The lazy way of hunting is to grow a herd. Venture tend to be good at that due to their praesenz ability lingering kiss. The size of your herd depends on your diplomacy. Just start hunting schemes against courtiers that fit your feeding restriction. Yes, your clan´s bane is annoying. They are still one of the stronger clans for sure.

Yeah but I went hunting to find characters for the herd. :D
I just started but it a somewhat mute point now because just hours after this post I got basically dethroned.
But if I remember books and games correctly then you are absolutely right, a big part of being Ventrue is herding the right people.

Sure, but you can also right-click on one of your courtiers who meets your feeding restrictions and pick the "hunt" option. With lingering kiss you can automatically add that person to your herd after a successful hunt. At the beginning of the game you get to pick your restriction, like young women, lustful people, warriors etc.
Your prison is basically your fridge so you might want to pick warriors, since they get captured a lot. Or pick lustful people and then just mass arrest adulterers for being bad and kind of tasty.

Ah, never used lingering kiss but I couldn't use the hunt option on the court, as the court didn't have suitable victims.
As I said, I have moved away from the Ventrue.
Right now I try the counties, play each count for a couple of years and get destroyed, still trying to find a slot, were I can survive for a bit.

You constantly get conquered as a vampire? I mean hunters and other minorities most def have a hard time in the early game. As a vamp you can always offer to become the vassal of the biggest and badest empire in your neighborhood. Then other rulers have to challenge your overlord for your turf. Or do you get taken out by other vassals of your overlord?

Nah not always conquered, that's just the most obvious thing. The game mostly nerfs me into oblvion with events which take all the money, constant stress bombardement or just now, I didn't know that making a Ghul costs me 250 piety and now I am almost 200 in the negativ and am contemplating just going to bed.

Ah, that´s a path problem. Your character probably follows the path of humanity or something like that. Being the good guy is not easy in WoD.
Try Via Tyrannus or go full viking Gangrel in Sweden. Just raid for money and captives. Sacrifice people for piety and blood. Play a char with either the zealous or sadistic trait and you get stress relief for being a vindictive prick to your prisoners. Embrace people and marry them off, because alliances boost your military score so people don´t attack you. Also, get a free dog and animal men at arms with little to zero upkeep.

Indeed it seems to be the road to Heaven. So the character is basically useless.
Being anyone in this mod is a lot harder than the base game, as expansion is all but impossible, there are never enough soldiers, especially for sieges.
Herding is hard too because most people you try have almost no affinity and are worthless. Money is also always gone as everyone just asks for the max. and at least 100 gold.
Viking Gangrel is such a turn off that I would rather deinstall the mod.

Well. animalism gets you tons of soldiers fast.
Low affinity herd members give like half XP compared to really good snacks. So you just need twice as many for the same result. You can switch your path at any time. Path of Heaven is not bad, especially in mid game. A viking Gangrel is just my rush build. Brujah with many children are quite strong, too.

Well its a mod so I shouldn't expect it to be balanced, its just frustrating when you run into a wall with every approach, nothing works and every rng situation looks like the game is trying to get you to quit.
Cainites think in centuries sure but playing for 20 ingame years without any progress can hardly be called fun.
But its late, so good night, and thanks for the advice.

Good night. May the god of powergaming smile on you some day.

You can get unlucky with any kind of feeding preference, but it's important to keep in mind that chances of the right type to appear are not equal. Young woman has 40% less chance to appear compared to middle aged one. Chances of particular particular trait to appear are even less. Certain type of education has double chance to appear compared to the others.

You have checked your court and found no suitable preys. Would not it be nice if you could make person of your choice appear in your court (almost) instantly and free of charge? Just one of the goals you might want to aim your character's development to, if you so desire. As Ventrue you would have easier time to accomplish that than, say, Nosferatu.

I try to train my ghoul friend to play PoD and it's amazing how seemingly intellegent being can fail so hard. In other words, I understand that for new player the learning curve is steep, features to exploit are too many. But don't be afraid to think and use numbers to your advantage. As Ventrue, in most cases, it would be a good roleplay too.

Well, the game is always one step ahead, I tried a new count in Italy, was able to buy a claim on land which I actually could conquer but the game took all my prestige away and because of my house I can only generate negative prestige.
So I am off to my next try.

Maybe your knowledge of the base game gets in your way here. PoD can be way more violent and direct. There are also way more religions/paths than Christianity/Islam/etc. You don´t play a good christian surrounded by other good christians, who expect you to play nice. You can just declare religious wars on some fringe duchy full of nobodies. Vamps don´t like each other much and strongly dislike fairies, hunters etc. I wouldn´t mess with werewolves in the early game, though.

Yes it seems starting as a count adds an extra level of difficulty, there are also less obvious ways to deal with stress and you are right, expanding the powerbase without knowledge of the religious lore or what costs prestige/piety/gold seems to be a game of roulette.
I restarted as Gustav Breidenstein, that seems to be a bit more forgiving, at least when it comes to military issues, as I was able to conquer one neighboring county and got a gifted claim on another, togehter with his focus in stewardship money is also not bad.
Lets see how far that guy can take me.