auto manage

[Foz]

For taxes, the automanaged taxes squeeze every last penny possible out of your peons. It'll run PO right down to the wire keeping things at highest tax level, and only bring it down on the turn you go red and would revolt. It's a really great option. Granted you can build up dread points doing this which may not be what everyone wants, but if you're economic-minded and don't mind the potential dread, then it's a very safe setting to use.

Never let the AI manage recruitment. It spends and spends and spends, and makes tons of low quality troops that you will never want to use. A nifty tip though is that if you enable auto-management without building or recruiting ticked, it manages taxes plus automatically retrains any eligible units in the settlement. I use this in castles where units will be auto-upgraded whenever an experience or armorer building completes, and it's handy if you drop units there to be retrained they automatically que up.

As for the massive micromanagement... I don't see what the big deal is. Right-click the "city" button on the UI, and you get a big ole list of all your cities and castles, each with icons that tell you whether it's constructing anything, recruiting anything, and what the current PO level and income are. I normally pop this up when the turn starts and hunt down any cities not building something. A right-click pops up their settlement scroll, and I pick something to build. On to the next. It doesn't take too long usually, especially since as the game progresses the build times go up. No more than 1/4 of the empire is usually idle ATM, as build times are usually in the 4-6 range. For recruitment, it's usually pretty easy to remember the few places I intend to do that, and jump to them to recruit units. One helpful possibility is to add something or change the settlement name so it grabs your attention. You can describe what you intend to produce there, or just put a *, or whatever will help you notice the place.

One thing I do wish, though, is that the city list would be able to be sorted by build status. It's sortable by everything else that I don't want, but build status that's usually the reason I'm in there, we don't have. It'd be great to just have all the cities I need to build in bubble up to the top.

[KHPike]

I don't trust the AI with micromanagement. It does a terrible job at that. I only leave it to manage my taxes. However I've noted that sometimes the AI lowers tax rates to low even though my loyalty on v high is 150%. My guess is that the AI is trying to promote population growth, which I don't really want as my population will grow too fast. I'd prefer to turn off automatic taxation in this scenario but it's not practical if I have a large empire to manage.

[Foz]

I don't trust the AI with micromanagement. It does a terrible job at that. I only leave it to manage my taxes. However I've noted that sometimes the AI lowers tax rates to low even though my loyalty on v high is 150%. My guess is that the AI is trying to promote population growth, which I don't really want as my population will grow too fast. I'd prefer to turn off automatic taxation in this scenario but it's not practical if I have a large empire to manage.

I agree on the practicality of the matter. I recently noticed that the AI put my taxes to low when they had been much higher, too. Interestingly enough, it did so when my empire hit a huge economic boom - in a few turns I had almost no big buildings to build, and recruit as I may I still ended up many tens of thousands in the black. In that situation, it seems like a very good idea to lower taxes, as the last thing you want is exorbitant sums of money sitting around, and that extra "resource" is probably better spent making population grow faster (and consequently farming some chivalry for governors). I actually think this is smart design on the dev's part, as there's no way I could use all that money that would be coming in from higher taxes - and from looking at the traits file pretty much, I also think there's a goal in mind too. I'm guessing this happens to actively avoid firing the "corruption" triggers.

;------------------------------------------
Trigger corruption1
    WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

    Condition EndedInSettlement
          and Treasury > 50000

    Affects Corrupt  1  Chance  1 
    Affects Aesthetic  1  Chance  1 
    Affects ExpensiveTastes  1  Chance  1 
    Affects Epicurean  1  Chance  1 
    Affects Embezzler  1  Chance  1

That's just the first one, it gets worse from there at the 100,000 and 150,000 treasury levels. All of those listed traits are NASTY things for governors to have, the kind of thing that makes them worthless. So if you consider that the game might be lowering taxes to help you avoid making so much surplus money that you destroy your governors, the auto tax manager starts to look smarter and smarter.

When this happened to you KHPike, were you making tons of money? I'm looking for some corroboration here, since I'm quite sure I was starting many turns with 40k or more at the time, and recall a few times trying desperately to spend to get under 50k, lol. I'm sure I failed once, which may in fact be what triggered the tax policy shift, I'm not certain.

[KHPike]

I won't say I was making lots. I had about 23 provinces, several of them still in the process of building up economic structures. I was churning out on the average 25k per turn.

But very late in the game I was producing about 80k per turn, which I'd usually deplete rapidly that turn building stuff. In this case I noted that tax levels in the smaller settlements decreases to low. Hence I believe that the AI tries to boost your population in the short run for long term tax benefits.

I haven't tried to observe what happens when I build farms though; perhaps the growth produced could offset this?

Your point on corruption prevention is valid...but the other triggers make it almost inevitable to get a corrupt governor when you place in a general.

[gingergenius]

sorted, thanks for all your help.

Every city now has had its garrison disbanded, and has six militia units (for free upkeep)

All my castles have a standing army of 1 general, 3 armoured swordsmen, 3 levy spearmen, 6 retinue longbowmen, and 7 English knights. Nottingham has sherwood archers instead of longbowmen, and some have knights hospitaller instead of english knights.

all sorted, and it retrains automatically as well (!! )

[gingergenius]

sorted, thanks for all your help.

Every city now has had its garrison disbanded, and has six militia units (for free upkeep)

All my castles have a standing army of 1 general, 3 armoured swordsmen, 3 levy spearmen, 6 retinue longbowmen, and 7 English knights. Nottingham has sherwood archers instead of longbowmen, and some have knights hospitaller instead of english knights.

all sorted, and it retrains automatically as well