Overview
A comprehensive guide to the basics of blood magic that should allow you to take a blood-heavy nation and play it at least marginally correctly.
Introduction
Blood Magic, a Primer
Blood magic is a unique tree in dominions 4, that operates differently to every other path of magic. For a start, all blood spells are in the same research tree – where you might have to research two or three or even 4 trees to get a decent spread of magic with Air or Fire, with Blood you only need the Blood research tree. Even crosspath spells, if they contain blood, are in that tree. Blood also has some of the most powerful spells in the game – Send Horror, Life for a Life, Astral Corruption, Send to Inferno, Infernal Tempest, all are potentially gamewinning spells on their own.
But Blood has a drawback: To cast any Blood spell, even a non-ritual spell on the battlefield, it costs blood slaves. What are blood slaves? They are virgins of especially pure blood kept in special dungeons for exactly this eventuality – yep, that’s right, blood magic is not for the pure and good amongst us (although no dominions nation is really that pure and good). Casting any blood spell is the process of sacrificing them to demons and devils for a favour. Ergo, a blood mage can use any nearby blood slave on the battlefield to cast a blood spell, even if it wasn’t attached to him – he just reaches over with the ol’ sacrificial knife.
Blood Slaves
You gain blood slaves by setting a unit with blood magic of at least 1 (although you want more) to ‘Blood Hunt’ while in a province with more than 5000 population. You can blood hunt without blood magic, and in a lower pop province – but you’ll be very unlikely to get any slaves out of it. Doing this causes unrest – naturally, people don’t like it when blood mages kick in their doors and take their daughters. Unrest stops you getting more slaves. Ergo, whenever you are bloodhunting a province you will tend to want to also Patrol it with enough troops to reduce the unrest to 0 each turn. How many this is will depend on a lot of factors, but typically 20 decent men for each 10 blood slaves the province is producing per turn is about right. This overall creates a very thematic image of your city guards kicking in doors under the guidance of blood mages to secure slaves etc, but will necessarily deplete your population over time as rebels are executed and young women are taken.
The ‘magic point’ of 5000 population is where you start to get diminishing returns on your blood hunting. If your pop is below that point, you can still try to find blood slaves but you won’t get as many, or any, and the amount of patrolling you need to do per slave will increase. You can hunt under 5000 population, but generally it is wasteful of mage time, and below 4000 it’s not really worth doing at all.
Slaves hunted in a province with a lab will automatically be added to your gem treasury, and you add them to your mages like normal, with the difference that on the battlefield they appear as a weak unit that just stands there (so enemy spells or archery can wipe out your blood slaves on the battlefield). Slaves hunted in a province without a lab will accumulate on your mages, and any mage with 30 slaves already any additional slaves he hunts up will be wasted and disappear (while still causing unrest). For a nation using heavy blood magic, it’s common to have every ‘safe’ (heavily within your borders) high population province filled with blood hunters and armies patrolling, grinding down the population by hundreds of people every turn to fuel your war machine.
You want high blood casters to hunt with. The rate at which higher blood casters succeed at finding blood slaves isn’t quite exponential, but it’s close. They should have dowsing rods, and even Blood Thorns (const. 6 +1 blood path booster for 20 slaves) to help them hunt. Unrest, even a tiny bit, makes blood hunting often fail, so you want to have unrest 0 – add more patrolling forces to make this a reality regardless of how hard you are smashing a province for blood slaves. It’s nearly always better to get more blood faster than to try to ‘preserve’ a province for later.
Sanguine Dowsing Rods – These items available at Construction 4 require a blood-1 mage and 5 blood slaves – they make your blood hunter count as one level higher for blood hunting purposes. They are invaluable and every blood hunter should have one.
Blood Vortex – this global spell gives you some blood slaves every turn and nukes all provinces near the province it’s cast in. Good for annoying a powerful foe, especially if you can teleport into their lands and drop it right next to their cap – good for dispelling another global if there are 5 globals up – but it will not give very many slaves to you sadly.
