New to Dom 3

[thejeff]

I'd avoid the VQ, especially in vanilla. Far too expensive for what you get.
With Mictlan, take whatever chassis you can cheaply get a W9F9 bless with high dominion. Recruit nothing but mages and Jaguar Warriors, slaughter everything. Go heavy into blood hunting, summon your national sacred summons and continue to slaughter everything. When you get bored with killing things, blood sacrifice everywhere and let your dominion win for you.

It's not quite that simple. It takes a little while to get the hang of balancing blood hunting with income and research. Still, Mictlan is a power and double bless sacreds are very hard for the AI to counter.

[sffrrrom]

I've been using that rebalancing MOD. That seemed like it just made a lot of decent changes. I might try a vanilla game without it next though, which I probably should have done from the start.

Anyway, I abandoned the VQ for this playthrough anyway. I forget what I picked - a big guy with Death and Blood magic. I went D9 B5 with high Turmoil and Strife and high Luck. My initial expansion went ok, and then I had to stop thanks to running into three different factions on my borders - I was scared to try to expand into one of them because I couldn't hold off the other two at the same time. So I tried to switch over to a blood economy, since I knew my long-term gold production would be crappy, and I kind of got stuck inbetween. I got up to level 5 or 6 in blood, I forget which, but couldn't generate enough oomph via summons to stave off the ravening hordes. I had some greenish faction led by the Great White Bull attacking my upper left with stacks of 3-400, and the Pale Ones in far fewer numbers, but still a problem, from my bottom right. Eventually a 50ish stack of tough Pale Ones broke through and went on a blood mage stomping fest. I just kind of got caught in the middle. Take 2 tomorrow I guess (with a non-blood faction this time).