Idea: one nation, several players
 

There was a lot of discussion recently concerning the problem known as "Micromanagement hell". Basically, the number of tasks required for competitive play in late game is overwhelming and tiresome for a single player. There were several good suggestions made, and I wish to add another one.

Basically, the question is: is it possible to have one nation in MP run by two or more players managing different areas? Technically, I see no problem here: players just send the turn to the next one in agreed order, and the last one submits the turn.

For example: a player's nation is eliminated somewhere in mid-game as it usually happens, but instead of just dropping out, he is offered a commanding position in another player's rapidly growing empire. He can be a magistrate in charge of micromanaging several provinces, or something like that.

I do not know if this idea can be actually used in a game, but I just thought of it as of an interesting possibility that I did not see mentioned here before. Maybe it will be useful for somebody :)

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

It could be used, but would require lots of communication between the players, effectively cancelling out benefits - it'd still require lots of time to coordinate the nation.

And with CBM 1.6 and removal of spammable gem gen items, MM has been reduced somewhat (blood nations still suffer from it though).

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

Well, the communications can be actualy reduced by game rules (for example, no more than one message per turn). For example, let us say that it takes a lot of time for messengers to reach the governor in his distant province. It will be less effective, probably, but more easy and fun, which is the whole point.

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

Personally, a lot of the difficulty I have with the late game is that you have many teleporting units, rituals that can hit any province, and magic items (which teleport between labs). This means that you can't consider any one situation or area in isolation; rather you have to solve this global problem of allocating your magical resources to the parts of your empire where they will be most effective. In the early/mid game you can divide the turn up into a number of discrete local problems, since units can't really have an effect more than 3 spaces from where they currently are. So any one tactical problem shouldn't take longer than 5 minutes or so. You might recruit some units for future turns, or start moving an army from one theater of war to another, but by and large you just have to deal with a series of simple tactical problems. By the time turn 80 rolls around, you have to worry about which front could best use a thug drop, which of your several dozen thugs can make best use of each new item, whether your D6 mages would be better spent summoning thugs or casting Manifestation, and if so, which of your fronts most needs Manifestation support? I know I've spent many an hour just staring at a late-game screen, with gray matter dribbling from my ear.

Since the late game problem is so interconnected, it seems like it would be difficult to chop it up, and assign one part to one person and a second part to a second person. Or you might be able to do it, but it wouldn't be efficient, and if it's not going to be efficient why even bother? :)

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

That sounds all too familiar to me :)

By far the biggest eater of my time in late game is working out where and how to best allocate all my resources, and how to get them to meld together nicely into something that might actually be effect. The actual 'doing' of everything once I've planned it out doesn't usually take me more than an hour I'd say.

The only way I can see a late-game turn being broken up to allow more than one person to do different jobs, is if before the turn was given to the main player, other players had gone around doing the blood hunting and gem gen cleaning up. But with gem gens now gone in CBM 1.6, I can't see any way to effectively split a turn up in a way that could help with the MM.

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

Most of my time spent in mid and late game is consumed by the following: getting every magic item in my possession into the lab, and distributing it again somewhere in the empire, in an optimal way.

The idea is nice, but pretty much unusable for Dom3 unless you are thinking of vassal states.

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

Thats an interesting idea, and totally doable as you describe it.

Personally, my MM is mostly managed by creating hotkeys to do re-occurring tasks. Such as cycling thru all my labs to tell my mages to make certain things and assigning the ones they made. Or cycling thru all of my provinces that have important units and the resources to create them to keep doing it (especially with commanders since you cant queue those up), assign the troops to commanders, and have them march to some central collection point. That way with two keypresses I have most of my MM work done.

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

I doubt many players would be interested in doing just the boring routine stuff anyway.

Could be interesting to break up a nation in several parts and play them allied.

Like for example you have 3 players with the normal unit list minus the cap only units surrounding one player with army list reduced to only cap only powerful units. That player would be the team leader and main ritual/forger/researcher while the others do the actual fighting.

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

I was thinking this would be possible if there's one main pretender who starts with immortal demi-pretenders which serve the main pretender. The main pretender then divides all gem income and gold income amongst those players on his team. Naturally major decisions such as globals or high cost summonings/rituals would require an agreement from all players.

I think it could be done as long as all the individuals know how to work as a team. There's other benefits for this method as well for example in a multiplayer game where it's 3 players for each nation the turns would move faster where the player with the most free time could help the others with their longterm plans. Also for scenarios where players drop from a game or decide to quit there's no need for finding a substitute because there's two others who will keep playing! Another benefit is multiple strategies could be discussed/shared so the nation is more deadly. At the very least I'd say it's worth testing in a multiplayer game.

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

Well this is straying from the OP, but you could also have multiple copies of a nation on a team playing against multiple copies of other nations on teams. This is sort of related and came to mind when I read the thread title.

IMO any team game is going to take more time which is in opposition to Festin's goals... although it might be fun.

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

That depends on how well the team works together and their personalities. A team of selfish perfectionists would be nightmarishly slow.

Re: Idea: one nation, several players
 

Ive actually played a game like that with my son and with my brother-in-law. We had very different playing styles. I tend to be a micro-manager, my BiL was a researcher, and my son was basically a barbarian horde in any type of game he ever plays so he was our God of War. We played some by passing the same nation around.

But mostly we played where we were each the nation of our choices playing as a pantheon (council of gods). Thats when we ironed out things like how to use a castle as a 2-way door for nations to cross each others lands, good trading rules, how to "gift" mages and leaders to each other, etc.