An Alternate Method – A low amount of PD (10 or so) negates the unrest from a b1 blood hunter by itself. A much higher amount negates the unrest from a b2 or b3 blood hunter, or multiple b1s, if you have taken Order-3 (Order reduces unrest much faster than Turmoil). So some people hunt with scattered b1 mages all over their lands rather than concentrating, in order to avoid population losses due to patrolling. I personally don’t do this, as I find that mage time is invaluable when using blood, and you usually I want more slaves faster and damn the population. The advantage of this approach, though, is that you lose less gold income – as unrest from blood hunting is factored into your income even if you patrol it away (patrolling happens after income generation, blood-hunting-unrest happens before), having less unrest = more income = more gold. It works out to less slaves, but with more gold income to balance it, and more sustainably.
Transporting Blood Slaves
In MP you don’t want to necessarily build labs everywhere, which leads many players to use scouts or other cheap commander units to transport slaves between the blood hunting province and the closest lab. This is horrible and boring, but it saves gold on lab costs. I personally don’t do this, as I play this game to have fun, but people do it.
Selecting a commander and press ctrl-V moves all slaves to him. Then when he is in a lab, pressing Ctrl-Z moves all those slaves to a lab. You want slaves on blood hunters for defence, though, so it still blurs into horror and pain pretty fast, but the keyboard commands help.
Having stealth on these commanders is generally seen as a good idea to avoid ‘intercepted and murdered’ issues with your blood slave convoy. Even though the slaves are not stealthy they are treated like gems, so the commander being stealthy is enough to transport them.
Protecting Your Blood Hunting Operation
The easiest way to secure a blood hunting operation is to only hunt your forts. That way, your patrolling armies can be attacked by an enemy raiding thug or supercombatant or stealth team, but your actual hunters will be safe in the fort (although they can’t blood hunt inside a besieged fortress).
Barring that, though, you can rely on the fact that the province has an army (usually of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ units) patrolling and several mages in it. Blood contains some of the best anti-thug spells in the game – Leech, Life for a Life, and Send to Inferno/Cocytos, notably, but even Summon Imps en masse can screw up and murder most light thugs. The actual spells you’ll use will depend, but scripting your mages for bear and leaving them with slaves to fuel their battlefield casting (don’t take all their slaves, leave them enough to cast spells in a surprise attack) along with placing your patroller troops in proper battle formation can run off most enemies. This is very economical, as the units you are using to fuel your blood economy are themselves usually quite deadly in combat – high blood is what you want to hunt with, and it’s also a deadly battlefield path. Resupply is not an issue when you are at the /source/ of the supply, so to speak.
At no point should your blood hunters in the field be unscripted. Even if you don’t have anything for them to cast, they should be scripted to retreat – preserving mages is always something to worry about. Don’t be afraid to drop a bunch of lesser horrors or a greater horror on an enemy thug that’s mucking about in your blood hunting zone – having your slave income interrupted is about the worst thing that can happen to a heavy blood nation.
How To Use Blood In War
How you fight with blood mages can depend hugely on what crosspaths your blood mages have – Blood/Fire has the excellent Hellfire which is death to lightly armoured troops, Blood/Air can drop Pazuzu’s Wrath which can shut down enemy fort production, Blood/Astral can step into remote attacks with Send Horror, etc – but mostly depends on what level of blood magic you have researched and how many and what path in blood you have.
At low blood paths and research, you can either spam a first wave of imps with Summon Imps, or Sabbath up and have a few pathboosted from the sabbath (Blood Sabbath is like Astral’s Communion – it makes a bunch of mages paralyzed to boost a few other mages, unlike Communion though, it costs slaves, but that’s normal for blood and you should have enough to fuel it) cast Harm or Agony to screw with enemy morale (taking damage, even 1 point, makes them take a morale check to not run away).
