Can you tell me about the Fountain of Blood?

[Jarkko]

An awake Fountain of Blood is great only in Blitz games when you intend to lock out the opponents capital with Rain of Toads as soon as possible. A cheap trick which has no counters really (few people would go for the domes initially in a blitz), but can give a nasty suprise to anybody who intends to use some super-troops who are capital only. Of course your troops have to be able to halt the initial attack of the opponent, but if you can manage until you've researched Blood 4, you are safe. Then just let the toads rain (with the free slaves the fountain has attracted during the time spent on research) on the enemy capital and feel clever. You won't make many friends with this strategy though...

[Baalz]

Thats not true. An awake fountain of blood can be very useful in other roles as well. A B8 blessing is very nice for some nations, particularly if you combine it with a second one like W9 or F9 (you hit often and hard). For instance, you might take a F9 B8 awake blood fountain with Mictlan and patrol with slaves, letting you tear stuff up with your jags and eagle warriors while you B-lined up to jaguar fiends with no need to go up to construction for sanguine rods, nor slow your research by having your mages blood hunting. A score of jaguar fiends with this blessing are incredibly nasty early in on year two just as your jags are making it to the enemy cap.

Rain of toads is definitely another great play with an awake blood fountain.

An early blood sac push is also a good move that can catch otherwise very strong nations off guard. This is great with, say pangaea b-lining to jade daggers and moving in stealth preachers with a (relatively cheap) dom-10 blood fountain blood hunting and maenads patrolling.

You could also use it to bloodhunt and forge soul contracts every few turns - having 3-4 of them out in year one is a game changer and as your other blood hunters come online it can slowly transition to forging one each turn.

You could also...well, I'll leave some as an exercise to the student, but suffice to say an awake blood fountain features quite regularly in my builds.

[BigDaddy]

I tend to think of the blood fountain as one of the nicest "sites" in the game. While it causes and awful lot of unrest, it also produces a lot of blood slaves.

It produces so many that I tend to want to design its support group in a way that maximized their spell casting and its blood hunting.