Dom III sitll gets some parental attention

[Bananadine]

Originally Posted by Sombre

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.

But moving the individual slaves is the part that takes the most work, isn't it? Maybe not.

Originally Posted by Sombre

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.

Yeah, that's what I was saying to Gandalf Parker. I wouldn't want to make a macro just for my own use. That would be a small chunk of work done for the purpose of saving a small chunk of work.

But I claim it would be easy for one skilled programmer to make a program that would let anybody else (possibly only on the same operating system) move slaves in the way I described. That would be a medium-sized chunk of work done for the purpose of saving a large chunk of work (the latter spread over multiple people).

I'm not proposing to attempt this myself, because I don't have a lot of time for such things. But I'm trying to find out whether it would be very helpful, so as to determine whether I should spontaneously try it if I happen to find the time. In that case some other interested observer might also want to try it (they probably wouldn't but who knows).

So, would it be very helpful?

[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.

[Gandalf Parker]

You want to deliver searched blood slaves to the lab from provinces with no lab?
I dont see that happening.

As to the macro thing that would be really hard for what you want. At most, a macro can make Ctrl-z into a single keypress for all gatherers at labs as far as a macro that can be used in every game you play.

A macro could be done for what you describe of course. But it would have to be recorded for every new game and those units. A single-key macro can be created for anything you can do manually. The game should not be running in a small window. The macro would have to start with hitting the HOME (to center the map on your capital) then moving the mouse to a single-pixel starting place such as the far upper-left corner of the monitor screen. At that point all actions of mouse move or keypress would be recordable and able to play back the same way every time so you woul take whatever actions you normally do to go to the province (using # and the province number is fast), then to the commanders in question and do their actions. It probably would have to be separate keypresses for "drop at lab and go to gatherer" and for "collect from gatherer and return to lab" altho it could do multiples of each. And it would be messed up easily by having a new commander in the provinces involved.

WOW even I would have a headache with that. I cant see where it would be worthwhile for gatherers that are more than 1 move from a lab, or maybe 2 moves with a relay. Obviously more useful for nations such as Pangaea and Caelum. And only then on really large maps with really old games where automating the back provinces might be worthwhile. But it would be kinda fun to watch such a macro carry out the full mission really really fast on the screen.

[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.

[Tollund]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

You want to deliver searched blood slaves to the lab from provinces with no lab?
I dont see that happening.

Then the game should also be changed so that all gems must be collected by a commander so that no nation has a micro advantage over any other.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

You want to deliver searched blood slaves to the lab from provinces with no lab?
I dont see that happening.

Neither do I, but I don't know why you mention the 'no lab' part of it. What difference does that make? The idea was just for blood slaves to work the same way as gems - they are just added to your vault unless you specifically take them out. There's no logical problem there.

It does change the way the game would work and it isn't going to be implemented (because the devs don't like to make changes like that in patches) but it doesn't seem like a bad solution to the micro.

A key which pooled commander held slaves within a province to the specified commander would also be very helpful, but it's more like treating the worst symptom rather than treating the cause. You'd still be ferrying scouts around, though it would be far less of a headache.

[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.

[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.

[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.