Blood Indies

[Dragar]

Give him Blood 6 & Fire 1 and bring on the soul contracts real early!

[vfb]

Originally Posted by OmikronWarrior

A strategy I played around with in my head (and a little in SP) is using the Blood Fountain (which combines a low cost with a significant bonus to blood hunting) to quickly get LA Man a blood economy. With Growth-3 and patroling Judges taxes can remain at 100% with out generating excessive unrest and still increase the population (though not as quickly). Problem was I just couldn't figure out how to translate an enormous early advantage in blood economy into success on the battlefield while sacrificing an SC or a rainbow.

This sounded like a neat idea, so I tried it in SP. I thought with CB1.3 I'd be able to leverage the reduced cost and research for Call Lesser Horror.

Order-3, Prod-3, Grow-3, Luck-2, Drain-3, Blood-4 fountain.

So, I spent the first year slowly expanding with just vanilla troops and the prophet, and then by the second year I empowered 2 Magisters Arcane in blood. They can take a province together with (Call Lesser Horror, flee) -- well, they turn it into an uninhabited zone that a Judge/scout/whatever can walk into the next month and steal. Another scout can sneak around carrying slaves for casting in his pocket.


But. Here are the problems I found with this strategy:

1 - It's really slow expansion

2 - With drain dominion, they get 120 fatigue from one Horror cast and can't flee the battlefield for a while.

3 - The horrors can be lost to lances, etc. Then the mages are toast.

4 - Even with Grow-3, both Magisters I empowered got diseased in Late Winter!

I was thinking of going with mass Lifelong Protection, researching Const-4, but gave up before I got there.

[Poopsi]

4 - Even with Grow-3, both Magisters I empowered got diseased in Late Winter!

Rejuvenate/boots?

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by vfb

This sounded like a neat idea, so I tried it in SP. I thought with CB1.3 I'd be able to leverage the reduced cost and research for Call Lesser Horror.

Order-3, Prod-3, Grow-3, Luck-2, Drain-3, Blood-4 fountain.

So, I spent the first year slowly expanding with just vanilla troops and the prophet, and then by the second year I empowered 2 Magisters Arcane in blood. They can take a province together with (Call Lesser Horror, flee) -- well, they turn it into an uninhabited zone that a Judge/scout/whatever can walk into the next month and steal. Another scout can sneak around carrying slaves for casting in his pocket.


But. Here are the problems I found with this strategy:

1 - It's really slow expansion

2 - With drain dominion, they get 120 fatigue from one Horror cast and can't flee the battlefield for a while.

3 - The horrors can be lost to lances, etc. Then the mages are toast.

4 - Even with Grow-3, both Magisters I empowered got diseased in Late Winter!

I was thinking of going with mass Lifelong Protection, researching Const-4, but gave up before I got there.

IIRC, LA man has a stealhty 1-1-1 mage. He'd make a great assassin. Give him a black heart or a soul contract....

Also, iirc one of LA Man significant weaknesses is lack of SC worthy chassis. Blood might be used to overcome that.

I've always thought it would be interesting if some units could perform blood sacrifice without a temple. Stealthy blood sacrifice in an opponents dominion just sounds.. well.. cool.

[Nikelaos]

Originally Posted by vfb

This sounded like a neat idea, so I tried it in SP. I thought with CB1.3 I'd be able to leverage the reduced cost and research for Call Lesser Horror.

Order-3, Prod-3, Grow-3, Luck-2, Drain-3, Blood-4 fountain.

So, I spent the first year slowly expanding with just vanilla troops and the prophet, and then by the second year I empowered 2 Magisters Arcane in blood. They can take a province together with (Call Lesser Horror, flee) -- well, they turn it into an uninhabited zone that a Judge/scout/whatever can walk into the next month and steal. Another scout can sneak around carrying slaves for casting in his pocket.


But. Here are the problems I found with this strategy:

1 - It's really slow expansion

2 - With drain dominion, they get 120 fatigue from one Horror cast and can't flee the battlefield for a while.

3 - The horrors can be lost to lances, etc. Then the mages are toast.

4 - Even with Grow-3, both Magisters I empowered got diseased in Late Winter!

I was thinking of going with mass Lifelong Protection, researching Const-4, but gave up before I got there.

how about using you're pretender for blood summons, you have the heliophagii to make use of and and arch devils and such.

[vfb]

Originally Posted by Nikelaos

how about using you're pretender for blood summons, you have the heliophagii to make use of and and arch devils and such.

Your pretender is not going to be able to summon anything that will help with your initial expansion. And later you'll have a tough time competing with the real blood nations to get the unique blood summons.