At higher blood paths and research, or with sabbath + research, you can start using stuff like Blood Lust to boost demons on the battlefield, Hellfire to drop big aoes of damage on foes, Blood Rain to lower morale on entire battlefield for everyone prior to spamming agony etc on enemies to rout entire enemy armies, Rush of Strength to boost your guys, some more niche stuff too.
At lower blood paths + higher research blood really shines. Leech is low paths but kills a square every time you use it, Life for a Life is no-defense 40 damage to a single target (this spell kills endgame monsters with contemptuous ease), Summon Imps is great even into the lategame. Hellbind Heart can /steal/ enemy units, and will target high-hp units first – great for stealing low-MR SCs and turning them around to smash their previously allied troops, or high cost sacreds like Anakim or Niefel Giants.
Ritual Spells with Blood
This deserves a huge note: Blood has the best summons in the game.
I’ll repeat that: Blood has the best summons in the game.
Forget Conjuration, Blood’s summons are amazing and will utterly rock your world.
At low levels you can summon 1/turn of: Storm Demons, Devils, Demon Knights, Spine Devil
several/turn of: Bone Fiends, Fiery Imps
Which you will summon depends on your crosspaths. It can be not worth it to waste a powerful mage summoning only one demon, but it’s a choice you make. At higher levels, you get ‘mass summon’ versions of these spells. Again, if your blood economy is working, you should not care about the slave cost – the mage turn cost should be the primary factor.
Storm Demons: These are ethereal cloud creatures that hurl lightning shots with high precision, fly in storms, have great stats, have huge stat boosts in storms, and punch people with lightning. Due to their volley effect, they are great en-masse. And just generally great.
Devils: These are high hp high stats flying blenders with a heat aura. Great attacks with a magic poison stinger = kills thugs in groups. They are vulnerable though and need to like caelum ‘destroy the enemy in a single round’. If you only have a small squad, setting them to hold and attack rear is the best strategy.
Demon Knights: Unlike the other two which are high damage but relatively fragile, demon knights are powerhouses. They each have fear 5 meaning they will rout non-mindless infantry after perhaps 2 turns of contact, and they have 21 prot – they are roughly as hard to kill as 2 ulm Black Knights, each. Mixing them with friendly infantry as mobile ‘fear batteries’ is a great use if you only have a few, but a squad of them will smash any regular enemy units on whatever flank you place them on.
Spine Devils: Better than nothing, they are cheap and only require basic blood magic no crosspaths. Decent attacks, poor stats, will die a lot.
Fiery Imps: You get a bunch for cheap but they are still useless. Chaff that hurls fire attacks that never do any damage, buy these if you are desperate for units or for siege/patrol purposes but never otherwise.
Fiend of Darkness: They die a lot, but have two attacks, and better stats than devils in darkness. They take buffs much better than devils, and especially if fighting in Darkness are a superior unit in that regard. If you plan to buff your demons well, make these guys. If you are going to send them in buffless, use devils instead.
Bone Fiend: Good cheap trash. Decent hp, poor prot, they will die holding a line like a better version of a Longdead, but you should only make them as chaff, never rely on them or at a serious cost.
Ice Fiend: Shoots ranged attacks, is pretty crappy overall. Like a storm demon but less worth massing. They have a ice fatigue aoe on their attack, which might be useful in some really specialized circumstances. They will also notably ignore longdead and target the mages summoning them, making them useful against skelespam. More difficult to use than storm demons, and while Grip of Winter serves a similar purpose for them as Storm does for the Storm Demons, the effect is less dramatic.
Dark Vines: Gives you a huge hp useless unit. Good at distracting enemy mages with a small squad of them, kinda useless otherwise. Will get hacked to pieces by most competent enemy infantry, so not great when you could have an artillery piece or flying murderer instead. That said they are really great at drawing mage aoes and archery when you have enough of them.
