Blood Nation Woes

[UninspiredName]

I've been having trouble trying to get blood strategies right. I'm at the point where I can make a pretty reliable economy without destroying my income, but I can't seem to make it give a return. So far I've tried three nations, but it never turns out quite right.

Lanka's mages are too pricey/capitol only for massing and too lacking in fire/water/earth for devils/frost fiends/demon knights, and nationals don't seem to give much of an alternative for standard combat.

LA Ulm... I've had some success massing serpent fiends and spamming summon imp, but serpent fiends take a long time to build up and are sort of vulnerable, and members of the second tier only get two summons before collapsing. I can't seem to outfit the Vampire Counts well enough and frequently enough to turn the tides of battle either.

EA and LA Mictlan is a big pain to get a supply of slaves coming in, since you also need them for sacrificing, and all half-decent Blood mages are capitol-only as well as old, excluding tribal kings, but they don't have many useful summons. MA with a 6 or 7 Blood pretender has worked okay as well, but that takes a long time to set up.

When it comes down to it, I just don't know how to spend my Blood Slaves. By its very nature, Blood magic weakens your recruitable military might, but I can't field any worthwhile demons to make up for it. I'm still not that good, and blood strategies as a whole might just be over my head, but I would appreciate any help nonetheless.

[Aleph]

Blood magic is a summoning school, by and large, with some amazing direct attacks (x3 rain of toads = 120 unrest = enemy fortress can't produce any more troops and takes massive income hit, infernal disease usually = dead enemy commander).

Lanka will slap anyone up, down, and sideways with an E9/N9 bless. Their high protection demons (forget name) and only recruitable-everywhere sacred are both unstoppable juggernauts under these conditions, and their early blood summons give them more of the same. Their Dakini and Mandaha's are also excellent SCs. Lanka needs to play a reasonable hybrid approach - that is, their basic troops are good enough that they aren't going to go entirely over to blood.

Mictlan - lots of ways to play it, there's another post on the first page telling you many ways to play it. However you play it, you need to be thinking about the following things. 1. If you empower 1 priest king, you can armor of thorns him into being a blood buff maker for everyone else. Once you have this, and starshine skullcaps for your moon priests, they have a lot of ranged offensive options which don't require them to move (although moon priest + starshine -> teleport if you want to five gates from your frontline). You can also use Sun priests with 3 blood buff items to forge soul contracts and pass them to commanders closer to the battle lines. 2. If you have growth scales your old age means less. 3. I can only think you aren't playing with reasonable blesses if you think Mictlans national summons aren't useful. Fire 9 alone makes Jaguar Fiends horrifyingly destructive, and I play a pretty modest (for Mictlan) F9B4W4N4D2 and still have room for a good chaos economy. 4. Your recruitable everywhere B1 priests are incredibly efficient bloodhunters once they have sanguine dousing rods. 5. Most summons (and I think all Mictlan's blood nationals) are free to maintain, while regular troops have maintenance costs; eventually you can bury the world under your demon hordes. 6. Your only regular troops worth using are Jaguar Warriors and Eagles.

LA Ulm - I started a question post about this quite recently, it's also still on the frontpage and there's a lot of good advice there (including a nasty trick with Summon Lamashtas). Apparently, they are about using Rangers to drive the early game, excellent mage/spies to disrupt enemy economies middle while adding in their very tough meatshields, and are unstoppable freespawn juggernauts late. I haven't quite gotten the hang of them, but the advice is there to be read.

I don't think mages of the second tier are meant to be battlemages - try their capital only recruitable priests with boots of earth + blood stone (through your pretender) + summon earthpower - between blade winds / curse of earth / legions of steel on your very tough troops you'll have at least some sort of battlefield magic presence, and with effective E4 + 4 points reinvigoration you'll not be passing out anywhere near as much.

[Aleph]

And here's how I know what I know.

Understanding Mictlan post

LA Marignon vs LA Abyssia + Some on Ulm

Blood Kings - Lanka vs. Mictlan

LA Ulm Info

[UninspiredName]

Thanks much. Very useful posts, linked or summarized. I'm sort of inept at bless strategies, but practice makes perfect, I suppose.

[Aleph]

If you're having trouble with bless, LA Ulm might be a good place to start (in that they don't use it).

