Wishlist: Pool anywhere blood slaves.

[Sombre]

I was going to say that it's almost counter productive to try and 'further' a seemingly simple change or add features or ideas to improve on it,...

But then I remembered there's no chance of the initial idea being implemented anyway :]

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by thejeff

I am curious about how you do this in dominions though. I get how the programs work, but I have difficulty seeing how you apply them to dominions. Particularly the mouse actions, since that would seem to require everything to be in exactly the same positions every time.
To go back to the original topic, how would you automate the task of collecting blood slaves from your blood provinces to scouts and moving them to the nearest labs? Could you do this off one hotkey? Or one per province?

I find it best to use keypresses whenever possible.
For necessary mouse commands I find it helpful to always begin the macro with a move as far as possible to one of the screen corners. That tends to zero-out the start position so that the macro doesnt try to act from wherever the mouse happens to be sitting.

As for the Z command, how about #1-a-Z-#2-a-Z-#3-a-Z-#4-a-Z-
I know it seems nuts to go thru every province even the ones you dont own and A/Shft-Z in each one, but it goes fast on most computers. And we are talking about late game MM so the larger the map the more its worth the wait. Actually its kindof fun to watch macros speeding thru the actions.

BTW I prefer AutoHotKey

[thejeff]

I suppose that would work for the mouse, though it does rely on every thing else remaining in the same relative position: selecting a commander if a new one in the province has moved him down the list, for example.

I agree that keys are far better. I could probably do more with keys than I do, even manually.

For the blood example, yours would work I assume, though it would be simple just to pool blood slaves from the lab menu.
You could limit it to your hunting provinces, which would leave sacrifices and mages elsewhere their slaves, so that would be better than pooling. You'd still have issues sacrificing at the hunting provinces and with blood mages going out to battle from there. The real problem is that you've already built a lab at each province, in some cases just to make the micro less. I was imagining a macro that would transfer the slaves from the hunters to a scout in the province and set him to move to a nearby lab. Probably too much to ask. I might try one just to click 30 times to transfer slaves though.

That's my general problem with the macro solutions though. There isn't enough really rote repetition to justify it for me. Everything is just enough variation of what I did the turn before to break the macros. Of course, I don't play on 1000+ province maps, which may simplify things.
The real micro for me is in the slightly more complex but still not interesting tasks: A macro that found the x lowest research fire mages, assigned them hammers and had them forge lanterns would be heaven, along with another automatically assigned any new lanterns to researchers in castles somewhere.

[Gandalf Parker]

Yeah after thinking about it I realized it didnt have to hit every province like some of my macros. But a macro list like I gave could easily be edited to only include the labs you want. Something like #-111-a-Z-#-223-a-Z-#-450-a-Z-#-495-a-Z-

As to the forging thing could make one to assign it to every mage in a province if you wanted to group your low fire mages together. Then just go to the labs involved and hit the key. Or edit it to do a # on the lab province then assign them all.

[Jarkko]

There are several programs that can do (for collecting the bloodslaves, that is) what Gandalf suggest above, and also keyboards (such as Logitech G15). However, they really are not worth it (in my opinion at least) for e-mail games, where you do your turns relatively seldomly. Bur for SP games and direct IP hosted MP games they shouldn't be such a hassle (especially if it is easy to add in lines for new provinces).