Good example of establishing a blood economy?

[Lasci]

Trying to wrap my head more around the various in depth concepts of the game and I was wondering if there was a good example of how to set up a blood economy, whether that be through videos, guides, an informative post, etc. Any help or direction would be appreciated. I'm especially interested in some of the EA mainstays like Lanka, Xibalba, Mictlan, etc.

[Kid Icarus]

This is probably the best thing I've read. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=667432694

[TheMage1]

My understanding is that blood is a huge drain on your mage turns, which causes them to not be able to do much else.

Basically, when you use blood, the most important thing to note is what you are giving up to do so. Each blood hunt causes a rise in unrest, as well as a loss in population(functionally insignificant). This unrest, due to turn order (blood hunt, then income comes in, then patrol, scales, dominion, and PD modify unrest) will cause gold to be lost regardless of what you do.

As such, you want to keep in mind the formulas for unrest reduction, as well as gold lost from unrest, in order to figure out what you should patrol with, and how much gold you're losing.

The formula for how many slaves in a successful hunt is something like 4.1 (exploding d6 average) + blood paths + magic site percentage factor. I'm not sure how many slaves the magic sites percentage gives you.

The probability of success of a blood hunt is 3 things, unrest/400 chance of failure, population/5000 chance of failure, and (10+40*B)%, where B is blood magic level.

I think the formula for unrest from blood hunting is 4+n*3, where n is number of slaves.

The formula for gold lost from unrest can be derived from: original gold/(1+.02*U)=received gold, where U is unrest.

The formula for unrest reduction is something like 1(base) + unrest from PD + Dominion (in province)/2 + Order scales + patrol + some percentage based value (which might depend on order scales).

The patrol formula is the sum of all patrol strengths, minus half the unrest (I think). Patrol strength is calculated based on (Precision+AP(if flying 30))/20.

When you patrol, you lose 10 population for each point of unrest patrolling removes, which can be significant when bloodhunting.

Finally, you need to take into account mage-turns. By blood-hunting, you are losing mage turns, both from the blood-hunting needed, as well as the need for mages to cast spells/forge items to make use of your slaves (although you can empower for better ratios, you still need some use for your blood slaves, or all your gold that you spent on blood-hunting isn't doing anything).

As an example of how worthwhile imp familiars are(b1, 5 slaves), I think that it is roughly equivalent for these two situations.

2 blood hunter warrior sorceresses(with rod), to make 15 slaves a turn, have 3 warrior sorceresses make an imp familiar(9 research per turn). This results in 925 gold spent for the sorceresses, with 30.8 gold per turn for plain upkeep. There is also blood hunting fees, that add to the cost per turn, but I'm not going to calculate that.

As an alternative, you could make a fort recruiting soothsayers for 900 gold, and produce them for 35 gold for 9 research(in magic 3, and averaged research). This has additional upkeep of 2.33 gold a turn, but the blood hunters have an upkeep in terms of population loss (which I think is less, but magnifies over time, due to growth scales).

Just keep in mind that Sauromatia has a very cheap researcher, as well as a very expensive blood hunter. For almost all other nations, building imp familiars should work out much better.

[Althaea]

Most of the technical details mentioned in this thread can be found in the manual, by the way.

The guide linked above is also quite useful. It's for Dominions 4 but all the basic principles are the same even if many of the small details are slightly different. To summarize the blood economy itself very briefly, to maximize blood income you want to reach Construction 4 to make Sanguine Dousing Rods, pass out Sanguine Dousing Rods to each of your blood hunters, and likely patrol the unrest generated by blood hunting down using some low-or-zero upkeep patroller, such as summoned wolves, black hawks (from "Call of the Winds") or (as Mictlan or Hinnom) slaves. Lanka can also use reanimated undead for this, but since Lanka can only reanimate the undead with their national priests in this iteration of the franchise, it's got more of an opportunity cost to reanimate than any guides for Dominions 4 would suggest.

To minimize costs you usually blood hunt in provinces without any labs in them, meaning you'll need to ferry blood slaves back and forth between them and a province with a lab using scouts or other cheap commanders. This takes a bit of micro, but it gets much easier if you're used to the game's hotkeys. Using "n" to select the next idle commander and using "Ctrl" + "v" (or is it "shift" + "V"? I don't quite remember and I'm writing this at work so can't conveniently check) to transfer as many blood slaves as possible to the selected commander from all the other commanders in the province makes it much, much easier. Finally there's "Ctrl" + "z" (or "Shift" + "z") to transfer all blood slaves on the selected commanders to the treasury (only works when in a province with a lab).

And I pity the poor sods who had to deal with that entire system in Dominions 3 (and earlier titles) when none of these hotkeys existed.

edit: the guide covers the hotkeys (as it should), and it's "Ctrl" + "v" and "Ctrl" + "z".

Originally posted by TheMage1:

The formula for how many slaves in a successful hunt is something like 4.1 (exploding d6 average) + blood paths + magic site percentage factor. I'm not sure how many slaves the magic sites percentage gives you.

If it hasn't been tweaked, it's an average of +0.5 for every 5 points of Frequency above 35. A different formula exists for reducing blood slave income at a Frequency of 30 or less, but I don't remember that one at all (serious games with reduced magic site frequency are significantly less common than hen's teeth).

