You are quite right of course. But I am taking the Richard I of England approach by wanting to go off on crusade while leaving someone else to run my kingdom. As someone else mentioned, towards the end of the game running a big empire becomes very time consuming.

Lets be clear here. I am NOT advocating dispensing with the economic system (even I like to run the kingdom from time to time). What I am asking for is an improved AI for running the economy. How often have you left the economy on automanage and then suddenly noticed that one of your cities with a govenor has suddenly turned blue (the city not the govenor). You have to monitor the cities and switch them from cultural/financial to growth and back again to keep the population happy an to get the best tax return. Also spend your money on the army every month and nothing civilian ever seems to get built.

Also have you noticed that on automanage there is a big difference between the balanced/military/financial/cultural settings and growth setting and not between themselves? Switch between them and you can see that one is set to high taxes and the other to low taxes. If you do it yourself and set it to normal taxes then the city is happy but leave it to the automanage and it is either revolting or you get no income. I can understand military/financial/cultural being high taxes and the growth in low taxes but surely the balanced setting should result in normal taxes.

How many guides on the Org do you read that say "turn off the economy automanagement to get the best tax return"

The other thing that I would like changed is that if you set everything to atuomange and put the type as balanced policy, your cities will happily get on with building a whole range of military buildings that you do not want and will never use. I would prefer it if I could leave the civilian building to one side and control the military building myself. After all you have that option with recruitment. All that happens is that I end up with every city in the kingdom with the full range of military buildings and never recruit from them as the recruitment check box is clear. Historically military institutions were always government controlled whereas most civilian institutions just grew up naturally.

Do not get me wrong, CA have done a great job on the economic side and it is great fun to play it but some days I just want to conquor the world in a afternoon.