[licker]

Well I played (and won) a game with LA ulm using t3l3, don't recall exactly where I had sloth, but it wasn't much of an issue for me ever (I know I didn't take any production anyway).

Sure you hurt a little for income from time to time, but the point being that if you are going to go big blood, and leverage your magic paths, you don't miss the income quite so much. Mostly because everything you really need to recruit is cheap anyway, since you NEVER bother with the knights unless you want/need for some reason mid to late game.

And while it's really not that good of a deal, you can always alchemize a bit if you are really cash strapped, though in my tests I found I rarely needed to do it, unless it was to just get that last 50 gold to put up another fort/temple/lab.

The key was getting count production up early, letting them do my blood hunting while I recruited forge priests to support chaffy indie hunters.

Of course you can also put together a few 100 rangers over the course of the first couple years and if you need them somewhere they can move fairly quickly (and even stealthily if you need them to).