Mictlan, Cross Breeding and Luck

[moodgiesanta]

I'm a newbie to this game, and I was brought here by the Gamespot review. Anyhow, I just got the full Version, and have been playing it non-stop. I had to play Ermor, just so I could have a game where I annihilated the enemy, to build confidence. Then I tried Mictlan, with one of their unique pretenders.

Yeouch. By some miracle of nature, I was left alone by the enemy for a long time, I guess because I was playing on Normal AI, but eventually things came to a head. But it got me thinking, you know, there could be a real strategy here for Mictlan.

I'll use a blood fountain as my pretender, get some considerable blood magic going with a couple ranks of nature, and then crank up the luck full tilt. Then I am going to focus on their nature priests for cross-breeding and their low level priests for dominion increasing through sacrifices. I'll bring Drain all the way down to -3, because I can easily make sure my dominion never enters my main research province (which won't be my capital) by never sacrificing in that province. Order would be nice, but I need growth to replace the blood-slaving and patrolling I'll be doing throughout the entire game. I'm leaning towards picking up fire magic at the cost of production (since they need so little production) for Bless bonuses for the bajillion holy troops. I imagine I'll have Ermor-like hordes of cannon fodder troops, what with the cheap-o units they have and Cross-breeding. By land-grabbing a handful of provinces and slave-taking early OR by having strong independants, I'm thinking I can do OK, as long I raise an absolute army of low-level priests for blood slaves. I'm thinking also of picking a very cheap fortress, so I can build them en masse, in order to make lots of priests/ And of course, I'll need to make lots of jade daggers. (Wish I'd have known about that the first time around.)

I'm really trying to make Mictlan work. They seem to me to be the most fascinating in a large group of fascinating countries. And I think this game is the best strategy game I've ever played, so far at least, which immediately would make it the best game ever, as long as it holds up on the replay value, which I think it will.

If anyone has made Mictlan work well, please tell me, because they suck almost as much as Caelum or whatever it is on first glance.