Ritual of Five Gates gives you a devil, a storm demon, a fiend of darkness, a devil knight, and an Ice Fiend. It’s worth it because it doesn’t require crosspaths and is relatively cheap in mage turns for giving you the units you want. It’s slightly annoying since normally you want to go either darkness fiends OR devils, and ice devils OR storm demons, since ice devils freeze anyone near them and devils catch anyone near them on fire, but it only requires blood, no crosspaths, and is cheap for what you get. It’s great to cast if you plan to cast it a lot and are setting up high blood guys anyway for battlefield duties or to cast the mass demon summoning spells later.
At higher levels you use the mass-summon versions of these spells, usually with blood boosters or empowering to get mages who can cast them. Infernal Tempest, Infernal Forces, Infernal Crusade, Forces of Ice, etc. You obviously prioritize the better demon types (storm, devil) over the others, but whatever paths you got, those are the ones you usually use.
Blood is great because it has a diverse toolbox of rituals even in addition to great summons. Blood Feast will remove afflictions from your commanders for cost of some pop, Blood Fecundity will make a province have higher growth scales, Wrath of Pazuzu/Rain of Toads to increase enemy unrest and shut down fort production, Send Horror to attack enemy provinces with a horror, Horde from Hell to get a (really crappy) flying raider squad (mix in devils or storm demons to give it more punch/to get a flying demon leader guy and just dump the imps into patrol duties), Purify Blood on the battlefield to shut down enemy poison tactics, Infernal Disease to send a Disease Demon to remote assassinate enemy commanders, rejuvenate on a sabbath leader mage to stop sabbath mages from dying of fatigue, a Dream Horror to increase unrest forever (like a monster boar), Three Red Seconds to fort a province, Dome of Corruption to forestall remote spell attacks, etc. There’s a lot of uses for this stuff, but it should mostly be self-evident, so i’ll leave it up to you.
Rain of Toads deserves an especial mention for being relatively easy to cast and dropping a whopping huge amount of unrest at huge range. With the spell to increase blood ritual range, you can fire it across the map and nuke someone’s mage-pile with disease or shut down their production (100 unrest = can’t build units) from their important capital fort. It’s worth empowering a nature mage in blood purely to cast this spell.
Send Horror gets a mention for being almost the opposite of Rain of Toads. It’s only good en masse generally, but it can and will kill actual armies, and win you games. With Astral Corruption up, it has a chance of causing Doom Horrors to appear, powerhouse terrifying units that are the big bads of the Dominions setting. Few nations can use it effectively, but if it can be deployed properly, it’s very hard to fight or counter.
A note on Hell Power: While it seems great, it calls horrors onto your mages and proximity > horror marks, so even if you mark the enemy your mages will usually run away or get eaten. Except to cast a big spell from another path for a mage who can then be thrown away (told to attack), there is no use for it. It is a suicide spell since it calls Real horrors (not the trash ones) who will decimate your entire army with only 2 or 3 and horror marks your mage into oblivion. Don’t cast it with a sabbath leader as it will affect the entire sabbath and your entire army will evaporate.
A note on Cursed Rite/Cursed Blood: With death/blood this gives you vampires or vampire lords, vampire lords have d3/b3 so this is a great entry into death magic for a nation. They are expensive though (*about the same as an archdevil) so it’s a serious purchase. Some people like to try to use the immortality to create suicide raiders, but naked vampires are not great and gearing them means if they die you lose the gems from the gearcost. So I use them for death access, or extra blood if you don’t have great native blood access, but other than that don’t mass the vampires or anything.
Global Spells with Blood
Blood Vortex – Gives a significant number of slaves but ONLY if cast in a high-population province (ideally a capital with growth-3, your own or someone else’s). Turmoil helps generate slaves a tiny bit. It might be referring to the amount of order/turmoil across the globe rather than your own – it is not known. Can pull in 40-70 slaves/turn with enough pop in the province it’s cast in. Doesn’t appreciably destroy pop. Description very confusingly has little to do with what it does. Well worth casting, especially with enough slaves to sledgehammer another global out of the list.
