Suggestion: How's aboot a viceroy?

[Vicious Love]

Before I begin, I think a preemptive apology is in order.
I've been awake for thirtysomething hours straight, about half a dozen of which were spent on my first Dom II full Version game. Consequently, this post may not be all that lucid or relevant. I'll have to check it out when I'm fully awake.

BEGIN AIMLESS MICROMANAGEMENT SPIEL

The actual point is way below this

Anyway, my experiences with the demo, the aforementioned six hour game, and these fora have led me to one painfully obvious conclusion: The micromanagement on this game is atrocious.
Which is a shame, because every other aspect of the game(Except meaningless piffle like graphics, I mean) is simply outstanding, worthy of the same sort of acclaim spiritual predecessors like Master of Orion/Magic received in their time.
Honestly, every aspect of the game is sheer, unadelterated, incomporable bliss, until the point at which it finally bogs you down with so much repetition and drudgery that each 20 minute long turn becomes 90% chore and 10% gameplay. Not that good a description, I know, but I really am too semiconscious to turn a better phrase than that. Besides, you already know why micromanagement sucks. Ingrates.

Now, I've heard it said that this is chiefly because the game is PbeM oriented. Understandable enough, single player probably shouldn't be the focus for this sort of thing. Hell, I was just tiding myself over and testing the learning curve with tonight's solo game. Still no excuse, though.
Micromanagement is usually considered permissible in PbeM for two reasons:
Firstly, because a good game of Dom, MoM, etc is like a fine game of chess, with hobbitses and fireballs and multiple mana types. To get the most out of the experience, each turn must be assessed from every possible angle, each detail accounted for, each dilemma savored.
Secondly, because multiplayer is all about pwn1ng the other players, and complete control over every minute detail is necessary to keep your strategic edge.

Both above assumptions ignore the possibility of, simply put, casual games . So simply put, in fact, that I don't think I need to linger on this point any further.

And so, without further ado(Damn, I'm long winded when I'm exhausted):


END SPIEL, BEGIN ACTUAL SUGGESTION

So, how about a viceroy? I'm referring, obviously enough, to a MOO/Civilization/Whatever style AI micromanager, to handle the odds and ends of your empire for you.
Plenty of control/"delegation" schemes might work for something like this. For instance, the crudest system I can imagine would just have you be able to hand units and resources over to the viceroy, who would use them as though it were running your empire.
For instance, you would give your viceroy a dozen or so troops you don't feel like handling yourself, 8,000 gold, 40 air gems, and a "salary" of 3 air gems and 200 gold per turn. The viceroy would use these pretty much as an AI-controlled nation ordinarily does(Well, not in the strictest technical sense. There'd likely have to be a buncha changes made to the AI, bbut I'm talking ends, not means).
Naturally, your build queues'd take precedence over the viceroy's, meaning it'd only be able to actual put its gold to use in provinces you aren't using.
This frankly unwieldy basic concept can be polished in dozens of ways, each of which'd take more work than the Last. To name a few:
1. The viceroy could be given general priorities or attitudes on how to spend its funds and gems, IE "Expansionist", "Never pillage", "20% gold defense, 10% espionage, 20% castle construction, and so on, 20% gems empowerment, 20% give to mages, 60% rituals, and so forth", "100 gold/round cap on missile units", "max 400 units".

2. And then you start specifying. "Don't build sauromancers", "

3. Plenty of province specific flags, such as "do not construct castle", "do not invade", "invade, priority 2", "fortify, priority tango lime eskimo", could narrow things down further.

3. If you've missed the point and really want to micromanage your macromanagement, build queue hijacking could be allowed, either globally or province-specifically, IE "get first dibs on 20% of production, only use remainder after I've built my troops".

And so friggin' on. In retrospect, this is all amazingly obvious.
I suppose, the four actual questions at hand are:
A) Am I the only one who thinks this might be a good idea?
B) Will I still think it's a good idea once I actually wake up?
and
C) Would this be that hard to implement, either in patch, mod, or sequel? Some bits seem straightforward, others seem tricky.
D) Hold on, rewind a sec, assuming the answer to A is "no", what sort of viceroy do we actually need? Some of the higher detail levels mentioned above seem pretty superfluous, and the basic "give resources to computer and let it manage bits of your empire" design seems catastrophically incomplete. I think we should at least have some idea of what we want before we start firing off questions like C.

