Guide to EA Mictlan and bloodhunting

[Baalz]

The thing you have to remember about Mictlan is `it's all about the bless'. If you take a dominion 7 or greater and a good blessing you'll be recruiting a force every turn that can take out up to medium strength indies. Taking an imprisoned pretender will usually allow you to get a second (or third) blessing, or at least an extra fourth level bless. Because the benefit of extra blessings is so drastic (a dual bless is often more than twice as good as a single bless) every ounce you can squeeze into it really pays off. Conversely you should already be expanding fast enough that an awake pretender won't help that much (with a high domain score don't worry about the dominion spread). I generally take an imprisoned immobile pretender, rely on jags for early expansion, then ice/arch devils as a mid game answer to other's imprisoned combat pretenders.

Honestly, if you want to trash your scales go with a triple bless...its much better than a tough pretender. The bang for the buck of a 20 gp triple blessed jag is pretty ridiculous, once you get three castles up there isn't much that can hold you off until research gets pretty far along.

On the magic/drain scale I have had some success taking drain and piggybacking off of the inevitable magic-1 neighbor and managing my dominion growth, but honestly this adds a lot of micro and inefficiency as you're shuttling mages around all the time, plus obviously theres some risks.

[Jazzepi]

This is something I didn't know until I played for a long time.

No matter what the current scales read in any given province. You get NO benefit, at all, from any positive scales if you don't have at least one point of positive dominion there (you only get the bad ones). So if you opponent had +3 magic scales, and you move all your combat mages into their newly conquered capital to research, you will only get their regular research rate.

That said, if you conquer a province, and get one white candle in it, you can use their scales for as long as they remain, though the further the scales are from your own, the quicker they shift.

Jazzepi

[MaxWilson]

True. However, if your scales are heavily negative (e.g. drain-3 dominion), you benefit from hostile magic-3 dominions in the sense that you're at least not taking any penalty to research. If you've totally trashed your scales for a triple bless this could be important, especially because Mictlan can micromanage its dominion spread to avoid dominion kill and still contain its own dominion. I've never tried it, but IIRC Gandalf did this to get a quad bless with Mictlan and he reported it as being fun (which is not the same thing as effective, because we all know Gandalf is crazy and doesn't optimize for effectiveness).

-Max