Top-tier Blood summons

[fogandsteel]

I have never summoned any Blood summons. What are pros and cons of the top-tier Blood summons like Demon Lords and Arch Devils (and others, if there are more)?

I looked them up in Dom 4 Mod Inspector, and it seems that they have undesirable traits, some of which I don't even know. For example, what is "Reaper: 10%"?

Which ones are better ones? and which ones are not worth the trouble of summoning them?

[Shrike]

In general, most of the high-tier unique summons are 'worth it', provided you have a pretty decent sized horde of demons (your other big blood slave sink) as well. In general, in the lategame you might be choosing between say 80 storm demons with Pazuzu casting Fog Warriors and Wrathful Skies, or just 101 storm demons - the first option does way more good for you. The unique summons are high-level spellcasters who can ideally do things that your nation cannot.

Mostly, you are summoning them to break into magic paths that you don't otherwise get, or don't get enough of. They also tend to serve as flying leaders for demon armies that fly. You can turn your unique summons into supercombatants, but it's way less good an option than it used to be in earlier patches.

In general, many of the unique blood summons tend to do bad things to the provinces they live in - Reaper kills population, for example. Diseasing, spreading unrest, all that sort of thing are really common. You want the guys who do this stuff either in a lab in a low-pop province you don't care about (if they are forging or casting globals or whatever) or you want them leading armies to attack enemies.

In general:

Archdevils mostly just give you top-tier fire casters who can drop big fire spells and either end up being supercombatants with like Phoenix Pyre, or parts of Firestorm traps. However they also give you S3 on a guy, which is pretty awesome.

Ice devils give you S2 and D3 in addition to water magic.

Vampire Lords give you excellent flying raiders with skeleton-spamming, thugging, and immortal capabilities.

Father Illearth is really good as a supercombatant with minimal gear (he comes with his own regen and has great stats) and can also toss out bloodstones.

Heliophagi break you into fire and death even if you have none of either of those paths.

Demon Lords get you into a lot of different paths, and are sort of obscene spellcasters.

Of the non-unique unit summons, the biggest and best are probably:

Storm Demons - toss amazing lightning damage everywhere, and flies also, and still is pretty good in melee. Amazing unit.

Demon Knight - tanky as hell in melee, and has a Fear aura on each dude so a bunch of these will rout most enemies who have morale (i.e. not mindless/demon/undead guys).

Devils - Flying guys who want to be used to kill archers or casters in the backs of armies. Need a large number to be effective, not terribly resilient, but really strong and can kill elite units pretty well

Of the rest, Ice devils are not great, unless maybe fighting people with weaknesses to ice. Fiends of Darkness are sort of crap, even fighting in Darkness. Dark Vines are big blobs of HP to bait spells, that otherwise sort of suck. Crossbreeding *mostly* just gets fodder that's only good for sieging down castles, but costs too much for that job... but with max Luck scales it can sometimes pull out really quite nice monsters with neat abilities or stats, like Cockatrices, Basilisks, and Ettins, so if you have good luck on your BN nation it's not bad.

[fogandsteel]

What is BN nation?

[Shrike]

Nation with blood and nature mages. Magic paths are usually abbreviated to:

A = Air
W = Water
E = Earth
F = Fire
S = aStral
D = Death
N = Nature
B = Blood

Nations with mages with blood/nature crosspaths include some of the eras of Xibalba and Pangaea.

[dyslexicfaser]

Of note is that by the time you get most of the unique Blood summons (Ice Devils at 6, Arch Devils at 7, Heliophagi at 8, Demon Lords at 9), you're well on your way to being able to cast the Blood army spells at Blood 9 with those guys. Infernal Forces, Forces of Ice, Infernal Tempest and Infernal Crusade are all excellent.

Once you get one Vampire Lord, they'll be freespawning vampire units that are also immortal life drainers, and they can summon more Vampire Lords with a Skull Staff. Arch Devils and some of the Demon Lords can cast Infernal Forces so they can roll with posses of Devils and Imps. Things like that. Your pretender can focus on other things while they take over summoning/forging duties.

One reason I like the Grigori so much is that they can all booster up to B6 or 7 easily, and then summon 10+ demons in one cast. A few turns at that and you have an army ready to roll.

[Shrike]

Ritual of Five Gates is also pretty good for cost effectiveness, and comes way earlier on the research front. You take one B5 guy, who can be as low as a base B2 wearing all 3 blood magic boosters, and you get a Fiend of Darkness, Frost Fiend, Storm Demon, Demon Knight, and Devil for 28 slaves in a single cast. It's cost savings and the fact that you're getting 5 at once mean it's super worthwhile compared to just summoning up these sorts of guys one at a time. It's not as good as the biggest summons, but it's available a lot earlier on. Cast it a bunch of times and get a strong and versatile army made of all sorts of demons (but be careful how you deploy and position it, you don't want your own guys hurting each other).