[Taqwus]

There is at least some room for automation which shouldn't entail writing a detailed AI assistant or changing the flavor of the game, because they're highly repetitive tasks with fairly stable criteria.

Tax policy, for instance -- if the default were 'Auto' which set it on a sliding scale based on unrest so as to bring it as close as possible to 0, if one could also set it manually if desired for the rare case where 0 unrest is either not a goal or not an important one. Perhaps even 'Default' where 'Default' might either be 'Auto' or a specific value configurable by the nation (often 100, but 200 may make sense for Dead Ermor etc).

The site-searching spells perhaps could be automated -- right now, a spell can be set to monthly, but it'll target the same location every time. If the site-searching spells could be used to probe different provinces every turn, that'd be good. I would suggest searching in order of acquisition, breaking ties by preferring the province with the lowest number of known sites, then by presence of fortress, then by total hp of defenders, or something like this. If the devs prefer not to design a heuristic for this, another way would be allowing the user to select from the map -- but blacking out provinces which are either ineligible (not owned by the caster) or otherwise not useful targets (already searched to level 4+, has four known magic sites) and perhaps having varying levels of shading for levels 1, 2, 3. Or let each search spell go into a pool (so in a particular turn you might have 2 searches for death, 1 for astral, 1 for water which all expire that turn) and in the province summary screen (which does list search/sites) let one allocate the contents of that pool -- e.g. by clicking on the part where it specifies the previous searches for a province. Basically I'm looking for a way to have less swapping between screens for figuring out where these need to be cast.

Mictlan priests set to Sacrifice should not deposit slaves in the pool; or, they should automatically pull them from the pool; or blood hunters should by default deposit them in the pool if there's a co-located lab. Unless this has changed lately, managing this was a pain.

It might be useful if mages could be assigned a template gem allocation, and that whenever in a lab and below what the template specifies they'd attempt to draw that gems to meet the template. If there are too few, allocate proportional to deficit. In this case, I would recommend that spellcasters set on Monthly do not completely erase their orders if the gem pools are too low, but merely pause them (perhaps with a warning message) until there is enough left.