Astral Corruption – Like Astral Nexus, this is a ‘you just declared war on the world’ spell. It means horrors eat enemy mages any time they use a ritual or forge an item. This applies to you as well, but doesn’t affect blood rituals or blood items. It’s the equivalent of going nuclear, and notably /upgrades/ any horrors that would appear normally. So, Send Lesser Horror tends to create real Horrors with this, and Send Horror can create Doom Horrors. This is the spell you cast when your blood economy is in full swing and your demon forces are ready for war and you have castles full of S/B casters ready to drop Doom Horror artillery on anyone who foolishly attacks your land of horror, demons, and blood. Going Full Evil Overlord is a risky bet, but this spell wins games if you do it successfully.
Looming Hell – Yet another ‘♥♥♥♥ you’ spell, this one basically fires assassination attempts across the land at random at enemies. I’d cast it, but only to remove an enemy global, and with exactly one less slave overcast than my Astral Corruption – removing AC for Looming Hell would be a terrible horrible thing to happen
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Summoned Commanders
B/F: Archdevils. These guys don’t have blood, mostly fire/something else. They can break you into paths, are great flying generals, and have enough stats/paths to thug out. Thugging them isn’t a terrible idea as they can be light SCs with their MR and paths and full gear, i.e. annoying to kill. Their fire mage is great for a non-fire nation, and can be empowered into blood if necessary.
W/B: Ice Devils. These are mostly generals with some water magic. A few of them get other paths or unique features, but they are mostly good for light thugging and leading lots of demons. Most nations that can summon these guys don’t really have a need to. A nation with W and B on it’s pretender could summon these for easy access to water magic for buffs like Wave Warriors on a demon army.
E/B: Pedoseion (Father Illearth). For the price of ‘some blood slaves’, you get a guy worth more than 50 earth gems. Earth 3, Blood 4, hundreds of hp, great stats, this guy is a SC. You can use him to earthquake spam or anything you like – with blood he can reinvigorate himself to 0 fatigue, so he can go on stupidly amazing buff routines using his E path. He can forge blood stones, a +1 E booster that is notoriously hard to make.
B: Heliophagii – the Fiends of Darkness. These guys are all useful. One has B/D at high levels, they all have high B, and one has native 4 B. They are great thugs, great blood casters, hunters, and only cost a bit more than the archdevils/ice generals. Notably the 4B one lets you forge a Blood Thorn (and from there, a Blood skull and armour of souls) without empowering (although those items are so costly you might as well empower really).
B: Demon Lords. These are all amazing. One is E/F/B, one is F/N/B, one is A/D/B, one is F/S/B, one is F/D/B, one is N/D/B. They all do additional stuff. You should not be using these as SCs – they are too valuable. They should be dropping big E, N, A, D and F buffs or spells on your armies, maybe supported by a Sabbath. These guys should travel around with an army of demons and supporting blood mages and generally be the Big Bads of your armed forces and be utterly terrifying to fight. You can gear them for hand to hand, but doing so should be to make them proof vs assassins or battlefield shenanigans, not your go-to.
B: Succubi. These guys are seducers, they seduce, if that fails they attack the commander they were trying to steal. They fly, so they can seduce from anywhere. Good way to get mages of paths you don’t got, as well as Hellbind Heart, but decent commanders will usually resist so you should plan them more as assassins than as commander-stealers. Not usually worth the slave investment. EDIT: Recent patch changes mean seduction attempts don’t automatically lead to assassinations if they fail. Ergo, these are even less worth it.
Crosspaths and How to Swing Them
Stuff You Can Do With Astral and Blood
This is the land of horror artillery. You can drop a dream horror to increase unrest, send lesser (useless) horrors, send horrors (sometimes useful), or drop astral corruption. Notably you can forge a few artifacts with this path, but they aren’t the most useful ones. The ‘Call Horror’ line is useless – again, it will create horrors in your army and they will kill your army. This is the horror combination so other than that no real uses.
