Could you do one for Turland?
Alright, this might be obvious, but you either get up a blood economy or die.
Not to put too fine a point on it, your non-blood paths are god awful. Your cap only recruit is, honestly, you could play optimally and never recruit him. His price is vastly inflated by death recruit, and you CANNOT take death with such a blood focused nation. He's too expensive for pure blood spells, and B/D gives you only a single spell worth mentioning, which is Curse of Blood. That's a fine spell and all, but its research 7 and costs 77 blood slaves and its better spammed than cast once. So its a distant option.
You could look at this as a disadvantage or you could look at it as an advantage: you literally only need to research one school, which is of course blood. You'll want to splash construction for boosters eventually, but no rush. It might seem tempting to go there for the sanguine dousing rods but they aren't good enough on their own to justify rushing construction 4. Your only hope of standing against the other factions is going to be blood magic, which means you need to quickly research up to ideally level 5 and also get a blood economy up in parallel (no waiting for you).
This guide is mandatory reading. Your only native crosspaths are earth and nature, but those are great. Earth will get you Demon Knights; these are great and absolutely worth however many slaves and mage turns you can spare. You'll also get Rain of Toads, spam it at forted provinces till the unrest goes up so high they can't recruit. You could cast nothing but those two spells and still do better than most dominions players. You'll also get the pure blood spells, which includes some nice anti-thug stuff; in particular Blood Burst is low research cost and pretty much irresistible (don't trust the description you need B2 to cast it). Later on you'll have exclusive access to the unique summons, for this purpose you'll ideally want a pretender with B4F2 to cast Bind Arch Devil which will break you into astral and get you some badass SC chassis. You'll also want growth and ideally order for the money, since you'll be saccing your population and I wouldn't trust having many provinces given your competition.
Both your blood mages are useful; the Dying Necrolyte is your bread and butter and recruiting a lot of them will give you access to plenty of B2, N1, and E2 randoms. Don't be afraid to empower blood; it might be worth it to empower the same mage twice or even three times to if they'll give you an important crosspath (although probably not). You'll need to use the armor of thorns to get Rain of Toads up in a practical manner, that means a source of nature gems and construction 4.
You have access to thugging, but not thugging like the other nations have. What you have is low cost, low return thugging for raiding. If you want that kind of thug to do anything against an army you'll want to mass them and have them join another one of your armies. For some reason you ALSO have invulnerable mages, in this case ambidextrous mini-giants. They're cheap enough to make that pretty damn badass but their paths are useless and their morale and defense skill are cripplingly bad. What I'd do is take the priest version, give them a flesh eater axe + whip of command (leadership over 120 gives awe), and then have them self bless for, at the very least, a minor water bless. You need a source of fear to work with the awe; either use a helm of fear, or send them in with some demon knights. That's fear+awe+invulnerable+berserking+23 health+whatever your bless is for 70 gold, 5 blood slaves, 5 nature gems, and whatever you spent to get the fear. Don't be afraid to throw more than one of these at a province. Also please test them in SP, its kind of a weird design (although I think it will be really good).
You need to find a dump for your ridiculous number of death gems. I've got nothing. A million black bows? A million banefire crossbows? Totally redundant horror helms (demon knights get fear 5)? I'd consider telling any dangerous neighbors that if they haven't attacked you by year 2 you'll give them 20+ death gems. Or maybe trade them for earth/nature gems.
Your national troops are uninspiring. Your sacreds are too risky to invest in. Someone WILL find a way to kill them on the cheap. You've got a great deal on precision 11 longbows, and they'll stay decent even once you've transitioned to demons. Sadly even if you take a fire pretender it won't be worth the research cost of getting Flaming Arrows. I'd focus on those guys, get a cheap wall of spearmen, and use diplomacy, threats, or straight up bribery to stay safe till you get your blood economy up.
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Topic: Dominions 4 Round 17: Very Bad Things (Hashed NationGen) - Done (Read 48818 times)