First a picture to get you into the mood :)

You are the Emperor, let's say it's a late game and the empire has 200 planets, so your personnel consist of 200 planetary governors, 202 army officers (200 colonels responsible for defending a particular planet and 2 generals), around 50-150 fleet officers (5-9 fleet admirals and 40-150 squadron commaders) plus like 20-30 special officials (ministers, courtiers, ambassadors, inspectors, etc). So we are taking here about 500+ NPCs.

Question is, how to manage them?

Obviously the traditional "select who should do what" won't work here at all (you can have it if you have a game like MoO2 with 4 or 8 "heroes"), the player's mind would overload :)

How it works at them moment. At the end of turn the game spawns an official for every unoccupied spot (no player's choice). All the player can do is fire am official (and then the post will be unoccupied for this turn and new one will arrive next turn, which mighht be worse or better, completely random). I would say it's not that that bad in practice (I put it as a temporary quick system, but surprisingly it has some charm to it, it allows to make decisions without mind meld and gives the impression of an Emperor of a vast empire who don't have the time to control everything yet can get rid of the incompetence).

Now to dig deeper, originally I planned that every planet has like 6 local politicians and the player chooses who should be the governor (so the choice would be restricted to those 6 only). So you don't have a long list of hundreds of NPCs and you thinking whom to put to what position. Yet, I'm not sure if the current system "the court chooses the gevornor for each planet and the Emperor can only order replacing a governor" would not be better...

Another thing is military, the Emperor dwelling into low level internal affairs of military (like who commands which squadron) is not so good. The Emperor should have a lot of saying about the Admiral position but that's it. Squad commanders is not what Emperor appoints, it just feels wrong... A quick solution here I thout of is 2 options (separate for each fleet) "replace admiral" and "replace all officers in the fleet". As for army I have no clue at all.

Imperial court. Court would be a group of people who more directly help the Emperor, a sort of central government. My idea here is that upon audience you are allowed to "promote" any governor (only governors, no military officials) to the court. Such governor vacants the planetary post and moves to the imperial court (I think there would be like 12 Courtiers slots so they would look like in the audience picture above). You can not demote courtier to a governor position, only fire permanently. Maybe you would be assigning them tasts to do (sort of like "ministers").

Ambassadors - dunno.

Note: I'm especially looking for ideas about military officials.

Why not take a page from Crusader Kings 2. Simply put you have a limit (which you can increase in various ways) on how many things you can directly control (IE: 3 fleets of ships, or whatever). You then have subordinates with their own goals/ambitions who you have direct SUPERVISION over. You can directly interact and influence these guys and that number too can increase (or decrease) with decisions. Then they have people under them who you can NOT directly interact with, but can possibly influence the overall group through actions/interactions with their superior, etc.

The theory being if you are emperor of the universe you don't have time to sit down and talk to every planetary govenor, they'd simply be beneath your radar, but a galactic senator? He's worth bribing, murdering, or marrying off to some distant relative!

:D

Another source you could borrow from is a sports sim, like "OOTP". Those have the issue of a large universe of players, of which you only care about a tiny fraction at a time (3000 players, 400 first basemen, but only 7 I might conceivably sign). They mostly do this with lots of filters: "Show me just free agent 1B with above average power, sorted by defensive ability". So if you need a new admiral, you might specify your priorities, see 10 of the best matching choices, and just choose one. Or you might look at the bottom performing commanders and decide who needs to go.


Presumably you're going to need a balancing force, some reason I wouldn't just go up and down the ranks firing any incompetency. One choice is something like an "influence" rating. An officer with high influence is connected to the elite of your empire: a galactic senators son, the owner of some juicy blackmail, or just a really charismatic individual who's won over his peers. Firing or demoting high influence officers is a destabilizing act. Promoting them 'greases the wheels' of your empire, and makes it easier to get your other desires met.


Some interesting mechanics could arise from that: Rather than fire the incompetent, you "promote" them to governor of some backwater world. Or you could click on commanders you want to face active combat: putting the talented in place increases your odds, but putting that really high influence jerk in the center of the attack plan could see his capital ship wiped out and a problem eliminated.

filters

I don't want filters in this game. It does not fit it. I want the epic scale (a lot of planets, a lot of officials) but with simple interface and simplistic feel.

I'm willing to sacriface freedom or go for abstraction if this would allow me to keep the interface simple. I would rather limit player's options here.

So, I would go for dividing the officials into strict classes (civilian, military) and simply allow less officials to choose from (like you have only 9 people to choose from when you are selecting an admiral). The explanation could that it's because of the "rules" or "political situation" or "you are too busy so you merely choose from a set of choices prepared by your advisors".

Overall, ideally I want no filters and even no scrolling (but no scrolling is an ideal situation, not a requirement). I would prefer to not make the player choose from more than 12 candidates at any one point.

I'd be wary of going too epic. I know it's a real temptation! But the problem is is that if a player sees something, they'll want to manage it, and it will become frustrating if they can't. Equally, if there's too much to manage, they'll still try managing it and end up hating the game! It's a real problem with 4X games, where your empire gets so bloated that nowhere really has a unique character any more. I know that this doesn't really answer your question directly, but I just wanted to play devil's advocate and offer a different starting point.