how do you not get wiped by the blessed dread on turn 7

I'm playing on normal/normal, as it is my first time with SFO, and the Blessed Dread and I have been best pals since turn 2 (same thing with the Awakened). We were both at war with the southern guardians (the green lizardmen faction?). I let Lokhir take their last settlement (which doesn't belong to my starting province), and from there he kept offering me treaties. He dealt with Tenehuanin and keeps Khalida at bay (though she's friendly with me, for some reason).

The real deal early on were the nearby dwarf factions. But I ambushed Thorek a couple times and the Spine of Sotek dwarfs got ganged-up by pretty much everyone. Gor-Rok was wiped out by two successive plagues before he could gather many unbreakable sauruses, and from there it was a cakewalk.

As for the pox samples, I don't know why, but I barely got any with my first two plague priests, but now I get like 40 or 50 everytime I start an epidemic. I'm almost done with the pestilens tech tree. Skrolk has made lord Nurglitch proud-content, yes-yes.

Originally posted by Meneldil:

I'm playing Skrolk, on Vortex. I just have no idea on how to reliably collect pox samples.

I'm churning out plague priests every ten turns, I try to infect nearby AI settlements, have my armies roam around to get infected. When one does get infected, I try to bring it back home to infect my own settlements (almost never works). I try to conquer infected settlements, etc.

But it's just so unreliable. If there weren't the -1 sample per turn, I could somewhat progress in the Pestilens tech tree, but after my third plague priest, I only just unlocked my 2nd tech (one that cost only 5 samples).

I don't see any way to get samples other than using plague priests. Am I missing something obvious? Cause at that rate, I will have only unlocked a handful of techs by the time I finish my campaign.

The wardens of the living pools - keep them alive but put an undercity below them, you can make a great plague cauldron in it to createa permanent plague right at the centre of lustria, which should pretty frequently spread back into itza/oxyl - after doing that I actually founc it pretty hard to drop below 20~ pox samples at any point, even when actively doing the plague research