[Scott Hebert]

Originally posted by Boron:
nice aar
it has awakened my interest for BF ulm

Thanks!

but a question which frightens me a bit to play them myself :
the inland map with 154 provinces is quite big already though i love the orania map with 260 or so provinces with every player and highest research costs .
at which turn are you at the moment ?

I'm about to do turn 8, as soon as people stop posting in this thread! (this is a joke)

but i guess you will need at least 100-150 turns or so . now my problem : you have to take death 1 :
although you only lose 0.2 % per turn you lose them . it is very slow but constant . if nothing else happens and i did calculate it right : at turn 100 your 30k capitol population should have dropped to 24557 . that is not so bad at all .
but with blood hunting you should get unrest and if you patrol lose your population quite quickly . and there are many bad events / spells which further decrease population .

Yes, the mandatory Death-1 hurts BF Ulm, since it is a Blood nation. I find it to be the main reason I don't play them more. I'll cover more below, but I'd like to point out that the Fortunetellers can negate bad events, and if you put them in your high-income provinces, it helps.

so with positive growth it is not much but at least your population has the ability to slowly regrow.
so if you are some time (10-20) turns in a state where you can't expand and fight much i fear that you come in a blood shortage and you can't hope it will ever become better because of death 1 .

I don't think that will happen, honestly. While I wouldn't call myself a 'good player', I don't think that, properly and cautiously played, the computer is going to give me that much of a problem. Yes, C'tis was just in the wrong place at the wrong time (with the wrong Fort, and the wrong Pretender). Part of the reason I took the VQ was to break that kind of stalemate.

how far did you already play and how long do you think your game Lasts roughly estimated in turns ? plz tell me if you had any blood hunting problems then

I expect the game to run as long as it takes for me to be the obvious and clear winner. How that is defined is different for every person, I would expect.

and how do you plan to bloodhunt ? masshunt in a few provinces with opressing unrest through partrols or perhaps 1 blood hunter in almost every province and taxes reduced to 50-80% to keep unrest low without patrolling ?

Generally, I follow one of two strategies when I'm bloodhunting. The first is to put 2 Bloodhunters in a province that's as close to 5K as possible, turn the taxes down to 0, and let them hunt. If they are Blood-2 mages (whether innate or 1 with a SDR), they generally don't cause any unrest to accumulate. The second is to use Norfleet's numbers to stifle unrest by patrolling (he has 65 slaves stops the unrest from two Blood-2 mages). Now, for BF Ulm, you'd use the Thralls auto-generated by the Blood Counts instead of Slaves, but the theory is sound. I don't know if this way is feasible with the Death scale, though.

At this point, I'm looking at doing it the first way until I get my first Blood Count, and then judge from then on.

Hope this helps. Another hope: I get the Blood Marshal or the Member of the Third Tier soon.