Thus in the Early Era it's +2.5 blood slaves per successful hunt, in the Middle Era +1.5, and in the Late Era +0.5. Of course, the total population in the Early Era is 20% lower than in the Middle Era, and the total population in the Late Era is 20% than the Middle Era, so good blood hunting provinces will be more common in later eras and can be exploited for longer before they go below 5000 or 4000 population.

Which is why you'll find people saying that blood slaves are more plentiful in later eras. It's not strictly true, but it is true for all relevant intents and purposes. But not for any porpoises, it should be noted, since you can't blood hunt underwater.

Originally posted by TheMage1:

The probability of success of a blood hunt is 3 things, unrest/400 chance of failure, population/5000 chance of failure, and (10+40*B)%, where B is blood magic level.

To clarify for other readers, these are not cumulative: there are three entirely separate checks here, and a failing any one of them will cause the blood hunt to fail. Thus one should rarely blood hunt in provinces with much less than 5000 population. Down to 4000 may still yield returns and I've personally found that a single very good blood hunter may give acceptable returns at even lower population levels since they are very likely to pass the other checks and give a good number of blood slaves anyway. (That being said, the only blood hunters good enough for that are probably pretenders with a high amount of Blood magic who are unique enough that you should not waste them on this, and Melqarts, who kill 120 population in their province every turn merely by being there, which is terribly unsustainable.)

[jojeck]

There are several different ways to view a blood economy depending whether your starting nation is a recognised Blood nation or not. Any nation can benefit from some use of Blood magic or items that need blood slaves to forge but blood nations can do it a lot easier, so let's start with them. A Blood nation is usually one where some of its recruitable troops are at least B1. That makes starting a blood economy fairly straightforward you just have to recruit some of them and send to suitable blood hunting provinces (at least 5000 pop and not over 9000 to avoid losing too much gold). If you are learning about blood hunting, blood magic and forging blood items pick a nation like that and learn how to do that efficiently. You can then expand your knowledge to deal with the several situations where a non Blood nation uses blood hunting in the middle or late game to expand its magical capablities.

Of course using your mages to blood hunt will slow down your research by a lot and the cost can be measured in terms of lost RP. So If you have 10 mages blood hunting each of which could research for 9 RP then your blood slaves gained that turn can be said to cost you 90 RP. Blood slaves also cost gold in terms of lost income from the province due to unrest and also due to pop loss from the blood hunting and particularly from patrolling. If you do light blood hunting in a province (usually 1 or 2 hunters per province) then you can probably get away without patrolling at least most months. With growth scales light blood hunting is usually sustainable for long periods.

Heavy blood hunting with say 6 blood hunters will cause a lot of unrest that carries over to the next month and will build up until many hunts fail due to unrest, unless you patrol away the unrest each turn and that will kill quite a lot of pop. Killing pop will cause long term loss of income from the province as each 100 pop gives a base income of 1 gold that is then modified by your scales and any unrest. Sustained heavy blood hunting will reduce the pop in a province despite growth scales and it might eventually reduce the pop below 5000 pop when it is probably better to move the blood hunters. So you might want to start with (say) 8000 pop in a province that you intend to hunt heavilly and then stop when it drops to 4500 pop. With good growth scales your other provinces might grow enough to compensate for the loss of gold and a few might grow enough to become suitable provinces to hunt.

There are essentially only 4 types of blood hunter and one is a type that you should try to avoid using. On average they give the following numbers of blood slaves per turn under ideal blood hunting conditions :
B0 0.4
B1 2.5
B2 5.4
B3 7.0
+1 per extra per level above B3.
B0 is any commander with no blood magic paths. They have a 10% chance of getting an average of 4 slaves per hunt for an overall average of 0.4 slaves. These can help break into a limited blood economy for a non Blood nation. Recruiting 10 scouts costs 250 gold and 17 gold upkeep and should give about 4 slaves per turn.
B1 is any mage with Blood 1 and these should only be used sparingly until you research Construction 4 and get a Sanguine Dowsing Rod (SDR) and they become an effective B2 hunter. The SDR adds 2.9 slaves per hunt and makes the B1 more than twice as effective. So as a general rule use your B1 mages to research Const 4 (total of 750 RP) and then equip the SDR before serious blood hunting.
B2 these have a 90% chance of success and gain 6 slaves on average if they succeed. Adding a SDR to these gains 1.6 slaves per hunt so as a rule always give the SDR to B1 hunters before equipping B2 ones.
B3 these have a 100% base chance of success and get 7 slaves. Adding an SDR adds one slave per hunt, so worth using for long term hunters but low priority use of SDR.
As others have mentioned the magic site frequency has been increased in Dom 5 and will apply a bonus or mallus to the average numbers given above for each successful hunt.

Heavy Blood hunting in a province with several blood hunters will cause the unrest to rise as each blood hunter either succeeds or fails and so the likelihood of failing grows with each hunter even if all the unrest is patrolled away by heavy patrolling. So expect lower average returns than given above as the conditions are no longer "ideal".

[✏pencils✏]

The short advice is to try to hunt in provinces with ~6k population, and to use the blood dowsing rod thing when possible. If you don't have any blood mages you can build a lab and recruit the indie mictlan priests when you find one of those provinces. Sometimes they start with b1 and you can empower from there.

[BoboYagga]

Originally posted by alguLoD:

Which is why you'll find people saying that blood slaves are more plentiful in later eras. It's not strictly true, but it is true for all relevant intents and purposes. But not for any porpoises, it should be noted, since you can't blood hunt underwater.

I laughed so hard at this...