Stuff You Can Do with Fire and Blood
Create devils, create lots of devils at once, cast Blood Boil (kinda crappy single target shooter spell), cast Hellfire (pretty decent low prot large aoe spell), get the arch devils (high fire flying demon leaders), cast Infernal Prison (no save sends an enemy supercombatant to hell, he comes back, but it takes like a year), and yeah that’s about it.
Stuff You Can Do with Nature and Blood
Create crappy dark vines, use crossbreeding or improved crossbreeding to generate loads of trashy patrollers in huge amounts (it is great chaff creation spell), cast blood fecundity to improve Growth scales, cast Rain of Toads to smash enemy unrest in their forts/disease their mages, cast a spell to remove poison on the battlefield.
Stuff You Can Do with Death and Blood
Summon bone fiends (great trash unit), make vampires and vampire lords for death access/immortal duties.
Stuff You Can Do with Water and Blood
Get ice chucking ice devils, get ice devil lords with water access, send someone to ice hell (Claws of Kokytos), get a whole bunch of ice chucking ice devils at once.
Stuff You Can Do with Earth and Blood
Get demon knights. !!!. Get a big ass kickass earth dude. Summon evil earth elementals on the battlefield. Get LOTS of demon knights at once.
Stuff You Can Do with Air and Blood
Get amazing lightning hurler demons. Increase enemy unrest with Wrath of Pazuzu. Get a whole damn lot of amazing lightning demons at once.
Boosting Blood
Empowering is doable with blood slaves since they are so cheap comparatively. You get a lot, and everything you do with them costs a lot of them, so empowering costs are lower comparatively. At blood-4 you can make the Blood Thorn, at blood-5 you can make the Brazen Vessel, at blood-6 you can make the Armour of Souls, all of these boost blood by 1. A Ring of Sorcery (super expensive high-astral const. 6 misc item) boosts blood by 1 as well, but you really shouldn’t be afraid to empower into high blood. The stuff you get there is worth the cost.
Sabbaths work like communions, so 2 sabbath slave mages = +1 paths to any sabbath master, 4 slaves = +2, 8 slaves = +3 etc. So you can do that, too, for battlefield stuff.
In Conclusion
Blood is a mixed bag. You can do a lot of stuff with it, enough that you almost don’t need other paths if you have blood. It is weaker than a proper multi-path strategy, though, but it makes up for that by scaling really well – 20 storm demons is good, but 100 is amazing. The key use of blood is to use it’s strengths to shore up weaknesses in your national strategy, but not rely on it – in combination with proper buffing, the elite demon troops are amazing. In combination with raiding and other remotes, horror-sending is strong enough to wipe out counter-raiding forces and teleported thugs etc.
So Blood is a great support path. It can do a lot of stuff, so the ‘bang for your buck’ in terms of research points is high – it gives you high path mages that get you access to other stuff, and great chaff and troops to keep the enemy off you until your other mages can get their ♥♥♥♥ together to drop that big Shimmering Fields or whatever it is you are relying on. Blood is just incredibly useful for nearly any strategy, and nations with strong blood access will generally never regret investing in it – they will only regret relying on it entirely.
Tricks and Specific Strategies with Blood
Black Heart Quickstep – The Black Heart is a Const 4. blood item (15 slaves). Placed on a stealthy commander, it gives them the Assassination ability. With a Lifelong Protection magic item (summons imps) or with a blood caster to summon some units and then cast Life for a Life, you can kill even SCs with one of these assassins. With Shademail (E/D item, gives stealth) you can turn any mage into an assassin with this item.
