Enjoying Shadow Empire While Totally Blind

[wodin]

You've really picked a tuff one here. No idea where or how you'd be able to start.

[BlindGuyNW]

THat's okay. I'm used to dealing with fairly tough challenges. A lot of the info I need is already there, it's just a matter of accessing it in a slightly different way.

[mroyer]

You got a whole other thing coming when you get to logistics. On the plus side, none of us can figure out logistics even with vision, so lack thereof might not be as big of a drawback as it might first seem! [;)]

Stick with it. We're rooting for you dude!

-Mark R.

[BlindGuyNW]

Hi All,

At the moment i have a question…

WHen I move a militia unit into a hex, which appears to have not been part of a zone previously, and no combat occurs, what happened? I gather the unit took over the hex in some fashion, but I wasn't sure how to tell whether the hex had enemy units in it or not. I gather that if no combat happened then there were no units to engage, but I Could be misunderstanding how the system works.

Anyone able to shed some light on these issues? Thanks for the support, all.

[Clux]

ORIGINAL: BlindGuyNW

Hi All,

At the moment i have a question…

WHen I move a militia unit into a hex, which appears to have not been part of a zone previously, and no combat occurs, what happened? I gather the unit took over the hex in some fashion, but I wasn't sure how to tell whether the hex had enemy units in it or not. I gather that if no combat happened then there were no units to engage, but I Could be misunderstanding how the system works.

Anyone able to shed some light on these issues? Thanks for the support, all.

What happens its than your starting zone normally its surrounded by non-aligned which are "neutral" and at war with everyone, minors and major nations. So, when one of your units advances into enemy territory they capture it if there is nobody to defend it, unless its a Major, in that case its going to ask you if you want to declare war.

One of the biggest problems than you could face its than as you expand farther from your capital the supply lines have a harder time to catch with the frontline troops, and in one moment, unless you build a road/supply station/truck station they won't receive any supplies at all, and if you don't know what are on the surroundings of your frontline troops they're at risk of being cut off from the supplies. There is one way to change the color of the map to green (best) to yellow, blue, red and black (worst) so you know if your troops are or not going to receive supplies, if I'm not mistaken its the key "number 6" so you can toggle it. I hope than I answered your question and good luck!

[BlindGuyNW]

Thank you. This was very helpful indeed.

One of the problems I face at the moment is finding a consistent place on the hex map. Can anyone speak to how it interacts with zoom levels? I need a way to move my mouse reliably to whichever hex is currently selected, so that I can explore the others in each direction, since it's the only way to move units and such at this point. I have a bookmark for the exact center of the screen (pixel position 720, 450, in my case,) but this doesn't quite seem to correspond to the center of the map. I hope the question makes sense, it's a little hard to explain.

[kongxinga]

Wow, this is an interesting challenge.[&o]
Brainstorming how I would play shadow empires, specifically reading and using the hex map.

There might exist a hotkey for jumping to your first settlement. That will be treated as 0,0 or 0,0,0 on the hex coordinate scale, either the offset coordinates or cube coordinates respectively (more on the hex coordinate types here (google redblobgames hex coordinates . Let's say the HOME key goes to 0,0 (using offset coordinates). Ok Cool.

Once at home, use certain key binds to move to the left or right. In offset coordinate this gets you to (-1,0) and (1,0). Once there, use textractor or similar to extract the relevant information. Textractor is a tool that extracts strings to be piped into other uses, such as translation or text to speech. If this is set up, you can pick the information you need to be extracted and piped to be read out.

For example, I move left after going to the home hex by pressing Home, then left arrow. This is the information I want to hear "Negative One, Zero, 2 Friendlies present, Friendly Control, Plains, Road Present, Supply Level 60, Elevation One Five Zero, 2 Friendly Installations present". If I wanted more information I would select it and tab through friendly units or installations as normal.

Then I move up, by pressing the up arrow key I hear "Negative one, Negative one, 1 Enemy Unit, Enemy Control, Forest, No Roads, Zero Supply, Elevation Five Zero, 1 installation present." Keep doing this to slowly map out your situational awareness, kinda like how some of the old dungeon crawler games had no map, so you either drew one as you went, or held the map in memory. As the map increases, there might be an ingame way of adding notes or waypoints or HQs as landmarks.

