Revamped blood collection?

[Ballbarian]

A small "Lock" icon/toggle/checkbox next to the gem box on commanders would help tremendously. Simply check the lock and gems/slaves of the given commander are ignored when pooling. Maybe in a future patch?

[NTJedi]

Ballbarian said:
A small "Lock" icon/toggle/checkbox next to the gem box on commanders would help tremendously. Simply check the lock and gems/slaves of the given commander are ignored when pooling. Maybe in a future patch?

I agree... this is especially helpful for large maps.
In dominions_2 I usually pool earth, fire, astral and blood gems since an item or action brings them into the inventory of commanders. Thus I have to pool gems first and then redistribute gems on the front lines which takes a good chunk of time on the large maps.

[Tyrian]

Very good idea. With a special command like the lock, we should give order to a general to resupply his gems automatically when he is in a province with a laboratory.

[BigJMoney]

Ack! Consolidating messages like this has made blood collection worse! Did nobody realize that? Before, I could click M for messages, then "go to commander" for each commander that collected blood slaves. Now, I can't even do that. The microing for blood hunting has just been exasperated, lol. I have to wonder if anyone developing/testing plays Mictlan... EVER.

Well, looking on the bright side, I'll hope that one day this _will_ get taken care of. To be honest, I'd rather Mictlan not even exist than this. At least there are a million other nations for me to play that don't have this issue.

=$= Big J Money =$=

[JaydedOne]

*smile* Let's not get too hyperbolic there, J. But I agree that it's a huge pain to, as a Mictlan player, take all of those collected slaves, pool them, and then have to redistribute to your sacrificing folks.

A lock toggle would be HUGELY helpful. If there's any way we can implement that in a patch, that'd be the singlemost helpful thing for getting me to play blood nations in larger multi-player games. Otherwise, the monotony of the management KILLS me.

[Graeme Dice]

JaydedOne said:
*smile* Let's not get too hyperbolic there, J. But I agree that it's a huge pain to, as a Mictlan player, take all of those collected slaves, pool them, and then have to redistribute to your sacrificing folks.

Except that you don't. You only collect slaves from those priests that are hunting by pressing 'Z' when their control grop is selected, and never actually use the pool slaves option.

A lock toggle would be HUGELY helpful.

Yes, it would be greatly appreciated.

If there's any way we can implement that in a patch, that'd be the singlemost helpful thing for getting me to play blood nations in larger multi-player games. Otherwise, the monotony of the management KILLS me.

Mictlan is the only nation that ever wants to put blood slaves on its commanders. (Besides the one or two times per game that you might give a demonbred a couple of slaves to cast hellfire.) Every other nation can simply pool slaves.

[BigJMoney]

Well, I guess I use an unorthodox strategy. No wonder people talk about running out of money with Mictlan. I don't use labs. What I do is place a few priests in a province, and I manually go around and select the ones that are hunting and give the gems to the ones who are sacrificing. And before you say it, this method is not nearly as inefficient a you'd think. I very rarely get stuck with turns where I end up having to make the sacrificer bloodhunt because his pals came up short. I won't complain about this too much, but I'm sure as heck not going to play like this any more. Okay, I won't jump the gun. For all I know, you can still click "go to commander" and it will at least take you to the province. If I'm lucky, it will even select all the commanders. That's just as good.

Come to think of it...how could anyone start bloodhunting from the beginning of the game if it required labs AND temples in every province! My unorthodox method seems pretty intuitive to me. No wonder everyone scoffed at me when I said Mictlan was a strong dominion spreading nation (though I'm finding I like Vanheim better anyway).

Still, thanks for the tip Graeme for making it easier once a lab is up.

=$=

[Graeme Dice]

BigJMoney said:
Come to think of it...how could anyone start bloodhunting from the beginning of the game if it required labs AND temples in every province!

You don't need a temple in every province when you first start, and a lab is the same cost as 10 jaguar warriors.

[NTJedi]

Graeme Dice said:
Mictlan is the only nation that ever wants to put blood slaves on its commanders.

That's not correct since blood slaves have uses for many nation commanders. Blood slaves work great for fully decked out assassins which carry an ethereal bow or a wand of incinerate. The target enemy has been known to spend a turn killing one or two blood slaves thus allowing any equipped items an extra turn in killing the enemy.
Blood slaves for commanders in battle also work great for spells such as rush of strength, hellbind heart, summon imps and so on.
Also for the few special commanders which need guards adding blood slaves makes them also more difficult to kill.

[Graeme Dice]

NTJedi said:
That's not correct since blood slaves have uses for many nation commanders. Blood slaves work great for fully decked out assassins which carry an ethereal bow or a wand of incinerate. The target enemy has been known to spend a turn killing one or two blood slaves thus allowing any equipped items an extra turn in killing the enemy.

Ok, that's another use, but it's also one that's much less work to manage than having to go and individually put slaves on all of your sacrificing priests as Mictlan.

Blood slaves for commanders in battle also work great for spells such as rush of strength, hellbind heart, summon imps and so on. Also for the few special commanders which need guards adding blood slaves makes them also more difficult to kill.

Spending 7 slaves to get a single devil would probably make them even harder to kill.