[alexti]

Few months ago I've found myself in a similar position. Being inexperienced, I've join too many games (and 2 of them on Orania) without realizing the time commitment (or maybe I hoped to be eliminated quickly). Fortunately, I had found a sub for one of those games (Norfleet was eager to try his skills without castles, VQ and clams ;->). In another game, I've decided to radically cut on micromanagement and allocated myself 40 minutes per turn. This way I've ended up starting from doing important things and gradually moving to less important tasks. For example, I've stopped watching taxes every turn, once every 5 turns was ok too. I've stopped ferrying blood slaves and built labs in all bloodhunting provinces. I've stopped trying to forge items ahead (meaning ones that I expected to need the next turn). Instead I was forging them as needed. Rather than building a castle regular way, I'd cast a spell, etc. It wasn't as optimal, but this way it was more fun than work. Fortunately, I was winning in that game anyway, so I didn't need to squeeze every opportunity.

But the lesson was learned and I'm not joining games on huge maps anymore. While they may be ok in the beginning, as players getting eliminated remaining empires become too big and require too much micromanagement for my taste.

For me the loss of fun factor is not due to high level spells, but rather due to big empires. Two best games went well into the late game with the research finished (one was on Karan with 7 strong nations remaining) and another was inland map with 5 major players remaining.