*steps back*
That was a lot of post for four simple questions about a pretty obvious suggestion. I suppose I feel so strongly about this because, as already mentioned, so much about this game is spectacular, and yet micromanagement seems to make it simply unplayable, once it reaches the scale where things get the most interesting.
Short of just keeping games small or short via maps/victory conditions, I really see no other solution, though that's probably fatigue-induced myopia.

[Gandalf Parker]

First off, I would love to see this. Since Im 95% solo play in any game I own I think this would be wonderful. But I dont think its likely to happen.

Such a project gets into the same thing that the AI discussion does except I think it makes things alittle mroe complicated. Much of the discussion about it can probably be found in the AI discussions. As the game is now there are no "hooks" (tags, variable names) for accessing the things that would need to be accessed. The AI is not a seperate AI for each race but just one AI trying to make generally good decisions with general tags. I dont think "Sauromancer" is recognized except maybe as "most expensive mage".

Also most early efforts would increase the game immensely. Its already a large memory/CPU footprint even it if is only running as a host to allow file transfers. Unless the program is broken into loadable modules then many desireable things would be major projects.

Wih one programmer I think that the multiplayers list is probably far more than enough to keep them busy before they look too much at solo-play things

[General Tacticus]

I agree that some sort of macro managing scheme would be useful. On the other hand, having played against the AI, I really don't want it administering my empire, or part of.

I currently reduce micromanagement by using strategies that reduce it : go for high quality armies (they take less losses and don't need a constant stream of reinforcement), concentrate on a few production centers, wait for an big army to be assembled before moving it out (no running around assembling the men), take advantage of the few automated tasks (monthly summons, enter site, summon allies), and once you have the cash, place big orders of regular troops that will take several turns to complete.

As it is, I would favor a few management reducing commands over full fledged viceroy : the ability to tell a province to churn out such and such units every turn, and a go-to command, for example. Monthly forge items, or even better a forge item queue, would also be nice.


P.S. How can you afford to give 8000 gold to your viceroy ? Don't tell me you routinely have that kind of cash on hand ?

[Tricon]

Originally posted by General Tacticus:
[QBAs it is, I would favor a few management reducing commands over full fledged viceroy : the ability to tell a province to churn out such and such units every turn, and a go-to command, for example. Monthly forge items, or even better a forge item queue, would also be nice.
[/QB]

That's the way I see it,too. The micro is bothersome, but it could be reduced with one or two tweaks like the above mentioned. A viceroy with it's own AI is a pretty big addition.

Oh, and one more thing talking from (limited)experience... learn to use the hotkeys of the game, it reduces the time spend on micro management significantly.

[aldin]

I can think of two tools I'd like available along these lines: Autotax and Autosearch

Autotax: Player sets a value so that the AI automatically adjusts the tax rate of provinces to be the highest level that is less than or equal to the player set value minus the province unrest level. This would happen at the beginning of each turn so it could be manually adjusted. For example, if set at 110, with no unrest the province would be taxed at 110, or taxed at 100 with 3 unrest, or taxed at 90 with 19 unrest. I often just want my tax rate plus the unrest to be less than or equal to zero and spend a fair amount of time double-checking every turn. Also, this keeps disaster unrest from being accidentally forgotten.

Autosearch: I can't even begin to count how many times I've lost track of priests wandering the countryside searching. Why not have an "autosearch" option to keep a unit moving and searching until all owned provinces have been searched at the level offered by the searcher?

~Aldin

[moodgiesanta]

I actually think a change of attitude could help a small minority. It helped me. At first, on the big maps, I was thinking, "Man, I'mg getting bogged down." But then I thought about it, and all it really is at the end is what you do at the beginning, only moreso. Once I started looking at a late game turn as being broken into many different parts, with my western front one, my eastern the other, internal management another, and so on, the problem went away. The micromanagement scales linearly. The front game really isn't so different from the late game. The late game is just the front game multiplied a few or even several turns, except you have access to cooler stuff. So I find the late game on a map such as Orania to be very entertaining.

[Demosthenes]

Auto-search would rock!

[mattzu84]

A more advanced blood slave command would also be helpful. I have troubles with Mictan on large maps as I don't always 'Z' my blood hunters, or remember to refill my slave sacrificers.

[Ranger]

How about a hero/commander list (something like the nation list) that would show a list of all commanders, their name, equipment, level, magic levels, status, locations activity. click on any commander would bring you to their location.

I would also like to see the commander names in the combat Messages, so I know who died.

[Taqwus]

Autosearch? The geek in me suspects that's a dynamic Version of the traveling salesman problem; with intervening already-searched provinces increasing transit costs between owned, unsearched provinces (the nodes in the graph).