Automation vs Micromanagement

[Pnakotus]

How does everyone here feel about this issue? I'm curious to get a feel for how the community sees the contrast between some very automated elements (recruiting, ritual magic) and some very time-intensive manual tasks (patroling, preaching).

From an internal game perspective, there isn't any reason why the complex automated orders people have talked about shouldn't be added; your god is hardly going to be issuing orders like 'Preach at that town. Wait, now preach at that town. DO NOT MOVE UNLESS I TELL YOU TO!'. Of course if I'm in the minority here there's no point in maintaining any interest in D3.

This is a serious issue for me because single player is lame and MP is absolutely ruined by some of my friends micro-ing the *** out of everything. 80% of players have ~30 sec turns unless something fun is happening; the other 20% can go on far longer doing various mundane tasks that provide a long term benefit, but which take forever to constantly supervise. In my view, MP is the heart of the game and would be far better by reducing micro as much as possible. That sort of fiddly, time consuming task has no place in a computer game.

[quantum_mechani]

Pnakotus said:

This is a serious issue for me because single player is lame and MP is absolutely ruined by some of my friends micro-ing the *** out of everything. 80% of players have ~30 sec turns unless something fun is happening; the other 20% can go on far longer doing various mundane tasks that provide a long term benefit, but which take forever to constantly supervise. In my view, MP is the heart of the game and would be far better by reducing micro as much as possible. That sort of fiddly, time consuming task has no place in a computer game.

I agree, the best way to combat this problem I've found is to use small maps. That said, I don't know if I would like a game where the average turn was 30 seconds...

[Arralen]

I agree, there's no point in maintaining interest in Dom3 - at least for you.

Dominions can't - and shouldn't, as it isn't designed in such a way from ground up - be played in 30-second-turns in midgame and later.

If you want a real time strategy game, go and buy such. Dominions started out as (and still mostly is) an email-game. And as it is a "grand strategy"-game, IMNSHO this should change too much.

On the other hand, there are some MM tasks that could be made easier. Think you didn't mention them, as patrolling and preaching isn't problematic:
patrolling - well, in Dom1 it was feasable to patrol every province to balance out growth, unrest and heavy taxation. You're not meant to do this in Dom2.
preaching - where's the problem with preaching? You set a priest to preach, that's it.

What would be nice and helpful:

• "move-to" orders
• auto-repeat on production queues
• "produce-to" redirection
• "sitesearching(spell)" and
• maybe"sitesearching(mov)", but the last one could turn ou too dangerous for your mages.

Edited: I forgot: The fastest-playing Dom2 blitz games on earth you'll find on the dominions IRC channel, on Saturday and Sundays. I've seen turn that lasted not more than 5 seconds, in general turn-around-time is 3..10 minutes.

[Chazar]

I agree that turns already on maps the size like Karan tend to drown in micromanaging, but I also realize that it is my own fault to satisfy the urge for minmaxing every tiny bit, although it kills the fun...

However, automized preaching is there in the form of temples, and the priests are necessary to allow directed domininon pushing - which is one of the game's essentials.

Nevertheless, there is some room of improvement to reduce micromanaging, in addition to the good points that have been said here so far, I think that these would be useful:

• cumulative scouting: A scout's report should take into account the previous turn, so improve. It is just plain stupid to write these things down by pen and paper!
• fog of war is fine, but the game should still recall the last scoutings for me, marked as outdated.
• sticky notes/color codes for commanders
• common tactical setup for armies starting from different provinces and hiding of colocated troops which I do not want to participate.
• Something that prevents the "search the hammer/pathbooster game" with respect to forging

I think the second and third item, as well as far reaching move-to's could be nicely handled by structuring commanders and their troops into groups of commanders, regardless of their position on the map (i.e. a group of commanders might be located in several provinces)

[Gandalf Parker]

Pnakotus said: Of course if I'm in the minority here there's no point in maintaining any interest in D3.

[old wise man sayings]
Nothing is impossible, but some things are not worth the time and effort.

Everything has its Pros and Cons.

There is something to be said for "look at all the others doing it". There is also something that can be said for "that niche is covered, dont bother going there"
[/END old wise]

There are many things suggested for Dominions which are not bad ideas. And there are good justifications for doing it. And often they can point at other games which have managed to do it well.

But at that point I start feeling nervous. Dominions is a top game, in a specific market niche. The multiplayer Play-by-EMail structure comes with pros and cons built into it. I myself have things I wouldnt mind seeing changed but only if it doesnt affect where Dominions sits in the gaming world. If the developers decide that they want something abit more action, more graphical, more solo play, fewer opponents and smaller maps and faster games.. then I would rather that they leave Dominions in its position and create a new game. (by the way, have you looked at Conquest of Ellysium which is Illwinters solo-play game from their site? Have you looked at StarFury which is a game available at ShrapnelGames.com also?)

On the other hand I feel that there are some advantages to MP PbEM style games which could be expanded in Dominions. Part of the advantage is SUPPOSED to be that "hosting" the turn does not have to be fast. That is supposed to allow for more opponents in one game, deeper strategy, larger maps, more choices in every aspect of the game, and better AI. I know that they are trying to balance such things in so that solo play doesnt become impossible but I think that as long as few players on small maps plays quickly, that the ceiling on the other things could stand to be raised.
Just IMHO

[Duncanish]

My own 2 cents:

I think certain things could use a bit of automation, but for the incredibly vast majority, I'd say not. What I would like, automated wise, is gem-restocking and a way to gather units.

A way to replenish gems quickly for a mass of spell users would come in very handy, at least for me, since I tend to give most of my mages generally the same gems. Not to mention, it would help Mictlan out immensely (I swear, that nation was designed for an OCD player). Maybe even a way to give the same command to more than one commander at a time. Shift+Right click on each commander, give order via key command. All commanders able to use that order do it. Handy for when you have to Call God and then go back to Research or Patrol.

I'd love to be able to set a gathering point or something. Toggle one province and any stray units (those without a commander present) in adjacent provinces migrate there automatically. Useful for gathering up those militia for the next suicide run.

[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.

[Pnakotus]

Play by EMAIL? Christ. No wonder you people are so anti-automation; you've got DAYS per turn.

My point remains: most people don't. Implementing auto-scouting, or auto-siting, or auto-tax or auto-preach or whatever doesn't change the nature of the game, or the decisions anyone makes. It just reduces paperwork. How is that bad? Explain it to me.

There isn't any production redirection, but gems get moved automatically. This is inconsistent. I appreciate that moving production is far more valuable, so put a logical time delay on it, based on distance. *I* don't want to have to supervise every aspect of my huge empire - as I pointed out, you're supposed to be a GOD. At the top, issuing orders to OTHERS. So pillory me because I've never finished a game of Rome:Total War; maintaining a ridiculous level of management on a huge empire kills the fun long before you've killed everyone else.

[alexti]

Automation that you want is essentially there. Basically, you need to create pretender(s), modify a map giving those pretenders to AI, set yourself (preferrably as Arco) in the border-free province where you can sit safely and monitor the progress. Put some special sites there, so you won't need to bother with gem/gold collection. AI will be doing pretty much everything on its own (including auto-scouting, auto-siting... etc) and you won't have to give any orders to OTHERS. On a bad side that also means that you won't be able to give any orders.

[sushiboat]

Pnakotus, have you tried searching the term "micromanagement" on this board? It's not exactly a new topic, so you may be interested in the many suggestions for reducing micromanagement that players have made since the game came out over a year ago.