Understanding Mictlan
 

Or, "thieves in the temple."

So I started a game with LA Mictlan, Imprisoned Oracle Turmoil/Sloth/Luck/Growth 3 Heat 1 S9W9. Turn 4, I die because merchants show up in my temple, decreasing faith and increasing profits.

I'd like some ideas on how to play Mictlan (and blood nations in general, but I thought I'd start there since it's so emblematic). Specifically:

1. LA vs. EA. I like the pretenders and mages available to LA a bit more, but the loss of blood income in the early game would seem to be of critical importance for dominion expansion.

2. When does one start blood hunting and sacrificing? I thought it could wait a while until I had a physical infrastructure to drive it, but apparently not.

3. Where does one blood hunt? Best to spread out or use one's cities with extensive patrols and tax cuts? I assume the latter but am willing to admit I don't have a clue.

4. EA Pretender. I like S9W9 with an Oracle for exceptionally durable troops and ready to go Wish for blood slaves when the pretender finally awakens, but it's not available in EA without sacrificing good scales (luck is fun with Crossbreeding and if I'm going to be lowering taxes would be a good source of income, growth because it helps address the income problems over the long term, will easily counteract patrolling losses, and large provinces = better blood hunts). I'm thinking any of N9/B9, S9/N9, B9/S9, or B9/W9. All of these have something I don't like as well as W9/S9, and in general I don't grok the usefulness of either Death Curse or Berserk (I don't doubt they are useful; I just don't get it).

Re: Understanding Mictlan
 

1 - When you start serious bloodhunt, 1 vs 3 slaves in the capitol doesn't change anything.

2 - Sacrifice on capitol as soon as possible.

3 - The best are 5000+ pop provinces.

4 - Imho, F9 is a must have for Mictlan. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Understanding Mictlan
 

2) Start sacrificing at the capital with your first priest. Even 1 slave/turn will help. This is vital if you start without a pretender, since you don't have him to spread dominion.
Mictlan's prophet spreads dominion normally right? If so, make sure one is appointed as soon as possible.

3)More specifically, population over 5000 doesn't help blood hunting, so using provinces close to 5000 minimizes income loss while maximizing blood.

Re: Understanding Mictlan
 

Mictlan's prophets don't spread dominion.

Thanks for the guidance on the pop size. Obvious, from the rules, yet I still missed it.

F9 more so than W9? I would think that the doubling of attacks would pay off more in the long run with sacred demons than the additional damage - you can only kill an opposing infantryman once, after all, and you're going to get through/survive missile fire a lot better with water. I pretty much have to pick one or the other in order to have even decent scales. My choices are the ones I listed above, plus I could sub fire in anywhere I have water. Thoughts?

Re: Understanding Mictlan
 

You could also play with a F9W9S9 bless strategy. This works very well for mictlan. Imprisoned oracle, some spends on dominion and order and the rest negative scales and you've it.

If you keep your two 9-bless strategy with astral 9 i would go for F9 instead of W9. Mictlan has a better use from the better attack then from the defence bonus (jaguar form has 3 attacks, low defence in both forms).

Re: Understanding Mictlan
 

True, the attack is more useful than the defence in most cases but your forgetting the 50% quickness. +50% move speed and a 50% chance to attack twice per turn? Yes please. With your oracle i would suggest either f9w9s9 or f9w9s3-4. If you dont plan on using your sacreds for expansion then i guess you could consider dropping f9 but i really think you should try to get it in.

The Beast With Two Backs,
 

Ok, this is specifically concerning a Bless-strategy for Mictlan, since there seem to be quite a few questions about it, and because every Colonel seems to have a secret recipe.

I'm using EA because I'm familiar with it. There are two really excellent Pretenders for EA Mictlan: Lord of the Night and the often overlooked Smoking Mirror.

Lord of the Night is great in-and-of himself, he's got titan stats plus stealthy assassin flying, a butt-load of fear, and he can see in the dark, and if the bug ever gets fixed, he'll summon Fiends of Darkness to aid him in battle. Currently he just summons giant bats, but that's ok, it's a good start. He's also got blood 2, death 1-again, it sucketh not, Horatio.

Still, the Lord of the Night is the Darth Vader to Smoking Mirror's Emperor. To paraphraise Rolling Stone Magazine: the Lord of the Night runs down the corner to fetch Smoking Mirror's ciggarettes. Here's why:

Smoking Mirror is your basic human, he's fire-retardant, but other than that he's got no special powers, EXCEPT!!! he's got 3-count them, fire, death, blood, 1,2,3! starting magic paths! AND! it'll only cost 20 points to raise other magic paths to level 1, that mean's he's a triple-bless master lich where magic is concerned. it sucketh VERY not, Horatio.

