Empowering thugs/SCs in Blood

[Rookierookie]

...worthwhile at all?

Considering that Blood is by far the easiest path to get quite a lot of slaves for empowerment, it would seem viable to empower a chasis - particularly non-magic ones - to Blood 1, and giving them a couple of slaves to cast Blood Vengeance. This would give them an ubiquitious protection and crowd control ability that cannot be fully countered at all, and which would protect against almost anything. If fatigue is an issue, Reinvigoration is also Blood-1, and it's not so hard to script it right after.

Compared to gems, slaves are cheap and 30 slaves can be procured easily by even a small blood economy, as are the slaves needed to support the attack on-the-go. While certainly a waste for a thug/SC, the empowered "thing" can also earn his cost back blood hunting or - god forbid - researching.

The biggest problem here other than cost are the logistics of feeding a supply of blood slaves to your thug/SCs, and the fact that Blood Vengeance is at Blood-9. Considering all that, is this a viable strategy?

[13lackGu4rd]

main problem with it is that most SCs and some thugs already put the 5 spell slots to good use with various buff skills. usually there's just no room. other than that, there's the issue of having the slaves constantly handy(just takes more micro management as you can have a scout with 30 slaves following your SC and keep supplying it) also there's the fatigue issue as you said, which requires the another blood spell so 2 slots instead of just 1. also blood slaves are very fragile, once your opponent sees what you're doing he'll target your blood slaves before you can use them for your 2 buffs, and as an SC he'll usually be on the offensive(so enemy gets to act first) which will instead put 2 AI spells, which can be horrible and too often mess up with your fatigue that you so carefully tried to manage with smart scripting(hopefully). also keep in mind that you'll need 50 blood slaves for each SC, it gets very expensive very fast, so only real blood nations would be able to afford it, and those usually have much better things to do with their blood slaves in the first place...

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by Rookierookie

Compared to gems, slaves are cheap and 30 slaves can be procured easily by even a small blood economy...

It's generally never going to be worth it unless you really are swimming in slaves, and even then you should always have a better use for 50 slaves (it costs 50 to empower to the first level, not 30 as I think you have indicated above).

If you are at the stage of a game where you can realistically empower random SC's in magic just to access new spells, then you must be in such a good position that you may as well just ask the other players for the win. (although as you say, Blood is by far the cheapest for this of course). If it is a SP game, then you are free to do any off the wall strategy and it will always work perfectly

I'm sure someone at some point someone has come up with a strategy based on empowering SC's in blood, but I just don't ever see it being worth it myself. (although this obviously doesn't apply to mages, who you might empower to access spell/items.)



Of course empowering Wraith Lords to S5 so they can Wish for Power is another matter, and always a no-brainer instant win IMO

[Rytek]

In general, no, not a good idea to empower thugs. Thugs are meant to die for your cause. don't invest too much in to them or you will be afraid to use them.

There are circumstances when an empowerment in blood is a good idea:

For instance, MA Jotun can buy a level 2 priest for 200g. The Jotun Gode. If Jotun was fighting MA Ermor who had huge hoardes of undead a Jotun Gode empowered in blood could join a Sabbath, wear a crystal shield and do some level 5 banishment smackdown with just 4 sabbath slaves.

[Fantomen]

When empowering in blood with a non blood nation, you usually do it to break into blood. So the main purpose is to get your first blood hunter. But it can still be a good idea to empower some unit with synergetic abilities like forge bonus or paths going well with blood. Empowering a thug? No, but perhaps a real sc could be worth it on special occations.

[Lingchih]

If you are a nation that can blood sacrifice, but with little access to nature, it is worthwhile to empower an indy nature mage to blood 1, so that you can then make jade knives.