Revamped blood collection?

[JaydedOne]

Now that the game's in release, can someone talk about how revamped blood collection works? I've rarely ever played blood nations because of the micromanagement and gave it a go last night. It wasn't so bad, but one thing I hated was that pooling virgins meant that you had to manually reassign virgins to each sacrificing priest who was in a temple that also had a lab. That's not so bad initially but when you have double-digit temples, it's a headache.

How does it work now?

[okiN]

Has it been revamped? I remember asking but I never got an answer.

[JaydedOne]

One assumes (one PRAYS) that when they say reduced micromanagement, they mean blood as well.

And I seem to recall it being mentioned somewhere in an earlier thread as seeing a revamp.

[Endoperez]

I haven't heard of that change. I haven't checked blood nations yet, though. I'll test quickly.

One way micromanagement was reduced is auto-taxation. It can be turned on/off very easily. I doubt it anticipates what unrest the province will have next turn, so it mightn't help much.

[Endoperez]

Hasn't changed. I noticed this, though:

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/uploads/451203-temp.jpg

Only one message per province.

[Tyrian]

In my opinion, this problem make playing Mictlan really hard on large map. When you have to give blood slave to 30 priest(after a great use of virgin), 2 times... Argl...

[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]

BigJMoney said:
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.



I assume that they do, since I can't imagine that anyone would want the horrible micromanagement that you just described. The way you blood hunt with Mictlan is you take a province, put a lab and three priests with dousing rods in it. You set these three priests up as a control group. You then go around between the three or four provinces that are set up for blood hunting, click on the priest groups and press 'Z'.

[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. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif 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.

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[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.

[BigJMoney]

You don't need it, but the way I play is to get them ASAP. One thing I'm learning abut dominion is that it's many times easier to spread early than later when it has to counter enemy dominion. I usually play Luck3 and Order3 with Mictlan, so affording one temple on a regular basis is no probemo! I also reread your post and noticed that you said "the three of four provinces" with blood hunters. Another thing I do differently is to have a few hunters in almost every province, because I've been worried that too many hunters and patrollers will deplete population in the long run, but I guess one can just find another three or four and move on. I'll try the fewer designated hunting provinces with more hunters option some time and compare the results. It would certainly cut down on micro.

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/threads/images/Graemlins/PointRight.gif Actually, this brings up a pertinent question which I don't know has been asked before. Do the results (ie. increased unrest) of a single blood hunt take place in sequential order as the hunts themselves takes place? If they do, having more than two hunters in a province is inefficient, because when priest1 finds bloodslaves, he has increased unrest for priest2+ to have to hunt in, decreasing their chances.

[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.

[Graeme Dice]

BigJMoney said:
I also reread your post and noticed that you said "the three of four provinces" with blood hunters. Another thing I do differently is to have a few hunters in almost every province, because I've been worried that too many hunters and patrollers will deplete population in the long run, but I guess one can just find another three or four and move on.



If you put three or perhaps four hunters in a province with a population of about 5000 and a tax rate of 0, you'll probably not even notice the population drop having any effect on your hunting success over the course of a game.


Actually, this brings up a pertinent question which I don't know has been asked before. Do the results (ie. increased unrest) of a single blood hunt take place in sequential order as the hunts themselves takes place? If they do, having more than two hunters in a province is inefficient, because when priest1 finds bloodslaves, he has increased unrest for priest2+ to have to hunt in, decreasing their chances.



Yes, the results do take place sequentially. However, the standard number of priests in a hunting province is three with the tax rate set to 0 as the will almost always succeed despite the unrest. Four works, but every few turns you have to turn the fourth off of hunting and onto researching to let the unrest die off.

[NTJedi]

Graeme Dice said: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.



Yes indeed... hopefully a gem lockbox is added within a patch or sequel.


Graeme Dice said:

NTJedi said: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.



If it's a spell in battle spells such as rush of strength can be more beneficial depending on the current army size. If it's a personal guard for a commander the devil would work better if the commander has undead leadership and fire immunity which is not available for most commanders by default.

[BigJMoney]

I am playing a Vanheim game right now, and I just realized something about Dominions 3 that could potentially be a problem for blood sacrificing nations until the first patch; unless this has already been addressed.

As I understand it, when a priest sacrifices blood slaves, they generate a number of temple checks equal to their priest level. In Dominions 3, all priest levels were dropped by 1 across the board. This means that priests that were level 2 priests in DomII will literally have their number of plopps cut in half in Doms3. For Vanheim that might not be a big deal, but for Mictlan, it is a huge deal. Maybe this was taken into consideration with new game mechanics, though.

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[BigJMoney]

Wow, that's possibly the most legitimate post I've made since I can remember, and I actually didn't create any replies. Just to be thorough, I'm going to start a new topic on this one since it's a tad OT and this thread concluded itself a long time ago, anyway.

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