It is absolutely fine to play manually and guide your territory conquers by the value of bonuses and recipes. From lowest to highest, haven't seen any map yet, that was bad while using this conquering method :D
Sometimes, of course, you can see a hospital / army camp nearby on "higher cost ground", so gonna grind for longer, to get them before conquering new territories.
Going for that automated stuff now sucks a lot of APs for little benefit, like, really, it is almost the same as click - wait - click manually.
The beginning minimum of each automated advancement is too low, I am not ready to waste my aps on them. I find it better to increase incoming profit for mercenaries, money, armies, which will speed up the overall completion of any map, than beginning to waste those on auto-stuff. :p

i just found a map where i wish that i'd conquered it differently, but without revealing 150 territories with a powerup (probably was more than that many territories on the map anyway haha) i would never have known where the best hospital and mine was haha

it's an interesting math puzzle to try to guess which would be better, grinding towards those best ones the fast "route", maxing tech and then taking the fast route, or just hitting territories in order of troop size and hoping that the bonuses and recipes give enough benefit overall to finish faster lol

Order of troop size is usually bad for me. Because there are lots of small-small-small-EXTRA LARGE territories. But when following size of bonuses you actually can understand approximately how big army is needed to conquer it.
For example, you see 20m - 24m - 40m - ??? - ??? territories. Looking at their bonus, you can understand how big are those 2 hidden ones. If you see like 400 c/sec, then they are probably 100-120M each. If you see 3k, for example, then either both with ~400-500M, or 1 with 800M and 1 of size 100-200M.
Especially now, on bigger maps (requiring ~2 weeks to complete) it is common thing that bonuses have such situations, where lots of small territories are hiding a big chunk in the fog and if you would just blindly go for smaller territories, you might get into situation, where you conquered all territories from bonus except one or two, but those require like 10hours of waiting to conquer, while those smaller required around 20 minutes. Something like that, not very scientific explanation, but it is just my personal experience! :DDD

It was fun on one of the maps, there was a 350 c/sec bonus hidden inside a circle of 2-4k territories... and I couldn't find a recipe for smelting nickel bars... just guess where was it hidden? lmao :D now I look through all the bonuses, paths, shortcuts etc. before planning a strategy for beating the map. (when I can, I always use fog just in the beginning of the level, it is not really useful in later phase)

Just got in such situation :D Went for 3k bonus with fastest route through "highlands", found super big hospital and two army camps, in that 3k area probably will find that much needed tin can recipe (not really sure, will find out tomorrow) :D
https://i.imgur.com/IDkEZ69.png

Edited 12/4/2020 21:22:34