Tips for finding blood slaves appreciated here

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Zen:
So this is the best of both worlds, then when you need to convert to a higher blood output you convert ~5 priests with dousing rod to your 5k+ province with 0% tax and watch the blood roll in.

5 priests will only give you around 20 blood slaves a turn. If you want enough to make it truly pay off, you'll want 10 priests at least, if not double that.

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
5 priests will only give you around 20 blood slaves a turn. If you want enough to make it truly pay off, you'll want 10 priests at least, if not double that.

Yes The more the better when you get to the point where you need blood more than research. I'd say convert them all actually. But that was just an example.

But I wouldn't place more than 5, Blood 1 + Dousing Rod in a province of 5k+ and reduce the taxes, or your unrest can get out of line (unless you have massive patrollers).

But that's just my preference. If I'm not focusing on Blood as a nation (with a Pretender/nation that can use the blood) I tend to not convert everything to a blood only income but supplement my existing gem income, gold income, with the blood income that can be overlooked.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Zen:
But I wouldn't place more than 5, Blood 1 + Dousing Rod in a province of 5k+ and reduce the taxes, or your unrest can get out of line (unless you have massive patrollers).

Well, I tend to put ~4 Tribal Kings in a province capturing slaves and patrolling, so it's quite posible to keep unrest fairly low. You do run the population down extremely fast that way though.

[GavinWheeler]

Hunting with Priests:
I had actually heard that the expense of a Blood 1 hunter over a scout with a dowsing rod didn't pay for itself (even over time??), but I wanted lots of priests to try out Communion abuse with a nation other than Pythium. So as I was hiring them anyway, I may as well put them to good use while waiting to try fielding a magic heavy army. And they do (unquantified vague impression here) seem to produce a lot more slaves than my scout hunting parties from an earlier attempt did.

As for the pool button working with auto-blood sacrifice:
Does that mean that if I click 'pool' my auto-sacrificers will go on sacrificing their allotted number of slaves every round, despite not having any slaves in their inventory? For that matter, am I wrong about the number of slaves in their inventory deciding how many slaves they will sacrifice? I can't remember where I heard that, but I haven't tested it myself, having had plenty of blood slaves so far.

[tinkthank]

Originally posted by licker:
"Unrest accumulates from unrest. So if you are unable to completely kill the unrest of a turn by tax or patrol, it will breed more unrest. So if you have a set tax rate that will not clear the unrest you currently have, produced by your current unrest, and will squelch the unrest caused by next turns blood hunts, you will accumulate unrest.

An unsuccessful blood hunt gives you 1 point of Unrest. So even if 5 scouts fail, you will only get 5 points of unrest, which will be cleaned by 90% taxes."

I'd also like to know what other people say about this. From my own meager experience, I'd say the latter claim (unsuccessful bh = 1 unrest) is untrue for the nations and hunters I have used thus far.
And I would like to know about the first claim too. If true, there must be some darn complex algorithm which determines how that works; unrest will usually decrease if around 1-20, all things being equal (e.g. not overly negative dominion, not weird events, outragous taxation, etc.) in my experience, and sort of remain the same if around 15-40, and I have no clue for other values.
Anyone know?

Originally posted by tinkthank:

I'd also like to know what other people say about this. From my own meager experience, I'd say the latter claim (unsuccessful bh = 1 unrest) is untrue for the nations and hunters I have used thus far.

Try it for yourself. Start a game, have a unit blood hunt, if unsuccessful note the unrest. Assign someone to patrol or lower taxes, stop the blood hunter. Next turn when the unrest is 0 again, try to blood hunt. If unsuccessful, note the unrest.

In these tests, it is anywhere between 0-7 unrest for an unsuccessful blood hunt. This might be modified by the size of the population. In low provinces you seem to have less unrest per unsuccessful than high provinces.

And I would like to know about the first claim too. If true, there must be some darn complex algorithm which determines how that works; unrest will usually decrease if around 1-20, all things being equal (e.g. not overly negative dominion, not weird events, outragous taxation, etc.) in my experience, and sort of remain the same if around 15-40, and I have no clue for other values.
Anyone know?

More than likely this is just a perception issue. I did tests before where unrest does not move without outside influence at 100% Taxation. But I remember reading somewhere that having unrest has the chance to increase that unrest and at times it seems to work that way, but it just as easily could be a factor of something else.

Edit: Here is some information from Dom1 that I dug up, some of it has been modified (Like the FoB) but most of it is still fairly accurate AFAIK.

http://www.freewebs.com/sunraybe/blood.html

[ February 12, 2004, 09:13: Message edited by: Zen ]

[DLC]

i got 7-20+ blood slaves per turn with with each of my bloodhunting mages from abysia which had 8 in skill for bloodhunting.(warlocks 3 blood + dagger + armor + brazen skull + dousing rod).

That's the best way of collecting them i think

this was with territories with 3000-9000 in population.

[licker]

Originally posted by DLC:
i got 7-20+ blood slaves per turn with with each of my bloodhunting mages from abysia which had 8 in skill for bloodhunting.(warlocks 3 blood + dagger + armor + brazen skull + dousing rod).

That's the best way of collecting them i think

this was with territories with 3000-9000 in population.

Whoa, that's crazy... I mean to invest to much into one blood hunter... 2 WAs with rods should match that... Hell I had a WA with no dousing rod in an 11k province picking up 17slaves for a while, strangely when I stuck the rod on him it droped to less than 10, though by that time there were more hunters and more unrest

Getting back to scouts for a sec... I did some testing with Abysia Last night and found that they still do suck compared to WAs. Of course I had the luxury of time and being able to take research more slowly (didn't find a library or other cheap mage site in 15+ provinces ). The 5 scout province brought in fewer slaves and had worse unrest than the 1 WA+rod. Of course it should have been 7.5 scouts to 1 WA, but whatever From this simple test (both provinces were ~11k pop) it seems to me that if you have the extra gold you can easilly take every 3rd or 4th WA and set him up as a BH, using scouts only to ferry the slaves around if you don't want to build a lab. I'm still unconvinced that scouts are *better* (in some situations sure, but you'll have to adjust on the fly in your games anyway) even for the themes without cheap blood mages.

[DLC]

i think the blood items are very cheaply made tho, they dont cost all that much.

the armor is the one thing that costs most of all of those(40 blood or 20 blood and nature) and all they need are 5 devils or blessed troops as bodyguards to pretty much survive anything(not to mention leech(25+ damage 100% accurancy + alot of bloodslaves since he's collecting....) to kill any assassin or aid any defense you might have set up.

[licker]

Originally posted by DLC:
i think the blood items are very cheaply made tho, they dont cost all that much.

the armor is the one thing that costs most of all of those(40 blood or 20 blood and nature) and all they need are 5 devils or blessed troops as bodyguards to pretty much survive anything(not to mention leech(25+ damage 100% accurancy + alot of bloodslaves since he's collecting....) to kill any assassin or aid any defense you might have set up.

Without actually looking up the costs I think you're looking at around 80 slaves and some assorted gems. 80 slaves is one soul contract, which is worth a ton more than a decked out blood hunter. I suppose if you've nothing better to do with those items you can use that commander to search, but I think he'd be more useful summoning the big bad boys, or leading your forces somewhere. Anyway, 2 WAs would probably equal his output in slaves, and there's not much need to protect your hunters with big baddies normally. Besides if your hunters are cheaper there's not as much imperative to protect them heavilly in the first place...