You might also try MA Abyssia for a low bless blood hunter nation - ridiculously good fire mages recruitable everywhere and no friendly fire on your own troops + demonbreds from capital make for good bloodhunters (costly, but sacred, highly mobile, and excellent in battle). Again, you'll be mixing regular troops with blood to get your power (and demonbreds are too expensive to go pure blood anyway), but boots of youth, demonbreds leading five gates raiding parties, infernal disease, and eventually Astral Corruption (backed up by Infernal Prison to let your ubermages still cast non-blood overland spells, although you'll also do fine with just fire battle magic) will let you experiment with blood while also annihilating enemies hand over fist.

[Nick_K]

Blood has some excellent low-level summons. Fiends of darkness don't require any other paths and you don't need many to make a big difference early on. Spine devils are excellent in terms of raw combat stats for the price, but don't fly. If you have elemental magic then any of the 4 elemental/blood lesser demons could be good. I especially like devils (best raw combat stats) and demon knights (huge prot, fear... easily better than, say, Ulm's black knights)

I dislike blood battle magic - the micro needed when every spell costs slaves is just too much hassle. I also don't like serpent fiends or bone devils.

[Edi]

Serpent Fiends are ok, but pale in comparison to the Mictlan low level blood summons. Bone devils are completely useless. A longdead with a few more hitpoints, two attacks and no armor and dies in droves.

Edi

[Baalz]

Another thing to keep in mind when going blood (which I mentioned briefly in another of those threads) is that there is an opportunity cost to blood hunting – the gold you could have had if you weren’t doing it. This is quite different than other gems which are more of a bonus – there is no trade off. What this means as far as your strategy is that whenever you “convert” a province from giving you gold to giving you blood slaves you need to adjust how your economy functions. Every time you crank up your blood slave flow, you need to adjust the rest of your strategy to the lower gold flow to keep from grinding to a halt.

In a practical sense, that means the more you blood hunt, the less you can recruit troops for gold. Done properly you can switch recruiting nationals for summoning demons (a pretty good trade off), but done haphazardly your economy will crash leaving you unable to support enough of an army to defend yourself. Since you specifically mentioned trouble balancing your economy I’m guessing this is what you’re running into.

Specifically from a blood economy point of view, try this. Do minimal blood hunting initially, use your gold for troops and your mages for researching. Always keep in mind when you start blood hunting you’re giving something up, so don’t do it until you can get a payback greater than the cost. What this point is depends on what nation you are and what your strategy is, but will generally be a certain level of research in construction or blood. Also keep in mind that there is going to be a lag from when you start blood hunting to when you get that payback, so switching to blood hunting when in an intense war is a decision that takes quite a bit of thought.

Another thing to keep a close eye on when you start giving your gold economy the axe is upkeep. If your upkeep is running 40% of your income you’re fine, but if you cut your gold income in half when you start blood hunting suddenly you don’t have enough gold to replace that lab that just burned down because your upkeep is 80%. Mages in particular, but don’t recruit any troops just because you’ve got the resources for it – once you switch to blood let the demons be the workhorses (and this is something you have to start managing BEFORE you start blood hunting!). Of course, this isn’t an either-or question, you can crank your blood up just a bit and keep some gold flowing in, but you’ve always got to keep in mind that balance. If you start blood hunting much with Lanka, for instance, that means less of those kick-*** national infantries so make sure that fits the strategy you’re pursuing. If you’re reliant on a steady stream of them for a war you’re fighting, blood hunting will grind your nation to a halt.

PS.
I keep seeing people mention Mictlan's need to blood sacrifice as a significant drain to their ability to blood hunt. I don't really see that when I play Mictlan. It seems like Mictlan is just made to seriously focus on blood hunting, and when you've got 30 or so blood slaves coming in from each blood hunting province (for the upkeep cost of 3, holy, 60 gold blood hunters!) 5 or 6 slaves per month blood sacrificing just doesn't seem significant. Because of the cheaper upkeep of your blood hunters you can have more of them, which I find more than compensates for the drain of the blood sacrifices.

[Kuritza]

One thing about Mictlan - most likely, you dont want your dominion to spread. Vice versa, your domain is so terrible, you want to conquer somebody as fast as possible with your blessed jaguars and live in his dominion from now on.
Just make sure you have some candles in your home province, and you will be fine.

[NickW]

Kuritza said:
One thing about Mictlan - most likely, you dont want your dominion to spread. Vice versa, your domain is so terrible, you want to conquer somebody as fast as possible with your blessed jaguars and live in his dominion from now on.
Just make sure you have some candles in your home province, and you will be fine.

That's actually not a good way to play Mictlan. I much prefer a milder bless with decent dominion. Not using Mictlan's ability to power-spread dominion and thus not taking advantage of the potential bonuses from fighting in friendly dominion is workable but it's ignoring one of Mictlan's strengths.