Now that's an effective anti-piracy initiative!
UPD:
To be frank, POPs were exactly what made me love Vic1. Not only they represented the diferent cultures and peoples, they simulated the society with its worries, ambitions and aspirations; its development, the social groups migrations, the evolution of social consciousness and all such stuff. Removing the POPs system would strip Victoria 2 of that special social feel, and how different from any other Paradox game would it then be?
Surely it was a tedious routine to manage POPs all by yourself, but with this new concept of Ai control the POP system could be vastly improved. Why kill it then?
After all, I like to know the country I govern is populated by actual people, not an abstract pie chart.
I think maybe the problem with pops was pop splitting increased (production) efficiency. I hate floating point math the way all good performance oriented computer scientists do, but the bucket system they had for efficiency meant you had to manage the pops a lot or be significantly sub optimal. And unemployed pops migrated making managing your pops for emmigration was a bit harder than I'd like.
So my micromanaging looked like this: I'd figure out the profitable RGO's in whatever country I was playing. and then never expand them. (or maybe expand them once). As those pops got big and filled the RGO I'd split them, so a bunch would be unemployed and emmigrate, usually to my colonies. Everywhere else the goal was to have as may pops as you could populating your factories, and factories as high level as possible. That seemed dumb. Again I know floating point math is bad but a simple # people/(factory_level * 500k) all * modifier for clerks/craftsmen ratio (and then capitalists, infrastructure etc) I think would have resolved one of my issues.
Immigration is a different mess. I'd have built up a 'pool' of national migrants (say every month). And then split them up in parallel amongst all of the places they might go. So area A has a desirability of 5, and all valid areas have a total desirability of 2000 then area a gets 5/2000ths of the pops. Figuring out how to make a pop a migrant is a somewhat different problem, obviously unemployment is part of it, but they should be willing to migrate to anywhere potentially more profitable, and the number willing to move is say 5% of the diffrence in profitabilities between current area, and national profitability average. (I'd have to test that to see if 5% is a good or terrible number). So a pop in london is presumably on the high end of the average, so chances are he won't move. But someone in ireland might be on the low end of the national profit curve, so he looks at all of the places more profitable than where he is, and splits up and goes along to all of those places (including london) - and even the middle of the USA.
Both of these would retain the pop system in general, but eliminate much of the micro managing. The other problem is craftsmen/clerks promotion. I'd have a single pop that is 'factory worker' with the inherent craftsmen/clerks ratio based on education. Capitalists emerge from these at a particular rate - essentially determined how much over the required goods it is (which itself is a product of productivity and education), or you could pay to promote it. There are other, equally good, if not better ways to do it, but that jumps out at me as what I would have done to Vicky1. Vicky2, well depends how you structure 'pops' at all.