So Home would jump to 0,0. Pressing 1 could jump me to an important landbridge I had set and am trying to capture. Then I use arrow keys to move along the grid "Seventeen, twenty three. 2 Enemies, Enemy control, plains, Grav Rail present, No Supply, Elevation Negative 20, No installations." By using landmarks plus the key based navigation, you can picture the strategic situation. You probably still need a pretty good memory to hold the situation in your head, but as a wargamer you have a good chance of having that. How else do people on this forum who play War in the Pacific keep track of the logistical needs of some random destroyer on some island in the pacific, with hundreds of units to control, and thousands of hexes.

In summary, customized textractor, hotkeys, and arrow keys to move, have the textractor set to target specific fields to extract, piped to a reader. This solves the "Where am I" problem you face, especially with different zooms. You always know you are offset 4 and offset 8 from your home hex if you hit Home, and Right Arrow 4, and Down Arrow 8 times respectively.

[BlindGuyNW]

Hey,

Yeah. I have OCR capability from my screen reader, the part I'm missing is just the keyboard accessibility for hex movement. I'd be in favor of something like "Q W E, A S D," just because I'm used to that kind of thing from roguelike games.

I have yet to actually see how the game handles display of enemy units by default, do they show up below the hex info like friendlies do? Dealing with the graphical mouse-only aspects of this particular map make it hard to get started, but I feel like i'd be okay once I figure out a way to really do so.

[kongxinga]

The game has a recon component, so sometimes it does not show any enemy units while there is an enemy unit, so your unit gets ambushed and bushwhacked.

With enough scouting (recon buggies are good at this), you would see the presence of a unit, but not the type, and with even more recon you can see the type but not the strength etc.

The textractor component comes in handy from deliberately selecting the specific strings to read, since that information you need to know about the hex is split into several places and textractor or similar tools would pull place them together in a convenient place.

When you select a hex, multiple tabs with more information shows up. These are units, structures etc, and each can have multiple members. So I can select a hex, and then select structures, and tab through the farm, ice mining facility, etc that exist in the hex. The same for friendlies, although typically I would click more than once since that cycles between selecting different units in the stack. Each unit has multiple elements (450 riflemen, 50 machine guns, 10 light tanks) as well, so to get a full picture you need to tab or cycle through that as well to get the full picture. And each element is customized too! So conceivably you would also want to drill down into the element to find out what armour it has for example.

I went into the game to check on the enemy, and it looks like with sufficient recon, you do see the number of enemy units within, and double clicking does cycle through each to give you the information that you have about it. Of course, like real commanders, this information is limited and often wrong, and you either need to recon more, or take the risks. So enemy units DO show up below the hex info like friendlies. The better recon, the more information you get such as numbers, types, disposition.

[BlindGuyNW]

Hey,

Thanks so much for confirming that.

I'm going to download textractor and give it a look, hopefully it will ease my dependence on OCR, at least.

THe key piece missing for now is easy navigation of hexes, and unit movement. If I can get that sorted I'm very excited to see how far I can go. I really appreciate all the enthusiastic support.

[BlindGuyNW]

Hey,

Okay, the Textractor program is really cool from what I can see thus far. I'm not sure how to start customizing it to do what I need, but it's amazing just not having constant OCR typos and missing information. I was looking at all the unit data for instance, it was awesome to be able to read that even if I had to go into another window to do so.

Thanks for mentioning it I just wish I could figure out the map issues.

[kongxinga]

Hi,
I hope it helps. Textractor is somewhat fiddly and needs some trial and error to get to work, and now I realize that it itself is rather badly accessible and for certain games would need extensions on itself. I was looking over the issues, and saw someone trying to use it on Clausewitz engines, so I got excited but that was you haha. I am going to fiddle a bit with it to see what text I can extract, out of the box. I haven't used it on strategy games yet, but I won't know till I fiddle around. I do hope you are able to figure something out.

[BlindGuyNW]

YEah.

The art of game accessibility for me is in many ways just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. I'm a huge fan of strategy games in general but until I discovered OCR was unable to do much of anything with them. I just wish more had better keyboard support.

[kongxinga]

Well good news and bad news.
Good news. The game's text is getting extracted. Bad news, there are 60 ish fields I am extracting from when I click around the map, not withstanding what I will see if I go into menus. Good news, it looks like the information. For example the field GDIPMeasureString Outputs this results.

