Dominions 3: The Awakening/Nations/Mictlan, Reign of Blood

The empire of Mictlan is one horrific blood sacrifice. The neighbors of the nation live in constant fear of slavery or worse. Priests of their foul god spill the blood of countless victims to assauge the thirst of their pretender while the numerous armies of Mictlan are fueled by the bodies of their slave levies.

Mictlan is one of the races that you can play and feel really evil. To succeed, you must exploit and ransack your population, using their innocent daughters as the fuel that propels your infernal quest to conquer the world!

Mictlan uses Blood Magic extensively. In fact, Mictlan cannot spread its dominion using any method other than blood sacrifice. Neither your pretender nor your prophet will spread dominion for you and building temples serves no purpose except to give you a handy place to sacrifice virgins.

In Short

 * Race: Human, prefer heat scale +1
 * Military: Light infantry with slings and javelins, tribal kings can levy slaves
 * Magic: Blood, Fire, Astral, Nature, Water
 * Priests: Powerful, can perform blood sacrifices. Dominion does not spread unless blood is sacrificed

Pretenders
The following pretender god classes are available for Reign of Blood:

The unique pretenders for Early Era Mictlan are the Smoking Mirror and the Lord of Night.

Units
Mictlan actually has a fair amount of flexibility in their troop and commander choices.

Troops
They have four flavors of Warrior, ranging from a naked guy with a shield, spear and sling to a guy in copper scale armor (protection 11!). All of the warriors cost 9 gold and differ only in terms of gear and resource cost (and the associated encumbrance and defense hits). Which ones you buy are a function of how much money you have to spend verses the available resources -- if you've just spent all your cash on a temple, burn the rest of it on the heavily-armored warrior; if you have a lot of cash, buy hordes of the naked dudes and swamp your enemies with their bloodstained bodies.

The Feathered Warrior is the heavy-armor warrior with a Big Honking Hat. They operate as standards and can reinforce your units' morale. You should pick up a couple for each unit if you have the cash -- Mictlan's base morale 10 is average, but who wants to be average?

The Moon Warrior is a heavily armored fighter wielding a two handed obisidan sword, and the one who is blessed with darkvision. They are not sacred, so no limit for producing them, even together with a low-resource sacred one for better resource utilisation.

Probably the most tempting thing about Mictlan's arsenal is the three (3!) types of sacred units that you can buy. Given the range of pretenders you can buy, there are all sorts of Bless Strategies you can try.

The Jaguar Warrior gets two lives: kill the initial form and they turn into were-jaguars, meaning that they effectively have twice their listed hit points.

Eagle Warriors get to fly when blessed, giving you a nice rear-striking force if you script your attack right.

Sun Warriors are essentially sacred versions of the heavy-armor warrior.

A word of warning: Jaguar and Eagle Warriors are the only Mictlan troop type that does not have a ranged secondary weapon. Unless carefully positioned or scripted otherwise, they will dive right at the enemy's ranks while everyone else lags back and throws rocks or javelins, often leading to a great deal of "friendly fire" casualties amongst the troops with those spiffy bless effects.

Commanders
Mictlan has a nation-unique Scout. He has a sling. F34r the mighty sling!

Tribal Kings are the default non-mage commander. They, like most Mictlan commanders, are sacred and you must build a temple to recruit them. Don't forget that they have the "Levy Slave" ability -- this allows your idle commanders to grab peasants, toss them pointed sticks and allow them to die for your greater glory. This lowers population slightly and causes no unrest.

The Mictlan Priest is your default go-to-guy for getting blood slaves. He's dirt cheap at 60 gold, which gets you B1H1?0 (10% FWSN); quite the deal. Send him out and he can build the support structures you need for efficient blood-hunting and sacrificing.

The Nahualli is the only non-sacred Mictlan commander (aside from the scout). S1N2?0 (10% ADNB) for 110 gold. The leadership is lousy (10/0/20), but they do give the nature-related supply bonus which is useful for keeping the hoards of slave levies fed and watered... not that you'd be worried about slave levies' health.

The Priest King is a good bargain at 175 gold for N2B2H2. He can lead 120 normal units along with a smattering of undead and magical troops, and as a bonus, they can levy slaves too. Most vitally, they are not old, so you'll get some decent service out of them. They are your main source of Jade Knives.

Rain Priests and Moon Priests are essentially lesser versions of the Priest King. For 15 gold less, they don't come with any armor, their leadership is gone (10/10/20), and the icing on the cake is that they are old. The only reason to buy them is to get access to the unique summons that their W2B2H2 and S2B2H2 paths give you, respectively.

The High Priest of the Sun is your preferred Prophet chassis. Although you get little direct dominions benefit from having a prophet, it does get you a level-4 priest, which can be nice. Out-of-the-box High Priests are F2B3H3, which gives you Divine Bless, essential if you are going for a bless strategy of some kind. The big down-side of the HPotS is that he starts off at age 60, so he is not long for the world. Give him a Blood Thorn and he can cast Rejuvenation (blood-6) on himself a few times, making him nice and spry for the ladies once again. With Fire-2, he is ready to cast some of the more interesting blood summons.

Unique Spells
Mictlan Early Era has a slew of unique spells, mostly in the Conjuration and Blood schools.

Mictlipoctli
One of at least two heroes available to available to Mictlan in the Early Era, Mictlipoctli offers an excellent way to "bootstrap" yourself to a sizeable Undead Horde.

Tepeyocatl
The second, much less powerful, hero available to EA Mictlan is Tepeyocatl. He's an Eagle Warrior commander, with guaranteed A1H2.

Strategies

 * Scales
 * Undead Hordes
 * Darkness