Det-Charge and Courage – With a communion or sabbath, a fire mage as a communion master, and a blood mage as a communion master, and a bunch of communion slaves at the front of your army, you can do a trick that was used a lot in dom3. Firstly, have the fire mage cast Phoenix Pyre, a spell that makes your guys explode when they die and re-appear someone else with fatigue that stops working when they have 100+ fatigue. Then cast Hell Power. Your communion/sabbath slaves will receive both spells (as spells cast on masters go to slaves as well), and summon horrors, die, explode, teleport, re-appear, repeat until they run out of fatigue. You combine this with a blood mage sabbath master in the back with slaves and bodyguards casting Reinvigoration to regenerate their fatigue, with an astral master to cast Blink and teleport them around randomly like landmines, with Breath of Winter and Astral Shield to give them an aoe effect and paralyzing wall around them, and Ironskin/Personal Regen/other defensive buffs to make them gather more enemies and spawn more horrors before exploding, and Summon Earthpower and Relief to give them longer before they run out of fatigue and die for real. Needless to say, you shouldn’t bring anything you care about to this battle.
Kill:Everything – Bloodletting requires 4 blood to cast, but reinvigorates the caster immensely. With Antimagic up, a group of Bloodletters can murder entire battlefields. The tiny MR boost from Antimagici means that without penetration boosters on your bloodletting casters your men will be mostly safe and the enemy will be utterly screwed. Depends entirely on the MR value of your foe, and your ability to bring multiple b4 mages to the battlefield. Without Antimagic, you’ll kill off your slaves on the 10th or 11th cast, but eh, might still be fine.
Full Evil Overlord – Astral Corruption + Blood Vortex + Looming Hell + Send Horror. Also known as the ‘LA Abysian Lategame’, this means you are constantly screwing over the rest of the world, getting lots of slaves to summon more dudes, and squashing enemy armies with Doom Horrors. All it requires is a capital, research and some high blood mages. Astral Corruption can be comfortably cast by the Prince of Pleasure demon lord, who then becomes your artillery laser with Send Horror.
Purpose, Disclaimer
This Primer is aimed at people new to the game looking at a big tree full of blood magic and going ‘do I need to research this?’ When?’. It shouldn’t be taken as a replacement for a guide to playing blood-heavy nations – Lanka and Mictlan with their unique summons change things significantly, and what you should be doing alongside Blood changes from nation to nation.
Also, I am not a top player. I am solidly mediocre and tend to lose a lot of games, so take my advice with a grain of salt – a genius strategy may be poo-poo’d in my writeup, and obviously specific nations will change the priorities outlined above. Like all things, you have to consider this piece intelligently in terms of specific situation.
This guide is intended to be part of a series of primers on each magic path (Fire, Air, Astral) so forth, so new players can look them up after starting a game as a nation with mages with that path, and get some idea of how that path works and what you can do with it that will be effective.
This primer is aimed at MP, and doesn’t really cover SP as I view SP as more of a sandbox where anything goes.
Q&A (To be incorporated into future edits)
–How many devils or dark fiends do you find you need to make an effective attack on a back line? I see the potential but I’m always scared to use them. That’s a big question, because it depends on what you are attacking. You need a lot, though. A few devils you can toss at the back line and hope for the best, but to seriously mess someone up I would never use less than 20. They are more fragile than they seem if surrounded, and suffer from the ‘Caelum Problem’ – i.e. flying in leaves them scattered and unless they come in enough numbers to surround an enemy unit or flank they will just die. 30 is much better.
–How many casters do you need for ritual of 5 and how do you get them? Depends how long you’re willing to wait. It’s an expensive spell, so it scales to your blood slave income. If you’re not using blood as your primary combat path, it can be an idea to use spare slaves to empower someone/forge boosters into getting a 2nd caster, then a 3rd, and so forth until you run out of excess slave income.
–Thank you for your advice on scripting blood farms No problem.
–Why would Pedoseion forge a blood stone? Sure, he can do it, but so can the guy who summoned him. As an earth nation I can never ever have enough blood stones. And if he’s not Fighting in Wars, forging stones seems like a more useful thing for him to be doing than blood hunting or researching.
–Serpent Fiends are not mentioned I genuinely forgot about these. I’d appreciate if anyone who has found a use for them could tell me, because I have not.