[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.