How to use blood magic effectively in battles?

[Cor2]

DrPraetorious said:
Falling foo

NOooooooo Any thing but falling foo!

[Cheezeninja]

I've found summon imp to be a very effective spell to boost early expansion. Beyond that it probably isn't very useful unless you happen to have a research armada of B1 mages in good position to charge in and summon a literal horde of imps.

[Burnsaber]

Cheezeninja said:
I've found summon imp to be a very effective spell to boost early expansion. Beyond that it probably isn't very useful unless you happen to have a research armada of B1 mages in good position to charge in and summon a literal horde of imps.

Imps are pretty brutal if you buff them a bit. A round of summoning imp horders + Rush of Strenght (or that spell which gave all demons Str boost) can give those buggers a real bunch.

[FAJ]

Blood is most useful for helping out your own forces, not really hurting the others.

Reinvigorate, rush of strength, bloodlust etc.

Blood vengence is a nice one too. Pheonix pyre + Blood vengence is a decent boost for your own SCs late game.

[Baalz]

You can also do some nasty things with call horror. Make sure you lay a couple horror marks in an army beforehand then 5B/3S mages (easy for Mictlan & Abyssia to get) can teleport two mages in, one casts: call horror, bloodletting, call horror, bloodletting, returning, the other blood rain, blood letting, call horror, blood letting, returning. If you notice a starving enemy army (nobody starves when attacking heat 3 dominions, do they?) that's just about certain to route them which you can use to destroy a whole invading army if you're clever.

Hell power has some nasty uses with immortal units (like vampire counts) where it's no big deal to stack up some horror marks. It not only buffs your magic power it also buffs your defense, attack, hp, strength, etc.

Sabbath master/slave is very useful for buffing thugs as you can follow it up with a reinvigoration to wipe out the fatigue they'll build up being slaves for spells they don't have the paths for.

Bloodletting is great for lone SCs at the end of their buff cycle, it'll not only hit the entire enemy army it also wipes their fatigue and supercharges their HPs.

Imps can be devastating if used correctly. If you're defending and can get them off first they'll completely screw up the targeting of whatever they were hoping to use on your real troops (spells, flaming arrows, etc.). Also, because of their small size and double attacks they're surprisingly effective against guys with high defense.

Leech can be *devastating* if you have a bunch of cheap b1 mages (for researching or blood hunting). Not only is it effectively fatigue free, it's also aoe 1 and kills pretty much any regular type unit. If you're fighting human sized opponents that means 5 blood-1 mages can destroy 15 units per turn with precision-100, AN, and no mr check. This is a very cost effective counter to concentrated elite raiding squads. It's also a very effective SC killer when you spam it like that.