Micromanaging multiple war theaters?

[Rigman]

I'm having physical (read: not strategic) difficulty micromanaging wars that have multiple theaters or fronts, or when I wage multiple wars at the same time. I come from a board gaming background and have little interest in RTS. Is there a way to autopause when hostiles first enter a predefined radius or something like this? I'll be carefully watching for crossed swords or movement facing in one place and not notice some hunter stack pop out of fog and wipe one of my sieges--even though I have reinforcement stacks positioned near the seige and am managing the FoW so that I could see anyone approach from two provinces at least.

But I'll be focused on another area and get the end casualty popup and goto see my backup stacks just sitting there watching

How do other people handle this? Or just accept a certain level of "interface" mistakes? (though the AI would never not notice such things...) i like the bottom right radar, but all the ship spam makes it difficult to use...

 

[bly08]

There's a popup you can turn on for when a battle starts, but no popup for when your army is about to be attacked. The only thing you can do is hotkey multiple armies and spam them like for RTS. There is a bare minimum amount of mechanics that's required for blobbing efficiently but nothing compared to MOBAs or RTSs.

 

[braunschweig1]

I'd recommend playing on slower speed.

 

[Sfan]

It's not about the speed, you pause almost every day if you play a 5 front war. My worst nightmare so far is the one time I fought against a coalition involving most HRE states, Denmark, Savoy and the remnants of a Mingplosion. Denmark carpetsieging Russia, while the minors field 40k stacks because that's 1780 and they stackwipe my siege stacks if I'm not watching because I'm checking which battle I should reinforce in China. A complete disaster, it took me 4 hours to win the war, which took less than 10 years in game.

Create pop up pause for your armies arriving, but besides that there is not much to do. Pause every 2-3 day and check movements on minimap. If red dots get closer to green dots check. Take coffee. Relax. Breath. You'll do it.

 

[alexti]

I'm having physical (read: not strategic) difficulty micromanaging wars that have multiple theaters or fronts, or when I wage multiple wars at the same time. I come from a board gaming background and have little interest in RTS. Is there a way to autopause when hostiles first enter a predefined radius or something like this? I'll be carefully watching for crossed swords or movement facing in one place and not notice some hunter stack pop out of fog and wipe one of my sieges--even though I have reinforcement stacks positioned near the seige and am managing the FoW so that I could see anyone approach from two provinces at least.

But I'll be focused on another area and get the end casualty popup and goto see my backup stacks just sitting there watching

How do other people handle this? Or just accept a certain level of "interface" mistakes? (though the AI would never not notice such things...) i like the bottom right radar, but all the ship spam makes it difficult to use...

Very accurate observations. I don't think there's much that can be done about it. There are options to pause on certain events (battle begins, battle ends, army arrives to the province, enemy starts sieging etc...). Unfortunately, there is no way to pause on enemy entering into a certain radius, or the enemy in FoW starting/changing their move. So basically many concurrent wars are painful. Slow speed and frequent pausing (and focusing on important fronts and accepting that you will miss something elsewhere) are about the only tools.

 

[Soulburger]

One small tip, don't forget to pause during a battle. It's human nature to focus on a crucial fight and lose track of your other units. That is probably my number one reason I have units ganked is because I was caught staring at a fight which took weeks to resolve.

 

[Rigman]

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Much appreciated.

 

[atwix]

Is there a way to autopause when hostiles first enter a predefined radius or something like this? I'll be carefully watching for crossed swords or movement facing in one place and not notice some hunter stack pop out of fog and wipe one of my sieges--even though I have reinforcement stacks positioned near the seige and am managing the FoW so that I could see anyone approach from two provinces at least.

enable popups for military and combat. it helps a lot. also, don't overspread armies whie sieging, and position other stacks near your siege amies, to reinforce.

below snip of PU guide shows how (forget the PU references).








In message settings select "all" tab and enable the popup and pause for every herald possible for *every option" in the "to me", "from me", "interesting" and "other" categories.. You can select unpause also for each popup you get. Then you will get the popup, but game won't pause. In many cases, this isn't good idea. Like when battle starts, when army arrives and whatnot.

Then, in the window above the map buttons select your interesting countries. I usually select whole Europe, since you can't get PU over a country that isn't in your religion group. The result is that you can perfectly see when a new king comes to power, or when an event takes place that kills an heir of a country.
If you want to fine-tune the message settings without disabling stuff you don't like:

You can enable certain message types only for interesting category and other types for other. Select your interesting countries, and you will get the messages selected in "interesting" tab for those nations you made "interesting". All the other nations will go under "other" category, and you can enable/disable whatever in that tab.

As for the messages in the message box: if you click "send to log" in the message settings along with popup, you get both. But I never use the message box above minimap, as its WAY to easy to miss stuff there. But if you want to use it, set the according message types to "log". Up to you then if you want popup and pause for that message type as well. This can be handy when you accidentally click a popup away you didn't read. If its important, and if you set important stuff to show in the log as well, it will also be listed there.

You will never miss anything important happening in the world again.