Dom III sitll gets some parental attention

[Bananadine]

And actually, the reason why I keep talking about making a program from scratch, rather than using some existing macro-recording program, is that I thought the program would need to be at least a little bit smart in a Dominions-specific way, in order to work well for multiple people without much manual configuration by each person. But it may be that macro-recording programs would be good enough after all... it depends partly on how much the Dominions UI layout varies from one computer to another.

I guess I will look into macro-recording programs, then. That wouldn't take a lot of time.

[Bananadine]

Sombre, quite reasonably, would like slave movement between provinces to be automatic. But I'm just talking about one universally effective command that would collect slaves on one scout within one province. I don't want to mess with map-level movement, and I sure don't want the player to have to specially configure the macro even as often as once per game!

I just played with AutoHotKey and although the Dominions developers didn't make it easy, with their centered, variable-sized menus, I think I could probably use that tool to make a single-province slave-collecting script that would consistently work across many different games on my personal, Windows-running computer. Dunno whether I could make one that would work on many people's Windows-running computers. Also I was just making a quick prototype so I didn't bother looking for platform-independent macro-running programs for the Linux folks etc.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Bananadine

Sombre, quite reasonably, would like slave movement between provinces to be automatic.

I guess that's one way to put it, another would be:

"Sombre would like hunted blood slaves to be treated like gem income from sites"

Does anyone think of gems or gold as automatically moving between provinces? Your 'vault' of gold, gems, items etc isn't located in a province, it's just your wealth. You need a lab to withdraw gems, but you don't to deposit them.

[Gandalf Parker]

Gems come from magic sites, and slaves from magic sites are treated the same.
Since blood hunting is a commander action, it goes into the commanders ownership.
I guess you could create a magic site that allows gem collecting by assigning a commander to enter the site.

The comparison with gems came up later. The initial image I had was the problem of having blood commanders in a province that didnt have blood slaves for personal use. Collection was all or nothing. Keeping just some on the commanders was quite abit of micromanagement.

I hadnt actually considered the other option. Generally I just do blood collecting at labs.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

The initial image I had was the problem of having blood commanders in a province that didnt have blood slaves for personal use. Collection was all or nothing. Keeping just some on the commanders was quite abit of micromanagement.

You think assigning slaves to hunters in the very rare cases where you would actually want hunters to cast blood spells against raiders would be more micro than the current system of a bajillion clicks using scouts to ferry?

Labs where you blood hunt is fine if you're willing to have a huge in game disadvantage to avoid micro. I personally don't think mindless micro should be of such benefit in the game. It's not really an issue in SP though, where the lab in every hunting province idea is reasonable.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Sombre

You think assigning slaves to hunters in the very rare cases where you would actually want hunters to cast blood spells against raiders would be more micro than the current system of a bajillion clicks using scouts to ferry?

I just didnt realize anyone was doing that. The nations I play with tend to use blood as a secondary. I guess with nations that rely primarily on blood such extensive hunting in every province would logical.

Labs where you blood hunt is fine if you're willing to have a huge in game disadvantage to avoid micro. I personally don't think mindless micro should be of such benefit in the game. It's not really an issue in SP though, where the lab in every hunting province idea is reasonable.

Exactly. In my games labs tend to popup on their own often enough. Such provinces often have no other feature going for them so turning them into blood slave factories makes sense. But small maps with many players would make gathering a bigger rush-item I guess.

[Sir_Dr_D]

[quote=Sombre;726889]

Originally Posted by Bananadine

I guess that's one way to put it, another would be:

"Sombre would like hunted blood slaves to be treated like gem income from sites"

I agree with this as well.

[Bananadine]

I'm with you Sombre, I am indeed speculating about a treatment for the worst symptom of the problem! And I agree that a person with infinite freedom to change the game's rules might do better to make slaves go right to the lab in the way you describe, than to make it easier for a person to collect them in the game's current style.

"far less of a headache" sounds good to me, and these macro-scripty-hotkey-programs are more powerful than I thought they would be. I think I will make a single-province slave-collecting script that works as well as possible for me, and then talk about it in a new thread. Maybe it'll be good enough for other people to use, maybe not.

[Bananadine]

Originally Posted by Bananadine

I think I will make a single-province slave-collecting script that works as well as possible for me, and then talk about it in a new thread. Maybe it'll be good enough for other people to use, maybe not.

Okay, I made the script. It's neat. It has certain limitations but it seems to basically work. It is quieter than a mouse!

[Dimaz]

Don't see any problem with current blood hunt system, since ferrying slaves from 20+ hunting provs takes about 1/10 of the time needed to think what to actually do in current turn and these 2 tasks can be accomplished simultaneously.