Originally Posted by Baalz
***Blood hunting***
The thing to keep in mind when going blood hunting is that there is an opportunity cost to it� the gold you could have had if you weren�t doing it. This is quite different than other gems which are more of a bonus � there is no trade off. What this means as far as your strategy is that whenever you �convert� a province from giving you gold to giving you blood slaves you need to adjust how your economy functions. Every time you crank up your blood slave flow, you need to adjust the rest of your strategy to the lower gold flow to keep from grinding to a halt.
In a practical sense, that means the more you blood hunt, the less you can recruit troops for gold. Done properly you can switch recruiting nationals for summoning demons (a pretty good trade off), but done haphazardly your economy will crash leaving you unable to support enough of an army to defend yourself.
You�ll generally want to do minimal blood hunting initially, use your gold for troops and your mages for researching. Always keep in mind when you start blood hunting you�re giving something up, so don�t do it until you can get a payback greater than the cost. What this point is depends on what your strategy is, but will generally be a certain level of research in construction or blood. Also keep in mind that there is going to be a lag from when you start blood hunting to when you get that payback, so switching to blood hunting when in an intense war is a decision that takes quite a bit of thought.
Another thing to keep a close eye on when you start giving your gold economy the axe is upkeep. If your upkeep is running 40% of your income you�re fine, but if you cut your gold income in half when you start blood hunting suddenly you don�t have enough gold to replace that lab that just burned down because your upkeep is 80%. Mages in particular, but don�t recruit any troops just because you�ve got the resources for it. Once you switch to blood let the demons be the workhorses. This is something you have to start managing BEFORE you start blood hunting, even if you have the gold laying around think about it before you buy every unit. This is why you want to keep most of your troops sacred, and your army size relatively small. Of course, this isn�t an either-or question, you can crank your blood up just a bit and keep some gold flowing in, but you�ve always got to keep in mind that balance.
As far as where to blood hunt, basically how it boils down is that there is no difference in the blood slaves you get for any population over 5000, so blood hunting in a 10k population province will get you the same blood slaves as the 5k province, but (all other things being equal) will cost you twice as much gold. The other thing to keep in mind to is depending on your scales, and if you're patrolling to reduce unrest your population may be dropping, so if you start hunting in provinces real close to 5k you could drop under that before long and you start getting diminishing returns.
Where to blood hunt depends on a couple things. Always start with the provinces closest to 5k (with no mines or other gold boosting sites) as these will be the "cheapest" blood slaves. As you start wanting more and more blood slaves, start moving up the chain to higher and higher population provinces but keep in mind each one will have a higher cost in gold than the one before it. How high you go really depends on the strategy you�re following, you�re almost always going to need some gold so this is where you need to focus on balance. If you're going for a very tight blood focus (a good strategy with Mictlan), I find that in very general terms by the time I end up putting blood hunters in the territories close to 10k population my gold income has dropped to the point that I enter more of my �blood mode� and stop really recruiting troops (including blood hunters) and instead save the little gold I get for buying mages for specific needs and building labs and temples. By that time you�ve got enough blood slaves coming in that you can get a good amount of summoning done every round to compensate.
On blood hunting the provinces under 5k it�s more a question of the upkeep cost of the blood hunters because the gold income hit isn�t as much. This is where the Mictlan Priests really shine. They�re so damn cheap, I find it�s also worthwhile to put them in the 4k-5k population provinces as well, and even occasionally the sub 4k ones. You won�t get quite as many blood slaves (4/5 the blood slaves for a 4k population), but when your blood hunters cost 60 gold and are holy you�re not paying much for the blood slaves either. And again, it all depends on what your other options are, how valuable the blood slaves are to you, how easy it is to defend those blood hunters, what other territories you have, etc.
The thing to keep in mind is that you�re always �paying� gold for blood slaves, you just need to decide what price you�re willing to pay. The more blood slaves you want, the more expensive they are�but getting to the point that you�re sucking in 100+ blood slaves a turn is a pretty sweet spot if you can do it while remaining stable.
You�ll also need to keep in mind the protection of your blood hunters. Mictlan is very vulnerable to raiding by stealthy troops because your blood hunters are going to be spread out and not terribly effective at defending themselves unsupported. Place castles where you can, and pull your blood hunters inside them whenever you think you should to protect them. Ideally you�d like a castle on each province you�re blood hunting, but in practice that�s usually not feasible because of your restricted gold income. The 8th level blood spell Three Red Seconds is an expensive way to place castles using blood slaves instead of gold, so that may be an option in the later stages of the game. Scripting all your blood hunters to retreat from the back row will save you a lot of grief if you start getting raided.
Here�s an example strategy to get your blood economy going:
It�s usually a good idea to research up to construction-4 before researching blood with Mictlan. The main reason is because up until around that point your mages are more useful researching than blood hunting. You don't need any blood summons immediately because your holy troops are tough enough to deal with whatever they need to initially, and you're capitol's natural income is enough to keep you blood sacrificing at first. The nice thing about using all those Mictlan priests to research is that the very turn that you finish researching construction-4 they can all forge themselves sanguine rods (which doubles their blood hunting effectiveness). Obviously you don't have many blood slaves at that point since you haven't been blood hunting, but you can easily have at least 15 ready by that time time by limiting how much you blood sacrifice and stockpiling the blood slave income from your capitol. From that point more or less send three new blood hunters with sanguine rods out each turn (aim to have three castles at this point as well), each "squad" setting up in a new province. Drop the tax rate to 0%, and place a lab there.
So, how this works out is that just as you start having blood slaves flowing in you've still got a decent chunk of mages researching (blood now), so you start hitting those good blood spells relatively soon and with blood slaves in the bank. Also, since you've hit con-4 you can forge skull mentors and/or owl quills if you've gotten one of the national heroes (quite likely if you�ve taken high luck scales).
Compare this with researching straight for blood. If you do that, you've got to split your mages between research and blood hunting (no point in having spells you can't cast!) - and the blood hunters are half as effective without the sanguine rods. No owl quils or skull mentors to help you out, and you're taking an immediate hit to your gold while you're sill relying on your national troops to take out the indies. I guess you could make this work, but it seems much more of an uphill battle to me.
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Drugged Out Virgins Waiting to Have Their Throats Slashed (questions on blood hunting
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