Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

The "Tip of the Turn" sometimes tells me that certain stats make units slightly better at certain things. For example:

Patrolling works better if the units have higher Precision and AP.

Pillaging works better if the units are large, have Fear and high AP.

Sieging works better if the units have high Strength or if they can Fly.


So I was wondering if there were more subtle things that applied to Blood Hunting other than just Douse Bonuses. I'd imagine that Precision and AP would help so the hunters can catch the little vixens that try to get away. Perhaps blood hunters receive a small penalty from Fear as fathers work harder to hide their daughters from the fearsome one?

Also, if it's not much trouble, maybe include in the next patch an actual Icon for Douse Bonus? It'd be nice to know where most blood mages stand in terms of hunting as well as just how much better having a Dousing Rod makes them.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

Blood magic helps... alot.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

I guess I forgot to mention I knew that, sorry. I'm saying it now though. I'm looking for stuff other than Douse Bonus or Blood Magic, if there are any

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

There's nothing else. It's all on page 69. The only things affecting blood hunt success are:

* level check (including rod)
* province pop check
* unrest check
* slave count roll, on success

Oh, and a Fountain of Blood gets a bonus too.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

This it totally anecdotal, but it seemed to me in one game that Sauromatia's B1 Warrior Sorceresses were much better than average at blood hunting (WSes are mounted, with I think 16AP).

So perhaps being mounted, or indeed, just having high AP, does help?

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

I doubt that being mounted works, after all, you have to go from hut to hut and check those blood virgins... for virginity :-) and naturally, you can't do that while mounted.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

It'd be quicker to get between huts though.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

Naturally. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

>and naturally, you can't do that while mounted.

Sure ya can!!! It's the most reliable method!!!!!

8^)

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

Anything involving the word "virgin" and "mounted" soon get out of hand. It is the way of things.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

My problem with this answer (VFB one, not the jokes http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif )is that if you read the unit description you can understand that there is a hidden bonus somewhere. After reading Mictlan priest description at least I think, well maybe they have a bonus. Some other descriptions point to those Maybes and as there is nowhere to find this information... It is like the assasin, heretic and similar icons, everything was on the description. So, why not on this too?

Redoing starshine question: has anyone done some tests?

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

There is a blood hunt bonus, according to Edi's database. The only unit that appears to have it is the Fountain of Blood.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

I noticed the same thing. I was really impressed with their ability to bloodhunt when compared to my Mictlan priests. I am thinking maybe blood hunters are affected by some of the same rules as patrollers.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

If it is that's the first I've heard of it. It seems more likely that those particular amazons have an intrinsic douse bonus. Those are possible to mod in after all, so they probably occur in the game for a handful of units (Blood fountain being one apparently).

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

According to Edi's DB, the Blood Fountain is the only one.

I know, it's because they are ladies! The villagers think oh, it's safe to show off our lovely virgins around her ... and then *surprise*! The WS chucks 'em all on the back of the lizard and off she goes.

Sorry enough silliness. More seriously, Karlem and Foodstamp, are you thinking you're seeing a bonus with the WS naked, or with a rod? It's pretty easy to set up a test.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

In my comparison both had rods. I played a game with LA Mictlan towards the end of the week, and played Sauromatia to test some of Baalz's strategy last night. Before I read Karlem's post I was already pretty annoyed that my amazons seemed to be better blood hunters.

Without exception, the blood hunters I had for Sauromatia were Nature 1/Blood 1 with dousing rods. For mictlan it was the standard 60 gold priest with dousing rods.

In the game with Sauromatia, one blood hunter would reel in a consistent catch of around 8ish. My Mictlan guys would have completely dry months, but could pull in as many as the low teens on other turns. This variance never happened one time in my Sauromatia game, which led me to think that maybe they were seeing the same variance, and then the amazon AP kicked in to save them from a dry catch.

Something else important to note is that I did not hunt in nearly as many provinces with the amazons and the game ended up being a lot shorter so they did not hunt as many times as my mictlan priests. That leaves plenty of room for chance, but it was noticeable enough that I think it would be worth testing.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

If I remember correctly, and I'm probably not (:D), another effect on Blood Hunting is the site frequency setting. I think this was done to balance gem production against blood hunting. I may be completely incorrect, but if that is acting like a scaling factor, this could be important. Of course, if this is EA Mictlan and Sauromatia, on base settings, then the setting would be the same.

I'm assuming population in all provinces was over 5k and the unrest was kept down. On the other hand, is it possible Luck Scale was having an effect? Or Magic Scale?

I'm willing, when I have the time, to set up a neutral test case for this and run with it.

Wyatt

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

Hmmmm, I remember when I wrote the bloodhunting guide I dug through the dom2 forums for the formulas and there was no mention of AP, luck, etc effecting it. Working from dusty memory but I think it was something like each of these is checked to see if the blood hunt fails, here's the percent chance of failure:

100 - blood level of hunter * 40
unrest/200
100 - population/5000

If blood slaves found, number of slaves captured is one open ended d6 roll plus blood level of hunter.

Obviously this may have changed (or not been correct in the first place), and it doesn't take into account blood hunting bonus for the blood fountain (no idea how that works). So, seems like when I ran the numbers 3 b1 mages with rods (b2 for the sake of blood hunting) in a 5k+ province with no unrest should average 16 slaves or so, with a lot of variation.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

That was my understanding, roughly, of the formulae involved as well, but I seem to remember (or it may have just been a thought I had that would be cool and I convinced myself it had made it in the game) that, to balance spectacularly low site settings, blood hunting would be affected by the site setting parameter of the game.

Oh, well, I'll test that, too, at some point.

Wyatt

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

I'm 90% sure this topic came up before about magic site frequency altering blood hunting. KO said it was news to him and I think we concluded it wasn't the case.

The blood hunting douse bonus that the Blood fountain has adds levels to blood magic for the purpose of hunting only. I don't know hot big a bonus it is, but when you add the #douse bonus in modding, you can choose the strength. 1 is used in a few mods to make lvl1 blood guys who can hunt as if they were lvl2, lvl3 if they have the dousing rod. I would guess the bonus on the fountain is 1 or 2, but that's just a stab in the dark.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

Whether or not it actually works, I'm almost positive it was on the progress page back during beta.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

Alright, then. I guess it was something I convinced myself of. I will still test it to see if it was somehow added in.

As for the test involved, I'm thinking, 10 B Bloodhunters with Dowsing Rods, 2 per province, for 30 turns? That would give us:

300 hunts
Almost certainly zero unrest for all the hunting.
20% chance of a hunt failing completely.
d6(oe)+2 Slaves per success.

That would suggest 240d6(oe)+480 Slaves total... hmm... might have to reduce the total number of hunts and increase the iterations.

So... 50 Hunts would be 40d6(oe)+80 Slaves, which wouldn't overflow and have to stocked somewhere. Also only 5 turns once it is set up (and I could back up the game to run each test). 10-20 iterations would be nearly trivial to run at that point, and give pretty good average pull/hunt.

Also plan to have it be the only two nations in the game, with Order3/Dom10 Awake/Dormant Pretender so that I can, hopefully, minimize random events, or is this considered necessary?

Any input on checking this?

Wyatt