Dominions 3 and micromanagement

[alexti]

I was anticipated Dom3 a lot hoping that it would solve Dom2 micromanagement problems in the late game. As everybody probably knows, late game in Dom2 was bogging down becoming a chore due to micromanagement.

I think that UI improvements in Dom3 (gems and items visible on the main screen, sorted spells, combined squad management etc) have a promise, but after playing for a couple of months I believe that micromanagement reduction has failed to materialize. Worse than that, in Dom3 the game already bogs down in the early game! Part of the problem is that I like to play efficiently and when not micromanaging leads to suboptimal performance leaves me unsatisfied

The way I see the issue is that in the early-mid game it became efficient to recruit multiple armies of all kind of troops (national and indies), carefully script tactical combat and optimize strategic map movement. In practice it leads to explosion of micromanagement involved. Because for most nations it's virtually impossible to avoid some attrition, every turn one has to update the scripts, move units between squads (to get the right numbers, to assign new recruits, to move badly injured into the arrow catcher squads etc), plan which commander goes where to pick up troops that will flee in the next turn (and to collect new recruits). Besides, the limited leadership adds a headaches trying to optimally assign squads to leaders and foresee how much leadership capacity you'll need in every province on the next turn. Besides it's not much fun in SP, because AI keeps throwing the same (cluelessly scripted troops) at you, so essentially you can just use exactly the same army composition (it somewhat differs when you countering different AI nations, but much less than I'd like to) and scripting to efficiently destroy AI armies. It feels pretty boring to me.

Also the effects of strategy in the early game were significantly reduced (in comparison to Dom2). I think that one of the issues is that a lot of low level combat spells in Dom3 became useless. Early on one can't hire many mages (because it the fort+lab+(maybe)temple became much more expensive and construction time has grown as well) and small number of mages can't make much difference when there're so many units in the armies.

Unfortunately, I don't have much hope for UI solving those micromanagement issues. Neither of issues has any apparent solution. So I've started to experiment with various settings trying to get micromanagement reduced in different ways. My idea is essentially to make obvious and micromanagement-heavy plans inefficient They key I think is to make low-level magic more workable - it immediately leads to multiple possible strategies, certainly different for different nations (due to different magic paths on national mages if not for anything else). It's not really my idea - Illwinter has done it in Dom2, so essentially I'm trying to combine positive aspects of Dom2 and Dom3. So I've tried few games with easy research and 50% income (I had to reduce resources to 50% too, otherwise anything but heavily armored troops was becoming pretty much useless) and I really liked the resulting gameplay. Early game plays very much like Dom2 - quickly and creatively. But by mid-game the gameplay deviates from Dom2 - by the time in Dom2 one would typically use more or less the same summons, in Dom3 that's not working (part to due to difficulty of accessing different magic paths, part due to some changes in spells). That's I think is a positive thing because in Dom2 late mid-game and further tended to play very similarly every time. Late game still becomes same-ish I think, but on a good side UI improvement in Dom3 really cut down the micromanagement issues that existed in Dom2.

Anybody wants to share ideas and suggestions in this area?

P.S. I'm intentionally ignoring uber-bless strategies here - AI doesn't use them anyway and human players can agree on not using them.