Bandar Log advice

[MaxWilson]

K said:
Mmm, yes. Imprisoned, not sleeping.

Growth is a better income for games that last longer than 30 turns. Also, bandar eat a lot of supplies, so the Growth is necessary.

Growth is better for provinces that you hold for 30 turns with your dominion. If you have an aggressive playstyle it may be inferior to Order.

-Max

[K]

MaxWilson said:

It's actually not as difficult as you'd think to bootstrap into blood. There's two components to blood-hunting cost, the cost of the units doing the blood-hunting and the reduced income from unrest/reduced taxation. An unsuccessful bloodhunt causes d6-1 unrest, a successful one causes IIRC d(number of blood slaves found x3 plus 4) unrest. In most cases a successful bloodhunter will get 4-5 bloodslaves and cause ~10 unrest, so you can support ~3 bloodhunters in a 5000-pop province indefinitely by turning taxes down to 0. You can support 8 or 9 scouts blood-hunting (poorly) in that province. The scouts will produce only 1/6 as many blood slaves as the real blood hunters, but you can probably get enough blood slaves to forge into Bloodstones or something. I don't know if you can get enough to support Kailasa's national summons.

-Max

Bootstrapping into blood means empowerment on a massive scale. Once you have a Blood 1 guy, you have him make a Sanguine Rod and you empower more as needed

Ideally you empower one Death guy to summon vampires who are very good at blood hunting at only 77 slaves; lamia queens sometimes pop up with Death 3 and Blood 1 so with a Skull staff and minimal empowerment they are perfect for this tactic, and Bandar Log is very good for summoning lamia queens.

Blood is a mid-game advantage at best, but if you bootstrap into it then it is a late-game advantage. Basically, the only reason to do it is that it is so cheap and at the very least it is a few extra mages for research.

There are several decent guides on the subject in the strategy section.

[secretperson]

So what's generally considered the safest bad scales to take? Sloth? Heat/Cold? Drain?

Death seems pretty heavy to me and I don't think I've ever take it in a long game unless I was playing an appropriate nation ie Ermor.

Misfortune seriously scares me. Maybe I haven't had enough experience with it but nothing annoys me more than a temple being destroyed or a lab burning down or barbarians! But that brings up another question- I remember reading that random events may be tied to what scales you take, is that true?

[Zenzei]

Heh, I honestly think misfortune is the best bad scale to take because it doesn't give you any "hard" penalties such as minus to income. Sloth is pretty good pick too but once you play with misfortune a bit, you don't even notice it's there. With heat/cold one step further than the nation preference is also my standard procedure.

[MaxWilson]

I think most people would go with Sloth. Aside from the minor hit to income all it does is force you to build more fortresses--most nations are more gold-limited than resource-limited anyway.

Yes, events are known to be tied to what scales you take. An (incomplete) list from Dom2: http://www.freewebs.com/dominions2/events.html

-Max

[Kuritza]

Bad troops, weak mages, weak pd, expensive castles. Great summons. I think what you need is lots of luck, and I dont mean scales here.
Expansion-wise, with a strong bless you can put 4 of your starting atavi up front with a 'guard commander' order, and attach them to your big monkey prophet who's in the upper left corner. Then enemy archers wont kill your sacred troops and they should be able to kill the indies.