survival: your main blood goal, Vampire Counts, for much of the earlygame/early midgame, can already be summoned. Your troops are good enough to kick off expansion, and you're just putting off your signature battlefield spells (in evocation, Iron Blizzard and to a lesser extent, Shadow Blast) and Construction-4 to near the end of Year Two. It would indeed be nice to have these spells earlier, but by sacrificing a few turns without Iron Blizzard and other magics, you're setting yourself up to be a major midgame/endgame power. You can make up the research lost with the increased mage production from new forts. Using Calculus, you can get roughly 1226 RP from Year 1 to Year 2 with 2 forts turning out researchers and your Pretender (and assuming no researchers to begin with and you should have some mages available to be transitioned into research role by the end of year 1): enough to get you to Evo6 and Cons4, and that is discounting even more forts coming up and experience. With more forts, your research curve grows sharper, so it makes up for you research (or lack thereof) in year 1. The research you get in year 1 isn't significant anyway. If you devote your capital to nothing but research from turn 1, you get a graph of 6.1x (again discounting experience and new forts), of which the area is equal to 3.05x^2 and that means you end up with 439 RP. This is assuming you aren't turning out commanders for expansion. It's enough to get you to Cons4, but not even close to enough for Evo6, which is really more important than Cons4 (as it means access to Shadow Blast and Iron Blizzard).
Again, building up more forts means you can make up this gap in the long term.

[JimMorrison]

It's a good theory, I like it. I personally try never to train Second Tiers, due to the upkeep, but using them to get your Blood started ASAP, isn't a bad trick.

The only problem with this as far as my own style, is that I like an Imprisoned rainbow, and to work this, you need to only be Dormant, so you can summon your count(s), correct? Also I would be sorely tempted to just Blood Hunt the capital, and Patrol, so I'd probably want Growth, further impacting available points for a good rainbow pretender.

I think in my case, I'd find the happy medium by letting it take just a couple more turns to get the hunting started, in order to optimize the targeted province, the scales, and the disposition of forces. My inability to sacrifice "economy" for "horsepower" borders on OCD.

[Tolkien]

Well I favor patrolling when you're expanding anyway: the only problem is, having enough spare troops to actually patrol the provinces. Honestly, you don't even need to use two provinces if you are patrolling: if you are, setting one to 0% taxes and patrolling should suffice. Patrolling though is the #1 killer of population when it comes to blood hunting, and 0% taxes on a few mid-sized provinces don't hurt that much: they give 40-75 gold on 100 gold. Blood is basically based on turning gold into slaves. Since the amount of gold in the game and army sizes have increased from Dom2, the conversion rate doesn't hurt your income as much as it use to, and it means blood is actually better.

Personally, I like Second Tiers. They're more cost-effective (and recruit everywhere) researchers then the Iron Priests all in all: though the sacred part on the Priests does decrease total upkeep. Second Tiers are what you'll be using for most of your blood hunting needs until your Counts are in numbers, they're good for getting research up, and stealthy communions are %#*(ing awesome.