Dominions 3 and micromanagement

[alexti]

curtadams said:
Improving low-level magic would make the early game more varied, but it would make micromanagement *worse*. You're going to have almost as many squads but now also a bunch of mages with separate and even more complex scripts you have to frequently piddle with for similar reasons.

In the settings I've mentioned as my current favourite that doesn't happen. Amount of micromanagement is reduced maybe by 3-4 times, if not more. I think that one reason that there're shortcuts for mage scripts and another reasons is that with low-level magic being more efficient overly complicated squad management becomes unnecessary. Besides, it's becoming more practical to spend (now reduced amount gold) on mages instead of massing up the troops. So generally I'm using much fewer squads.

curtadams said:
The army micro that really drives me batty is placing squads on the battleground and in particular *moving* them when I switch my army's stance from, say, hold-and-attack to ambush cavalry or forward attack. The solution would be HTML-esque scripting or a real GUI interface (e.g. dragging squads) but those are of course major changes.

I agree that's one of the major headaches. I can't see any GUI that would solve all those problems. While general rules of what one does are pretty straightforward they're kind of hard to express in terse form. Some scripting language could solve it, but that's probably a big change in the code and I'm not sure how many players would be enthusiastic about using it either...