Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I like Sombre's idea better actually, now that I understand it. Having the blood slave income sucked into the lab (just like gems go from sites to the lab) sounds like an awesome plan.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Not just blood slaves. Any time any sort of gem is auto produced , from clams or what not, they should by auto deposited in the lab. This is a simple thing to implement that would improve the game immensly.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

The problem is that this makes blood-hunting much safer - you cannot lose harvested blood slaves due to someone attacking your province on that turn. So, in order not to break current mechanics, it would need to be done after the battles phase.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

The amount of blood slaves that you make on a particual turn, cannot make that much difference to the game as a whole. If one of your blood income provinces gets invaded, you have bigger concerns then just the slaves that would have been lost that turn. Coding the game so that it remebers where and and how many blood slaves were generated that turn, and then deposting them in the lab at the end of the turn would be harder to implement. It is far easier to just have the slaves be deposited into the lab to begin with.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I disagree. I am opposed to all these propositions about changing blood hunting, but if they are done in such a way so as not to disturb the current mechanics, then I don't mind. It is very important to be able to raid your opponent and deny him blood slave income. Blood is too powerful as it is.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Then would a better solution be to not have any gems and slaves generated until towards the end of the turn processing, at about the same time as buildings are built? If you are attacked and defeated that round, you shouldn't be able to have collected blood slaves after all.

But the way the game is set up now it is a major chore to play blood nations. The turns are more work then fun. Having slaves autodeposited in the lab would make all the differnce.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I don't need to defeat you to make you spend blood slaves.

I don't find this to be the case, but maybe that's because I prefer smaller maps (8-12 players).

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I don't think the change would 'break' anything currently in the game. Blood hunters can already be scripted to avoid using up their blood slaves while the pd handles your raider. If your raider can beat the PD then then hey you've disrupted their blood hunting anyway.

It would be a small boost in strength to blood, but it's only ever going to amount to an income of 1 turn. That's really a drop in the ocean.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

What exactly is the most painful thing about slave hunting? Surely something can be done about it. Is it the transferal of slaves from the hunters to the scouts who will take the slaves to labs? That's the only blood-hunting operation that's ever been painful for me, but I haven't yet made a really big slave economy so I don't know. I don't mind pressing Z to drop off slaves when there's a local lab, and I don't mind moving scouts back and forth between slave-hunting provinces and non-local labs.

I think an external program capable of automatically controlling the mouse could easily be made to reduce that from a ~20-click operation per province to a 2-click operation per province. It would just have to be told where the clickable elements were in the gem-transferal UI, within the boundaries of your Dominions window. You'd bring up the details for the commander who'd hold the slaves (one click) and tell the program to give all slaves to that commander (a second click, or keypress). I think it could do the rest automatically, without knowing anything about what it was really doing, as long as there weren't too many commanders in the province.

Drawbacks: I imagine the program entering one or two hundred artificial mouse clicks during this operation, and that might be too slow--I've never written a program that did such a thing. Also you'd still have to move the scouts around.

Would this help a lot? Or is the big problem elsewhere in the blood-hunting process?

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

The problem is with moving the scout to the province, moving the slaves to the scout then moving the scout back to a lab. Emptying the scout is a matter of hovering it and pressing ctrl-z, which is a lot quicker, but even taking out the moving one slave one click at a time from each individual hunter to the scout, you're still talking the micro of recruiting scouts every turn, moving them every turn, sucking up blood slaves and depositing blood slaves every turn. Not even remotely fun.

I've heard a couple people talking about mouse macros to do the work for you. Ok, show me. I'd love to know how to do that, but you'll have to show me it actually working before I'll even try, because I'm highly dubious it's as easy as all that.

It's definitely not reasonable to expect people to build a lab in every blood hunt province. Maybe in single player I guess.