Dom III sitll gets some parental attention

[Bananadine]

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!

[Sir_Dr_D]

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.

[Psycho]

Originally Posted by Sir_Dr_D

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.

I don't need to defeat you to make you spend blood slaves.

Originally Posted by Sir_Dr_D

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.

I don't find this to be the case, but maybe that's because I prefer smaller maps (8-12 players).

[Sombre]

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.

[Bananadine]

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?

[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.

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.

[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?

[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.

[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.