Helpful Imp

[Bananadine]

A while ago some thread or another about a new version of Dominions 3 devolved into complaints about blood slave management and I decided to try to automate the transfer of blood slaves amongst commanders within one province (since that involves something like twenty clicks per province and struck me as being the most annoying task in blood slave management, and also the easiest one for a computer to perform unsupervised).

Shortly after that I did indeed write a script, for a free automation utility called AutoHotkey, that can perform this task automatically, with one click and one keypress. The script is attached. Instructions for its use are inside it, at the top.

I'm posting about this here because I thought other people might be interested in using such a tool. If this script were completely friendly and fast, then I'd just recommend it to everybody; unfortunately it has some serious limitations:

1. It's run by AutoHotkey, which only works in Windows.
2. It needs to know the locations of some elements of your Dominions 3 UI. I've made it smart enough to handle a game window that's the size I like, which turns out to be about 1030x800, and also smart enough to resize a window to that size if need be. It wouldn't work for windows of other sizes. (But it could conceivably be taught to deal with a window of any size--I just didn't want to go to the trouble, without knowing whether anybody was interested.)
3. It's activated from the unit description view for the commander you want to take all the slaves. But it needs the background to be black, so you can only use the script from the F1 listing, and only with animated backrounds off.
4. It's reasonably fast, but you might still have to wait a few seconds per province. (Still, watching the pointer dance around is much more fun than moving it around yourself.)
5. It probably fails (probably somewhat gracefully) in some unusual situations--for instance, when there are like twenty commanders in your blood-hunting province, but no lab there.
6. It's only been tested on my computer, so it may well fail on somebody else's setup for some reason I haven't anticipated.

All that said, the script is actually a pretty easy thing to use, and I think that it might be able to help a Mictlan (etc.) player a lot. Give it a shot if you're interested, and if you don't mind adapting yourself to its ways (see 2 and 3 above). And if you do, tell me what you think (or how it failed, if it failed--see 6 above).