Delegation to AI managers

The player assigns a subsystem (a city, sector, colony, fleet, department, or set of planets) to an AI controller and sets objectives and constraints: a focus, a budget, permissions, and policies. Each decision interval the controller runs the same decision logic the game's opponent AI uses, restricted to that subsystem, and issues actions on the player's behalf. State owned: assignment, goal settings, and permissions per delegated unit; the rest is read from the subsystem. Inputs: subsystem state and player settings. Outputs: build, research, production, or movement actions. Canonical forms: Stellaris sectors, which a 2016 dev diary justified with a core-world limit and in which sector governors develop planets and build mining stations under a player-set focus, Hearts of Iron IV battle plans executed by AI-controlled generals, automated workers in the Civilization series, Football Manager staff responsibilities, and automated traders and miners in X4: Foundations.

The player moves up a level of abstraction and manages managers. Delegation trades control for attention and enables play at empire scale. When the AI does something dumb it feels like losing control; when it works it feels like governing.

• granularity of goals: single focus, weighted priorities, or explicit rules
• permissions such as may build, may demolish, may spend reserves
• transparency: whether the manager explains its choices
• manager competence relative to a good player
• incentives to delegate: hard limits on direct control versus voluntary convenience
• ease of reclaiming control and per-item overrides

• Managers that underperform a competent player turn delegation into a penalty that players avoid at all costs.
• Opaque managers make unexplained choices that players cannot correct without micromanaging.
• Managers that are too strong remove the game: the optimal play is to delegate everything.
• Forced delegation through control caps is widely resented; Stellaris sectors were reworked in later updates.

• Delegation allows simulations far larger than one player could micromanage, shifting play to allocation among managers.
• Partial delegation creates principal-agent tension: players watch managers and intervene at thresholds.
• Delegated units pursuing local goals can conflict with each other, such as two governors competing for one resource.

• Can language-model managers take natural-language mandates (keep morale high but never let the treasury go negative), explain their tradeoffs, and remain competent?
• Does delegation to a learned policy trained against the game's simulation make managers better than humans, and what is left for the player if so?