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.- 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.- 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.- 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.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.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.