Blood sacrifice oddity? Thread - Dominions 3: The Awakening

I'm playing EA Mictlan, CBM 1.94.

I have 2 identical H2 priests sacrificing at 2 temples. If I give one 3 (or more) blood slaves he will sacrifice 2. But if I give one guy just 2 slaves, he doesn't sacrifice. It's as though it wants to keep one spare??

Are you sure he isn't saccing two slaves and replenishing?

Err, no, I'm not. (And please don't tell me to count howe many total I had before & after!). Are you saying: if a sacrificer is in a temple + lab, he will auto-help-himself to slaves if necessary? I thought you had to load him up.

If your saccer is in a province with lab and temple he will auto-refill slaves, so you don't have to load him up. The quirk is that this only happen if he has the correct number of slaves. So in your case, a h2 with 3 slaves will go down to 1 slave after saccing while a h2 with 2 slaves will pick up 2 new slaves from the lab.

@Fanto

Which, of course, is precisely the situation I observed! Thank you.

Now then.... When one guy is down to 1 slave, if I leave him saccing (H2), what will happen?

(Oh, and while you're kindly answering, what if I start him off on sacrifice with 0 slaves to start with? )

If he has 1 slave remaining he will sac that slave and then replenish. As far as I know anyone who is saccing will replenish their slaves automatically at the start of the turn if they have none less. (I'm not completely sure if this is before or after sites generate slaves)
If a saccer can't replenish his slaves when he's out he goes back to the default defend command.

You can't give a priest the blood sacrifice command unless he has some slaves. You'll get a popup saying he needs some to get started.

EDIT: Fired up a game and did a quick testing. Sites generate before saccers grab their slaves.

Edited by: Oscarius

Isn't it fun? The quirks of Dominions.

Thanks to all.

To summarise, for anybody reading, if you have temple + lab all you have to is give the Holy Man one blood slave to set the order to sacrifice, then he will keep replenishing & continuing forever.

Which I didn't know!

JonBrave wrote:
To summarise, for anybody reading, if you have temple + lab all you have to is give the Holy Man one blood slave to set the order to sacrifice, then he will keep replenishing & continuing forever.

Yup.
As long as you got enough slaves in the bank and keep your fingers of the pool command everything should work out fine.

Ah, you're saying when you pool that cancels any on-going Sacrifice order, because the guy is now out of slaves, I guess.

It won't cancel any Sacrifice orders.
It will however lose you a turn of saccing unless you go back and manually give them slaves. This sort of ruins the point of having automated saccing.

Edited by: Oscarius

Now hang on, Oscarius. I thought we spent the whole thread saying that if a guy has sacrificing orders then he will help himself to virgins as required (even if he starts with 0 after pooling)??

Now I'm wondering: are you saying that the replenish only happens at start of turn, so that by time you place orders if you move slaves then you've lost the auto-sac-replenish? I guess you must be....

So, for final clarification, if you have an H2 and he starts turn with just 1 slave (e.g. left over from previous turn when he had 3), not only does he not get replenished to 2, but also he will only sacrifice that 1 slave on that turn; then he will replenish to 2 for following turn?

JonBrave wrote: Now hang on, Oscarius. I thought we spent the whole thread saying that if a guy has sacrificing orders then he will help himself to virgins as required (even if he starts with 0 after pooling)??

A saccer will help himself at the start of the turn. If you then remove slaves, either manually or through the pool command, he won't grab any more and won't sac anything this turn. He will however keep his "Blood Sacrifice" order and will grab more slaves at the start of the next turn if there are some left in the bank.

JonBrave wrote:
Now I'm wondering: are you saying that the replenish only happens at start of turn, so that by time you place orders if you move slaves then you've lost the auto-sac-replenish? I guess you must be....

Exactly

JonBrave wrote:
So, for final clarification, if you have an H2 and he starts turn with just 1 slave (e.g. left over from previous turn when he had 3), not only does he not get replenished to 2, but also he will only sacrifice that 1 slave on that turn; then he will replenish to 2 for following turn?

Yes. He will sacrifice that lone slave. At the start of the next turn he will then grab as many slaves as he can, up to his maximum (in this case 2) and continue saccing.

Now that's what I call a perfectly comprehensive answer to the original question! Many thanks.

JonBrave I think you're confusing yourself and everyone else reading this thread. This is how blood saccing and auto-refilling works. (which can all be tested for yourself with a VERY simple SP game as any blood sac nation)

When the turn finishes processing, any priests that were ordered to blood sacrifice will automatically take slaves from the lab (if they have access to one) equivalent to the maximum number of Blood slaves they can sacrifice. So a H1 priest will automatically take 1 slave, and a H3 priest will automatically take 3 slaves. If they are using a Jade Knife, then you can add +2. So a H3 priest with a Jade Knife will automatically take 5 slaves. (and regardless of how many slaves they actually sacrificed the previous turn).

Priests can only sacrifice the number of slaves they have assigned to them when the turn begins to process (ie. in SP games this occurs when you press end turn). The only time priests will automatically take slaves from the lab is at the end of the turn processing sequence (ie. the start of a new turn is the very end action of the previous turns hosting sequence). But if the player takes slaves off blood saccing priests, such as by using the pool blood slaves options, then they won't sacrifice any slaves that turn because THE PLAYER decided with their actions that they don't want those priests to have any slaves assigned to them to sacrifice.

A player can't expect the game to read their mind. If you leave a priest to blood sac, and it has access to a lab, then left to it's own devices it will happily keep saccing as many slaves as it can (providing the slaves are available in the lab at the required time). But if you interfere with this by taking slaves off the priest, then of course the priest will not sacrifice any slaves that turn. And for those wondering or questioning why it works like this, it is because it has to work this way because I know I'd get hella annoyed if I gave a H3 priest 1 blood slave to sacrifice, and then when the turn started processing it helped itself to more slaves from the lab against my permission.
.

Edit - Ah, ninja'd (Calahan must use self restraint to avoid abusing his mod powers to un-ninja himself)

Edited by: Calahan.

Dear Calahan,

I don't see why I'm confusing myself, or for that matter anyone else. Oscarius in his last reply (and others) has made it perfectly clear now how it works, and I'm very happy.

JonBrave wrote: Dear Calahan,

I don't see why I'm confusing myself, or for that matter anyone else. Oscarius in his last reply (and others) has made it perfectly clear now how it works, and I'm very happy.

Good to hear you are now very happy with your understanding of how this works (but note my reply was written and posted before I noticed Oscarius posted, hence my ninja edit. So I didn't realise he had clarified things for you, so when I typed my reply it did appear you were confused over this issue based on your previous post)

Edited by: Calahan.