What is the path of blood for?

[Question]

I don't understand how to use the path of blood.

-Blood hunting generates unrest, which requires patrols in every province

-Micromanaging the blood pool constantly is annoying (blood slaves go into commander slots and not the pool

-Most of the combat spells hurt your side too unless you are using undead only

-Demon summoning...not sure how useful they are?

-Summoning horrors seems pretty dangerous to yourself

-None of the blood items are really impressive from their descriptions...why use heartfinder instead of frost/fire/shadow brand for example?

How do you use the path of blood effectively?

[Squirrelloid]

The path of blood is for total game-breaking domination as you realize you can turn gold into gems and no one else can (unless they also have blood of course).

[Executor]

-You need to optimize blood hunting. Using provinces from around 4k-7k is best, patroling and blood hunting is not so good as you'll kill the population too fast.
You need to spread your blood hunters, I myself, as do most players, use only 3 blood hunters per provinces with taxes set to 0% of course. If the unrest gets too high, which it sometimes will, it's best to let it normalize on it's own rather than patrol. (paroling kills 10 population per every 1 unrest)
-There is a ctr+z command on selected commanders that transfers all blood slaves to the laboratory
-Blood spells are generally not used too often. They are situational since you need a lot of blood slaves to use them effectively and slaves can also be killed in battle, also, most of them are MR negated. You need to figure out which spells (if any) suit you best at that moment.
Horrors can be extremely good if you're facing a bigger enemy, you can direct the horrors by horror marking your enemy. ( if you can cast summon horror you should have horror mark as well ). There are other spells like harm which is excellent for braking enemy troops and forcing them into retreat and blood rain. Combining these three spells for example could make a much bigger army retreat.
-Demon summons are excellent! If you can get ritual of the five gates I'd suggest maximizing it. Every single one of the demon summon is worth their price. Of course summoning demon generals is even better if you want to make SCs.
-Blood items are not that useful actually. On occasion you'll use the black heart to create an assassin or boots or youth to stop old age, but the most common blood item used are boosters normally. Heart finder is also MR negated btw.

[thejeff]

The about Blood items is that they're cheap. Once you've got a good Blood economy going, you'll be pulling in far more slaves per turn than gems. Ritual spell costs reflect this, but item costs can't, since they're tied to the path requirements.
Even things like Armor of Souls (25 slaves) can be spammed, which you'd never do with a 25 (or even 15) gem item. 5 slave items are practically free.
Flesh Eaters are good anti-thug weapons. Ring of the Warrior is good fighting high-def thugs. Boots of Youth spamming is practically required for Abysia at least.

But yes, Blood really shines in the summons. Many blood nations also have national blood summons, usually sacred, that are even better than the normal demons.

[Soyweiser]

Well the high level battlefield spells are also great. All of them are either AN or death iirc.

Bloodletting: Everybody MR or take 1 damage (which is more in practice, as you get the random roll). Caster gets this as lifeforce.

Life for a life. 1 unit gets 40+ AN damage. range 100, prec 100. No MR roll.

Infernal Prison/Claws of Kokytos, one unit is banished into one of the hells. (removes him from the battle at least).

Hellbind heart. If the unit fails a MR save, it joins your side.

Rush of strength. All your units get more strength.

Blood rain. All units get lowered morale.

Call horror. Is your enemy horrormarked? Call a horror in battle.

The problem is that all these spells have high fatigue. So what do you do? Right, make a big communion, and use reinvigoration (removes fatigue, works on slaves). Bonus, communions boost penetration. And we all want more penetration now don't we?

You have something for every occasion. Facing SC's? Life for a life, and the banishment spells. Facing chaff? Blood letting with blood rain. (Using horde from hell to cut of the retreat route, bye bye army).

Facing heavy amounts of good sacreds. Well... a bit hard, but demons with blood rain (Blood rain does not effect morale 30 units) and rush of strength should help. But it is going to be hard.

And the hardest, lots of undead. No spells work directly on these.

[Question]

But if you blood hunt too much, unrest will go up and you wont get money anymore.

[llamabeast]

You won't need so much money because you'll have huge armies of demons.

[Soyweiser]

One note about (well two) blood battlefield magic.

Blood magic eats slaves like crazy. If you go for the sabbath communion, always give the sabbath slaves at least one blood slave. Else they will just take a blood slave from the battlefield and mess with your scripts. Which brings an important point. Blood slaves used for powering blood magic can come from anybody. One mage already holding 30 slaves but you want more? Put a commander with 30 more slaves next to him. The mage will now have 60 slaves to use in combat. And yeah, battlefield blood magic is very slave intensive. Using 100+ slaves in a large battlefield is not that uncommon. And what would you rather have? 20 more demons on the battlefield or 20 castings of bloodletting?

My second point. A lot of the high powered blood commander summons work very well with a reverse communion. Have a bunch of vampire lords set as a sabbath slave. Have some masters cast the elemental resistance spells, +mr, darkness, soul drain, mistform, invulnerability, etc. And last have one master cast reinvigoration. Boom! A lot of suped up vampire lords. (add darkness to the buffing mix!)

One note on reinvigoration. It can be a bit tricky to get your masters to cast this spell. It will only cast it if the master has some sort of fatigue itself. Having a b1 master with 2 slaves should do the trick. One slave for the sabbath master putting the master at 50+ fatigue, and one for the reinvigoration.

Well three notes then.

[Soyweiser]

Give me enough slaves, and I will crush the world!

[Question]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

You won't need so much money because you'll have huge armies of demons.

So the entire point is not to use national troops? Doesnt that remove a lot of diversity? Since nations tend to play pretty similar if you use the same summons...