---
VE MODEPlains GrassyNimnon (33,27)NimnonNo Unit selectedNimarbes PaxASSETSITEMS
VE MODEPlains GrassyNimnon (33,27)NimnonNo Unit selectedNimarbes PaxASSETSITEMS

Adv.[1]
Adv. [1]​

Adv.[1]
Adv. [1]​

View the mini-map. [F8]MINIMAP
View the mini-map. [F8] Minimap


---

Bad News. To make sense of these, we'll have to go through the fields one by one and pipe the text through Regex or some rules to get the information you need. This is not insurmountable, but it is a text analytics task. For example, VE MODEPlains GrassyNimnon (33,27)NimnonNo Unit selectedNimarbes PaxASSETSITEMS is nonsense, but with some rules we get get the info. Plains hex, coordinates 32,27, city of Nimnon, Grassy Terrain, Tile called Nimnon, No Unit Selected. This looks promising.

My own textractor is nearly black magic (it works and I don't dare touch it) for my use case, but with some extending it seems we can make it work for this game (as others have made it work for other games).

Can someone guess what the other information is? I think Nimarbes is the region, but what is VE mode, and Pax AssetsItems?

[BlindGuyNW]

Yeah. I was playing around with it last night, and while it was hard to consistently get text all the time, I did get it most of the time..

The keyboard accessibility is the other piece I'd love to get working, but we probably can't do that without help from Vic. Until I can avoid having to click on the map as much as possible, things are going to be difficult whether we get text or not.

Still, I'm optimistic.

[DTurtle]

ORIGINAL: BlindGuyNW

Thank you. This was very helpful indeed.

One of the problems I face at the moment is finding a consistent place on the hex map. Can anyone speak to how it interacts with zoom levels? I need a way to move my mouse reliably to whichever hex is currently selected, so that I can explore the others in each direction, since it's the only way to move units and such at this point. I have a bookmark for the exact center of the screen (pixel position 720, 450, in my case,) but this doesn't quite seem to correspond to the center of the map. I hope the question makes sense, it's a little hard to explain.

Experimenting some more, I haven't found any way to center on the currently selected hex. There are several ways to zoom onto cities or units. However the position of the selected and zoomed to hex on the screen is not completely the same. It can shift right or left and up or down by up to a hex. As I mentioned before, using the arrow keys shifts the map by exactly one hex. So while you might not immediately click on the correct hex by clicking in the center of the map, it should give you the coordinates of the hex you clicked on, and then you can shift the map and click again (without moving the mouse). Its the only way I can think of to get to wherever you want to get to.

[BlindGuyNW]

Understood, and thanks for checking. I'll do some more experiments myself.

[Soar_Slitherine]

ORIGINAL: kongxinga
VE MODEPlains GrassyNimnon (33,27)NimnonNo Unit selectedNimarbes PaxASSETSITEMS

Can someone guess what the other information is? I think Nimarbes is the region, but what is VE mode, and Pax AssetsItems?

"VE MODE" is probably MOVE MODE but the first two letters are cut off. "Pax" is used as a component in regime names, so "Nimarbes Pax" seems to be a regime name it's reading from the title of the corresponding tab in the bottom panel. ASSETS and ITEMS are tabs in the bottom panel. Then it seems to loop around to the top of the screen - "Adv.[1]" sounds like the indicator for the number of advice popups available from the top panel, and the minimap text is also up there if I recall correctly.

[MtnPatriot]

"Hi All,

Long time no see."
Am I really the only one who chuckled? Has the modern world devolved to the point that we can't laugh at a blind man's jokes because our laughter might offend someone?
Blindguy, I have nothing to offer beyond moral support. This game has enamoured me like no other in the last few years, but the UI is counterintuitive at best, and an equal adversary at worst. I wish you the best of luck in your explorations of it.

[BlindGuyNW]

Hey,

Thank you for the good wishes and humor.

The game is definitely still challenging. I intend to try and do some more exploration this weekend and see if I can figure out a predictable way to handle unit movement at the moment.

Textractor helps but the order in which it outputs things is, as demonstrated, unpredictable. I guess I'll just have to get used to it for now.