Vanheim and blood

[tinkthank]

With vanheim (any theme), who is supposed to blood hunt? The *cheapest* person you get costs 280 I think, and only has 1 blood skill. Am I supposed to do that with my pretender whom I give higher blood skill? (Actually, all Van folk have 1 blood max. Cant cast many spells with that, so I suppose the pretender should do that, so he must have some blood skills or ignore that school altogether.) Seems a sort of lowly job to do for a god.

[quantum_mechani]

Use lots of scouts, Saber Cherry's recent data showed that they are more efficient (for the gold) than most other blood hunters anyway.

[tinkthank]

Originally posted by quantum_mechani:
Use lots of scouts, Saber Cherry's recent data showed that they are more efficient (for the gold) than most other blood hunters anyway.

Thank you.
But:
1. Dont you need at least some blood slaves to be able to make a dousing rod?
2. I read that post, and am also confused about it. Didnt all other searchers perform better than .95 slaves/trn? Wasnt that the results?

The results were prompted on a discussion about Blood Slave gathering effeciency (as some people prefer to hunt with hunters, which as you can see not all nations are afforded cheap ones).

The way to make up for some of this initial loss is to use scouts hunt for slaves. Scouts don't use/wear anything to hunt. You just put them on Blood Hunt and let them go at it. You can use your initial slaves to equip a Vanjarl with Dousing Rod if you are extremely hard up for slaves and want to put some Van's on Blood Hunting.

[quantum_mechani]

Originally posted by tinkthank:

But:
1. Dont you need at least some blood slaves to be able to make a dousing rod?
2. I read that post, and am also confused about it. Didnt all other searchers perform better than .95 slaves/trn? Wasnt that the results?

1. Scouts don't need dousing rods to blood search, infact they don't help scouts at all.

2. Other searcher find more slaves per searcher, but scouts are so cheap to pruduce and maintain that they are usually the best deal.

EDIT: triple crosspost

[ February 15, 2004, 02:58: Message edited by: quantum_mechani ]

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by tinkthank:
1. Dont you need at least some blood slaves to be able to make a dousing rod?
2. I read that post, and am also confused about it. Didnt all other searchers perform better than .95 slaves/trn? Wasnt that the results?

Dousing rods cost 5 blood slaves base, which means you need at least blood-1, or Forge of the Ancients and any magic skill, to make one.

However, a dousing rod is not required to find blood slaves: An untrained scout still has a chance to find blood slaves, and scouts are fairly cheap.

According to Cherry's data, a blood-1 mage hunting with a dousing rod is roughly 4 times better than a scout at this...

But Vanjarls are $280! For the cost of a single Vanjarl, dousing rod not included, you could hire 14 $20 scouts. Vans are sacred, so their upkeep is reduced by half, but for that money, you could pay the wages of 7 scouts. A Vanjarl will only hunt as well as about 4 scouts. So for Vanheim, it appears to be somewhat more efficient to hunt with scouts. One other benefit of scout-hunting is that you can spread the hunting out across many provinces easily, to avoid savaging the blood-hunted province.

Mictlan can afford to hunt with their priests, as the Mictlan priest is $80 and sacred, so has the upkeep of a $40 unit, or two scouts, and hunts as well per unit cost as a scout, and twice as good with a rod. Vanjarls are much more pricey, however, so it's not quite as economical to bloodhunt with Vanjarls.

[Potatoman]

But isn't unrest generated based on the number of blood hunters, not slaves taken? If it is, then Vanjarls might be a better option for full-scale blood hunting. In my experience anything more than 3 blood hunters in a 0% tax province will send unrest through the roof.

[Zurai]

Nope, each slave taken adds like +1-2 unrest. The actual act of hunting itself doesn't add much at all, maybe 1 or 2. In addition, with scouts you can spread the hunting around more easily, so you get more unrest dissipation. Scouts are *definately* the best choice unless you have very cheap blood mages (like Mictlan).

It's based on unsuccessful hunts and successful hunts.

You get much more unrest for successful hunts than unsuccessful.

You can usually put 5 hunters in a province with 0 tax (1 blood +SDR) and do fairly alright. Sometimes you have to wait a round if you get lucky (with alot of slaves).

[Norfleet]

Scouts also tend to allow you to diffuse your blood hunting across provinces: One advantage of this is that you don't actually have to drop taxes to absolutely zero, and therefore give up income entirely in what are otherwise good provinces: Successful blood hunts tend to produce a LOT more unrest than a failed one, particularly if the take is large: I've done a blood hunt with a blood-10 hunter, raking in some 20+ slaves at once, and immediately sending unrest into the 100+ range.

In contrast, scouts usually fail their hunts: The unrest is minimal and even a successful hunt will yield only a modest take that doesn't overly annoy the province. A province being hunted by scouts will therefore tend to average out to a smoother unrest generation, as opposed to a blood mage hunter's spikes of successes.

Plus, costwise, scouts are far, far cheaper, and can be built nearly anywhere, even many provinces which are devoid of fortresses. There are also other benefits of having scouts diffused throughout your empire: Should an enemy attack you, once his army rolls through, your scouts may be able to easily reflag the province and allow your defense force to totally annihilate the enemy force, since they will not have anywhere to rout. Only Mictlan really benefits from using actual blood mages with SDRs to hunt, since their blood hunter priest is a mere $80 and sacred, to boot. Other potential blood nations have hunters which are just too expensive to use for such a task.