Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

From progress page:

4th january 2010
* Fixed crash during turn generation.
* Eliminated nations are now also shown in the graphs.

Dom III is content but more loving couldn't hurt :)

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Aww :]

I quite like that second point too. Nice idea!

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Oh cool, JK found my bug already :D I'm really curious as to what exactly was causing the problem, because that was a very non-standard dominions crash. Oh well, better keep that game around and see if it works post-patch.

Eliminated nations still being shown on the graphs is an excellent change. Helps keep the history of the game alive.



Thanks JK!

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Wow thats fantastic.
And after all my work to write scripts maintaining the games history for my AI tests. :(
Im glad I didnt put alot of time into jpg graphs.

But Id much rather have it this way. Thanks Johan.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I've missed the eliminated nations graphs ever since Dom2. Thank you, Johan! :D

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I'll chip in here to wish for my most wanted fix: Darkness toggled properly in caves and cave cities.

Edit: and yeah, graph for dead nations is super great!

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I think that's more or less everyone's most wanted fix.

I'd certainly love it.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Everyone? Wow, I must have missed those chats. That wasnt even on my top 10. I guess I should consider it for abit.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Yes I clearly meant literally everyone. That's the only possible explanation. And 'more or less' means exactly. And 'I think' means objectively verified fact.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Sorry, didnt mean to make it seem personal. I just was surprised it was considered so highly.

The next Dom2 missing thing Id like to see returned is scenarios.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Great. Showing graphs for dead nations is a big plus indeed.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

This forum gone gangsta!

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I know this isn't the place, but I want to add weight to the idea that caves not being dark is broken.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

As long as we're getting some love from the devs, can we please have a message interface that lets us review and alter sent messages? The lack of this feature is really starting to annoy me.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I think that's pretty unlikely to be added.

I don't think there have been any GUI changes since release have there?

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Particularly since this would be another "already in there but not as friendly as Id like" requests. You can delete ALL your messages and start over. And you can restart your turn from scratch. So viewing/editing messages would be a fair amount of adding for what is more improvment in the gui than it is a major problem fix.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

That's a pretty big "Not as friendly as I'd like."

Equivalent to saying all the functionality of a word processor is "already in there but not as friendly as Id like" in a typewriter since you can always throw away the sheet of paper and start again.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

... That does not provide the same functionality.

Say I send 15 messages and want to confirm that I successfully clicked the right destination nation for all of them. I can delete them all and do it again, but maybe I made a mistake that time. Still no way to confirm. Repeat ad nauseum, still no way to know if you entered all your messages totally error free.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Amnesia would help with that.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I'm not sure memory hacking by a third party is an acceptable alternative. I mean, it is the only option now, but that should be depressing rather than exciting.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

All I'm saying is that it's an option. It's a frustrating option, but a workable one at least.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

It seems like Dominions III is getting even more parental attention. Here is the latest items added to the progress report.

15th january 2010
* Spell AI improved regarding when to cast Arrow Fend, Gift of Flight, Legions of Steel.
* Description changed for Maggots to better correspond with its true effect.
* Djinn is now a unique monster.
* Could get some kind of mine even though all site slots were full, fixed.
* increased maximum number of messages a player can send on a given turn.


It looks like that messages issue has now been fixed.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

That list is really nice. Hurray IW :)

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Huzzah!

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Raising the message limit will only make the problem occur less. But, that is probably much easier than changing the interface to stop allowing messages when it hits the limit or not throw away items/gold that appear in messages over the limit. Appreciative of the attention Johan. Thanks.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

These are awesome changes. I also would like to throw in fifty more ideas right here but I think that would not be very nice. :) Oh how I wish I could hack the interface code myself, I would stick in so many nice tweaks and hotkeys....

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Like what? (keeping in mind that this is a Linux game that is ported to Win and Mac so you would need to avoid things that are win or mac only) :)

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Probably just stuff that's been suggested. I generally find the interface to be just friendly enough that it doesn't get in my way, but there are a few picky little actions I have to do a LOT that I would like to be a bit friendlier than that. I don't care how toxically tangled the code is; I bet it would only take a few hacked-in tweaks by a skilled, careful programmer to safely turn the script editor for commanders into a real editor that'd let you change any of the commander's five spells without messing up the others. ...Unless there's already some secret way to do that that I don't know about!

Also, you know, automatic manipulations of items and gems--putting a worn item into the lab with one click, and fully stripping a commander via hotkey/menu choice without first bringing up that commander's details... a way to move an item from one commander's slot to another commander's slot just by choosing the second slot and the item, and without touching the first commander... plus whatever other things, probably not literally fifty but surely a lot, that I'd inevitably think of while I was in there. I can't imagine that there isn't still room for a lot of nice, superficial features like these to be crammed in around the edges pretty easily. Supposing it's still reasonably easy to edit the code and recompile the program in the first place, which I guess it must be if they're still making patches at all.

I know you've advocated adding some shortcuts like these via external tools, but the operations I want to optimize are just easy enough for me as they are that learning to use said external tools has seemed harder than living with the game in its present state. Maybe I'll still try it though.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

I know one! a key similar to Shift-Z for slaves, but for gems

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Making blood hunts automatically drop slaves right into the vault,...

And so on. But really I just want the devs to do whatever they enjoy doing re: dom3.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

That one is absolutely needed to make blood nations have less insane micromanagement. For the cost of two scouts and about a minute per blood hunting province you currently get exactly the same thing. Just make the slaves get deposited at the beginning of each turn. It would also make ensuring that Mictlan priests had slaves less of a nightmare.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Id still rather see the promised scenarios feature restored that Dom2 had and Dom3 broke.
That would provide a far extended life to this game which would be a nice parting shot prior to unveiling the new game.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Yeah it's cool enough that they're doing something to make the game better. That is one reason why my fantasy was of fixing the problems myself. :)

How did that feature work?

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

So what happens to the slaves I've got on my blood-hunting mage that I want him to cast Leech, or Life for a Life with, to defend my province from raiders?

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

If the slaves were already in his inventory, nothing, since the idea is for the slaves from bloodhunts to go directly to the lab, not go to the hunter then be pooled to the lab.

The case where you needed to blood hunt to get slaves to cast scripted spells to defend yourself the very turn you hunted them,.. well that's a marginal case and would be sacrificed in the name of massively reducing blood micro and saving players hours and hours of time.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Pretty much like most games. You could create a playable map that sets all the game variables including the opponents. It would allow every map to have a variations file that pretty much makes it a game just to play the map.

For Dom2 I had a few even though the options were much less than Dom3 would have allowed.
http://www.dom3minions.com/~minion/Indeps.shtml
http://www.dom3minions.com/~minion/WEvsTHEM.shtml
Ive played Dom3 versions of both of them which are lots of fun in Dom3. They can be setup (with some headaches) on servers for multiplay, but there is no way to package it for download and play without alot of headaches.

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Come now people, it wouldn't be a clean job if it changed the game mechanics. I'm sure it'd be fine for the slaves to go into the lab when you pressed one button one time per turn, rather than quietly before you ever saw them--so long as it was the same slaves being moved in either case. Something approximately that simple could surely be worked out. What do the details matter, as long as the hypothetical hacker lacks the pearls he needs to stealthily teleport into the developer's home at 3 AM!

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Well it's already a game to play a game on a map. But you're saying it'd be a game that the map creator had an extraordinary amount of control over? Because they would have picked victory conditions and research speed and AI nations and AI pretenders etc. (Although I guess some of those things can already be set in a map?)

Re: Dom III sitll gets some parental attention
 

Have them be deposited at the very end of turn processing, after all battles are completed. That would be a better point I think.

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.