Blood Nation Woes

[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

[Baalz]

Awww, thanks Bob. Basically how it boils down is that there is no difference in the blood slaves you get for any population over 5000, so blood hunting in a 10k population province will get you the same blood slaves as the 5k province, but (all other things being equal) will cost you twice as much gold. The other thing to keep in mind to is depending on your scales, and if you're patrolling to reduce unrest your population may be dropping, so if you start hunting in provinces real close to 5k you could drop under that before long and you start getting diminishing returns.

So, to answer your question as to where to blood hunt, as always this depends on a couple things. Always start with the provinces closest to 5k (with no mines or other gold boosting sites) as these will be the "cheapest" blood slaves. As you start wanting more and more blood slaves, start moving up the chain to higher and higher population provinces but keep in mind each one will have a higher cost in gold than the one before it. How high you go really depends on the strategy you’re following, you’re almost always going to need some gold so this is where you need to focus on balance. If you're going for a very tight blood focus (a good strat with Mictlan), I find that in very general terms by the time I end up putting blood hunters in the territories close to 10k population my gold income has dropped to the point that I enter more of my “blood mode” and stop recruiting units every turn and instead save the little gold I get for buying mages for specific needs and building labs and temples. By that time you’ve got enough blood slaves coming in that you can get a good amount of summoning done every round to compensate.

On blood hunting the provinces under 5k it’s more a question of the upkeep cost of the blood hunters because the gold income hit isn’t as much. With Mictlan specifically the blood hunters are so damn cheap, I find it’s also worthwhile to put them in the 4k-5k population provinces as well. You won’t get quite as many blood slaves (4/5 the blood slaves for a 4k population), but when your blood hunters cost 60 gold and are holy you’re not paying much for the blood slaves either. And again, it all depends on what your other options are, how valuable the blood slaves are to you, how easy it is to defend those blood hunters, what other territories you have, etc.

The thing to keep in mind is that you’re always “paying” gold for blood slaves, you just need to decide what price you’re willing to pay. The more blood slaves you want, the more expensive they are…but getting to the point that you’re sucking in 100+ blood slaves a turn is a pretty sweet spot if you can do it while remaining stable.

[Baalz]

Oh, in answer to your other question I almost always go to con-4 first with Mictlan, though of course there are different ways to play it. The main reason is because up until around that point your mages are more useful researching than blood hunting. You don't need any blood summons immediately because your holy troops are tough enough to deal with whatever they need to initially, and you're capitol's naturual income is enough to keep you blood sacrificing at first. The nice thing about using all those Mictlan priests to research is that the very turn that you finish researching construction-4 they can all forge themselves sanguine rods. Obviously you don't have many blood slaves at that point since you haven't been blood hunting, but I usually aim to have at least 15 ready at the same time by limiting how much I'm blood sacrificing. From that point I more or less send three new blood hunters with sanguine rods out each turn (I usually aim to have three castles at this point as well), each "squad" setting up in a new province.

So, how this works out is that just as you start having blood slaves flowing in you've still got a decent chunk of mages researching (blood now), so you start hitting those good blood spells relatively soon and with blood slaves in the bank. Also, since you've hit con-4 you can forge skull mentors and/or owl quills if you've gotten one of the national heroes (I usually have a high luck scale with Mictlan for this among other reasons).

Compare this with researching straight for blood. If you do that, you've got to split your mages between research and blood hunting (no point in having spells you can't cast!) - and the blood hunters are half as effective without the sanguine rods. No owl quils or skull mentors to help you out, and you're taking an immediate hit to your gold while you're sill relying on your national troops to take out the indies. I guess you could make this work, but it seems much more of an uphill battle to me.