Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting

[Xietor]

I do not use the blood path, and old age is not an issue with Pangaea, my flavor of the month race, but blood can be used to reduce old age. Is that not a viable option for Micitans priests that get old?

[Huzurdaddi]

Re: Jaguar Warrior

So does anyone know how many HP these bad boys have? By this I mean the following:

1. How much damage must they sustain for the transformation? Does it only happen on death?
2. Does any of the damage he had before the transformation go to the were-jaguar?

I'm not 100% sure how it work, but I have a suspicion. They seem to have a tremendous number of HP.

[jutetrea]

Nice, I'll try these guys out after my flav of the month nation, Pangaea as well, gets stale.

Is Mict considered a face hugger? Any staying power in a long game? Everything else being equal, etc,etc in general. There are some interesting convos going on the "heavy bless strat" thread and Mict got mentioned a bit.

[Aleph]

I would think Mictlan would be both a facehugger and a longterm threat - the triple bless Mictlan more of a pure facehugger, but the right dual bless (LA Mictlan with Fountain for F9S9 or W9S9) or 1 major/multiple minor bless strats (Smoking Mirror is a great F9/W4/B4/S4/D2 base) can definitely leave a lot of room for Mictlan to take beneficial scales (ideal IMO is sloth/turmoil/luck 3 growth 2 magic 1). As Mictlan is the premiere blood nation, you can in a sense "buy off" some of your bad money scales by switching over to blood. Your random luck income will continue to roll in, you won't hunt in provinces which pick up good mines, and the opportunity cost for each individual blood slave is less (since the province is producing less gold through taxation than in an order setup and still has reasonable chances to give hundreds or thousands in random events).

Blood is an exceptionally strong long term strategy in my mind because it allows you to convert your gold income (generally used to buy troops with upkeep costs) into blood income (used to summon demons without upkeep costs). The longer the game lasts, the more your army size and power increases.

Finally, as mentioned above, in the late game Astral Corruption is pretty much an "I win" card.

[Hellboy]

Baalz,

First off, awesome post! I've been following your posts on Mictlan for a while, and it's really great to have everything brought together here in this guide.

I have one more noob question: is it a stupid idea to take death scales when you're playing Mictlan?

I like to play MP games on large maps (20+ provinces per player), and it just seems that on maps that size, once you get some momentum going, you just never run out of provinces. On this basis, any nation that is successful past turn 40 will have enough provinces and a large income, that they can afford the negative impact of the death scales.

But maybe its just my limited MP experience that leads me to this conclusion. Or maybe it's my noobishness that has me playing on such big maps. Either way, I'd love to hear some informed comment on death vs. growth scales in MP play.

[Baalz]

Well, the growth/death scales for Mictlan are not in the no-brainer category. I think it's probably better to take death scales for the reason you mention as well as some others (the impact to income is reduced for death scales, same as turmoil), BUT there is a trade off there that the death scales compound the population loss that you get from blood hunting. Yes, you will hopefully have a flow of fresh provinces, but there is a cost to moving your blood hunters - setting up a new lab, lost turns in moving them across the map, less easy to defend them closer to the front, etc. Also, high death scales will really hit all your old priests up until you can get boots of youth (all the way at construction-6). So, it's really more a question of how you want to play it. Death scales will give you a better early game by sacrificing some of your late game...usually a good trade off but more of a personal playstyle preference.

[Hellboy]

ok, thanks again Baalz, this is very helpful stuff to us noobs!

What you're saying makes perfect sense, I've seen the old age impact on sun priests from testing in SP, but I think I can live with that.

[Saxon]

Great guide, thank you for pulling this together.

So, if I read it right, for provinces with populations of less than 3K, you leave them alone and let them produce cash.

You mention searching for blood sites and the use in reducing ritual cost. Are there any/many that bring in a steady supply of slaves? Obviously, I can not plan around that, but I was curious.

[Baalz]

Well, the real factor that starts coming in for sub 3k provinces is the value of your mage's time rather than upkeep. You'll average a little over 16 blood slaves per turn for a 5k province with 3 Mictlan Priests with rods. You'll get half that for a 2.5k province, and it's costing you 3 mages that could be researching (if nothing else). Really, the cash generated by sub 3k provinces is negligible anyway, its a factor of if you have something better for your mages to do (you almost always can use more research).

You will be getting much more blood slaves from a single blood hunting province than you can conceivably hope to get from all the magic site income. There are very few magic sites which produce blood slaves, and none produce very much. They can produce quite a savings on the spending though.

[Velusion]

Excellent Guide! I'll be going back to this once I really have to tackle any blood nation...