Mictlan , how to play it effectively

[Soapyfrog]

Why not patrol with 50 or so slaves wherever you happen to be bloodhunting? It doesnt take that long to generate a nice big whack of slaves, and patrolling with them will let you hunt with 2 or 3 blood hunters/province with essenitally no unrest.

[archaeolept]

no unrest, but serious population loss...

[Soapyfrog]

Pretty minimal if you have growth scales, or dont think the game will be super long.

[archaeolept]

growth scales? what are those?

;p

[Cainehill]

Sadly, many players seem to agree that a point or two of death is far preferable to growth, to the point where a common complaint of Last of the Tuatha is "But I _have_ to take growth (and luck)!"

That's why there at least one or two balance mods out there that rejigger the scales, so that there aren't so many "no brainers".

[Kel]

Growth scale is measured by the size of your army

- Kel

[Jim_Parker]

In the latest game I've got 3 priest kings in a feeder province and I usually bloodhunt with 2 while slaving with the other. The population is only about 6000 but I'm getting around 4-8 each per turn which is alright I suppose. I'm not bothering with patrolling because I don't want the population falling any lower than it is. At 2 bloodhunts per turn and 0% tax rate, the province is stuck firmly on 6 unrest and that's with a bandit camp.

It's all working out fairly well this game actually.

[The Panther]

One of the problems with Mictlan is that you are pretty much forced to get growth if you expect the game to Last more than about 50 turns or so. With death scales + bloodhunting + patrolling, your provinces will look like Ermor was there in no time at all! With 3 hunters per province, zero tax rate, and no patrolling, you can just about balance the pop loss from hunting with 2 growth. Without population, you get no more slaves and you are totally dead. Just see how fast your dominion dies when you have no slaves to sacrifice anymore!

The other problem, pointed out above, is that the blood battle spells simply aren't useful at all. All those annoying blood slaves die in the battle, and you MUST have them because every blood battle spell uses a slave or two. Not to mention the intense micromanagement of getting the correct amount of slaves to the correct mages scripted to cast the correct battle spells. You are typically far better off using your slaves to make another devil/vampire or 2 (or 10 or 50)!

Another huge problem is the fact that after you pool slaves, you must go to ALL your sacrificing priests and put the 4 slaves (you have the jade knife on all your sacrificers, right?) back on them. Every darn turn! And you will always miss this a few times throughout the course of the game. Plus you will put your tax rate back to 100% inadvertently in the F1 screen and get instant high unrest more than once!

My strategy as Mictlan is to get 1-2 growth and put a set of four Mictlan priests in every single province between 4K and 8K population. One guy has the jade knife and a clam and sacs four slaves per turn. The other three have the SDR and a clam and hunt continously. With the tax at zero and the hunters only 90% successful, you almost never have the unrest go above 20. This nets you around 9 slaves, 4 temple checks, and 4 pearls per such province per turn indefinitely with 2 growth. Also, don't forget to get a cheap castle and put it in every single one of these hunt/sac provinces.

On all the low pop provinces, like below 2-3K, just hunt them to death and move on. Don't bother with a tower/temple/lab in those unless they have a gem income that you don't want to lose.

[Jim_Parker]

Actually I was working on a strategy of hoarding slaves and then mass sacrificing them at strategic points. I'm doing ok in a military and magic sense (I lead both gem and cash income and have a mid-ranking 'army'). Also, my dominion appears to be getting stronger on it's own - I haven't sacrificed any slaves for dominion so far (I've got the grand total of 2 temples). The whole sacrifice and dominion thing seems a bit different from what the rulebook suggests.

No jade knives yet but I'll have some for the sacrifices. I'm not sure on your point about the population dying btw - the province I'm using for blood slaves is not dropping noticably in population and has no growth scale. I'm basically getting between 5-15 blood slaves per turn for the loss of 26 gold. It has a -2 dominion (right next to Caelum's capital) so maybe thats a factor.

[The Panther]

Jim_Parker said:
Actually I was working on a strategy of hoarding slaves and then mass sacrificing them at strategic points. I'm doing ok in a military and magic sense (I lead both gem and cash income and have a mid-ranking 'army'). Also, my dominion appears to be getting stronger on it's own - I haven't sacrificed any slaves for dominion so far (I've got the grand total of 2 temples). The whole sacrifice and dominion thing seems a bit different from what the rulebook suggests.

No jade knives yet but I'll have some for the sacrifices. I'm not sure on your point about the population dying btw - the province I'm using for blood slaves is not dropping noticably in population and has no growth scale. I'm basically getting between 5-15 blood slaves per turn for the loss of 26 gold. It has a -2 dominion (right next to Caelum's capital) so maybe thats a factor.

I have to agree about the sacrifice thing. It seems to work odd at best. The dominion spread from sacrificing does not seem to be the same as the dominion spread from temples for other races. Four slaves sacrificed in a single province is supposed to produce 4 temple checks, but it seems less than this in practice. I wonder if the devs can explain this for real. In my current game, I am sacrificing 20 slaves per turn and still not gaining any dominion.

I also wonder about your mass sacrificing at strategic points thing. A huge problem is that only one priest at a time can sacrifice in a province with a temple. I simply cannot see how mass sacrificing will work at all.

As for the population loss thing, your pop is dying if you don't have growth. Write down the population in a provimce from one turn to the next and see how much it goes down each month. Every blood slave you create results in a loss of a minimum of 2 people per slave. The virgin and her mother perhaps???

So, 3 hunters in a single province over 5K population will lose you 30-35 people each turn for the 15 slaves on average that you get. Add in a -0.4% loss from death 2, and you would be losing 50+ pop per turn.

The patrolling thing makes your population drop slightly more than twice as fast as without, for each bandit killed also results in a loss of at least 2 pop per bandit. Plus you have to kill the 3 bandits (on average, but open ended) who come with the mere attempt to hunt whether successful or not. Patrolling with the above scenario means a loss of about 90 people per turn. In 11 turns, your 6K province becomes a 5K province for an average of 165 total blood slaves. Once you get down to 2K population, it is close to useless to hunt anymore, for you are getting only 2 of slaves per turn on average for a 5 increase in unrest.

As long as you can continue to expand by killing someone, this raping strategy works. On a smaller map, if you have to hunker down, fortify your borders, and race to the ice/arch devils, you better hope your initial attack wins. If it does not, then you are dead because your population is delining far too rapidly. You cannot get slaves without population except by wishing. If you have to resort to blood hunting in your capitol, then you are probably dead.

By the way, I did have my level 5 prophet with the jade knife successfully sacrifice 8 slaves per turn, just as it is supposed to be. Even then, though, I could not get my dominion to expand. Probably because I am squeezed between a 10-dominion Ermor and a rapdily expanding Caelum...