Here's what I get when I dump scales and go for a maximum bless strategy with an Imprisoned Smoking Mirror. I keep Luck set at 0, not that it matters all that much, but it will keep you in the game where Misfortune 3 can easily eliminate you early and hurt you late.

Every other scale I set to -3, Heat 3, etc. Now, looking at magic paths, I set Fire to 9, Blood to 9, Astral to 4, Death to 2 (because a little added affliction would be nice, but we really aren't going to need it, are we? no we are not.) Nature to 4 (just to cut down on pesky enemy afflictions), and Water to 9.

Dominion we leave alone. Perfect Efficiency.

Now, we don't care so much that we can only buy 2 sacred troops at a time, because even though we've got 3 choices of national sacreds-and they're all lovely in their own special ways-2 a turn is plenty for early expansion with the kind of Bless we've got on them, and what we really are after is National Summons.

And we've got great National Summons for Mictlan. A dozen of them, each one-as far as I know, sacred.

Each one of which now recieves Attack +4, Fire Weapons, Defense +4, Quickness, Magic Resistance +1, Regeneration +5%, Strength +4, and Death Curse.

We've also now got a Pretender with to Cojones to summon up every single Mictlan national summons, blood or conjuration. And he's got atleast a decent head-start on Wish, so it's not impossible to empower him up by mid-game or so, with clam-spam.

And if that aint Shakespeare, I don't know what is.

Re: Understanding Mictlan
 

The other thing to consider to, is that Jaguar Warriors are cheap, holy (cheap to maintain) and not capital only, so there is something to be said for taking only a single bless and good scales (turmoil, sloth, growh, luck, magic) so you can castle up and mass them more readily. This has the added advantage of letting you crank out the cheapo priests who are pretty cost effective researchers in addition to being good blood hunters (particularly with magic-3 scales)....which has a synergy there in that they're available to blood sacrifice in all your templed castles and spread your good dominion (with a high dominion score and a bunch of blood sacrificers a dominion push can be carried out against any other nation). Sloth is pretty much a given for this nation, I find turmoil is as well because it hurts you proportinally less as much of your gold income is going to be lost to blood hunting anyway.

Jaguar warriors are plenty deadly with just a single bless, and don't overlook the 4th level blesses. I find just the +2 attack from a 4th level fire bless is enough to make a significant difference as it gives them a reasonable chance to hit the higher defense units if they can outnumber them.

I find the key to jaguar warriors is to remember that they have low armor and low defense, so no matter how you bless them they're gonna be expendable to a certain degree. So rather than trying to squeeze out a tiny bit more survivability with a third (or second!) bless, I'm more inclined to focus on being able to have more of them. Wouldn't you rather have twice as many than have the double attack of a water bless?

PS.You HAVE to start blood hunting by the second turn for exactly the reasons you describe. Either your prophet or a priest you recruit on the first turn, but every turn you go with just a single dominion candle is a turn you're just asking to lose.

Re: Understanding Mictlan
 

Oh yes good point, I should add that Smoking Mirror with starting Dominion 2 gives you just a little edge on the normal Dominion 1 rainbow pretenders, for free, helping you avoid Dominion-Kill for the first round or two, so you can start blood-sacrificing.

Baalz, I tend to avoid national troops for just that reason-because you're going to lose population and income eventually anyway due to blood-hunting, no matter what scales you have, so you aren't really hurting youself badly if you dump most scales and aim for summons which are independent of gold income.

By the middle of the game, you should actually have less of an ability to generate new national troops due to attrition than you will the stronger summons, if you choose to concentrate on troops instead, especially compared to someone clam-spamming with Mictlan (and you should be, because Wish becomes very important, especially since there seems to be a bug with blood-hunting and Mictlan where you stop getting bloodslaves even when you're supposed to, after a while-and the ability to summon up a few Lords of the Night (and Gorgons and Ancient Krakens, etc.) by end-game doesn't hurt anything, either).

And they will be FAR weaker on a 1-1 basis, both as basic chassis and from bless.

Re: Understanding Mictlan
 

Badger, i really think you could drop astral there. Doing so should let you get some extra dominion (maybe up to 4-5) and maybe a slightly better death scale so the blood dosnt stop running too quickly.