I have gotten to the point in Idle where AP is basically meaningless, and I spend most of my time just letting Auto-Advancements run and upgrading artifacts. The Auto-Advancements are great for this, but there a few changes that I think would make them more useable since many of them can be detrimental if accidently left on. Here are my thoughts:

Applies to all:

• Add sliders to adjust how much you want them to be set at. Sometimes you may want 100% AUAC, and sometimes you may want 5%. As it currently stands, if you upgrade something too much, your only option is to reset or deal with it.
  
• All Auto settings to be level specific. If I am multi-levelling Hardened China and K-PX, I will most definitely want different Auto settings active.
  
• Move toggles for Auto settings to the top of the AP list. It is a hassle to scroll all the way down to find them. Additionally, by doing this, the treacherous upgrade button should no longer be next to the check box to activate.
  
• The rest of my suggestions are minor, but these three would be the biggest improvements to the Auto system.

Auto-Conquer (AQ)

• AQ currently targets the lowest value territories once they can be targeted OR it targets the largest territory it can if you gain a large amount of armies (such as with a Cache or Mercs)
  
• Perhaps change AQ to target by armies required to take. If you have Hospitals greater than the value of a territory (ie 0 armies needed) then it should conquer those first. Similarly, it would factor in those affected by JS.
  
• Add a second toggle for Joint Strike only. Make it only take a territory if JS applies to it (if possible). Territories like those in Trisk don't have JS available and would be targeted normally.

Auto-Smelt

• I love this one and never turn it off. Only possible upgrade would be to make it cap at 0 rather than 10.

Auto-Upgrade Army Camps (AUAC)

• This one is great early in a level to have at a high percentage, but as the level progresses, it is useless or even detrimental.
  
• Add a setting to "Upgrade Camps to ________ cost." I tend to stop upgrading camps that cost more than 1B. A setting like this would allow it to function early in a level, but taper off later on.

Auto-Sell

• This one can be tricky because it can screw you over if it sells something that you don't need now, but wanted later.
  
• Add toggles to sell Ores/Alloys/Items seperately.

Auto-Upgrade Mines (AUM)

• Easily the worst of the bunch. Can ruin you worse than AUAC, but at least AUAC upgrades something useful.
  
• Add a setting to "Upgrade Mines to level ___________." Although the Army Camps have hidden levels, so it would be hard to implement, the Mines are very transparent. I would probably set this to Level 4 with 5% of money on hand. This would allow my Smelters to function without ruining me.

Auto-Purchase Techs

• Fine as is. It can be irksome if it upgrades something that you don't want, but overall it is convenient.

Auto-Draft

• Easily one of the best once you Max it. It is basically useless before then.
  
• Maybe tweak the settings so that it isn't completely garbage before you max it? Otherwise, it is fine.

Auto-Mortar

• I take back what I said about Auto-Upgrade Mines being the worst.
  
• Until Mortars are made to be useful, this is a waste of AP.

Auto-Market (AM)

• The recent update changed how AM functions. Before, it would buy from the Markets to complete Tech and synergized well with Auto-Tech. Now, it only buys the most expensive item in a Market until it's cost reaches the BASE sell value.
  
• Make it so that it factors in actual/boosted sell values. Not the base.
  
• Add toggle to switch to Tech mode instead. (ie buy materials to upgrade Tech regardless of price.)

Auto-Upgrade Hospitals (AUH)

• Similar to AUM, add a setting to "Upgrade Hospitals to level ___________." This would prevent wasting as much money upgrading the first Hospitals (the useless ones) to max level.

Auto-Purchase Mercenaries

• I don't have this unlocked yet, but I do not see any issues with it.
  
• Maybe add a slider to spend no more than XX% of your total money each time?

Anyway, those are my thoughts. What do you guys think? My Applies to All suggestions are pretty essential to make them useful in my opinion. If I am lucky, Fizzer will see this and incorporate a few of my ideas. *proceeds to do the Fizzer summoning dance*

I have also been wanting basically everything on this list (and more). Some of the suggestions are on user voice, so give a few votes if you see ones you really like.

https://warlight.uservoice.com/forums/77051-warzone-features?query=Idle

The difference between the time (session age) it takes me to finish manually, and the time it takes my autos to finish is huge. I've also had quite a few mishaps with opening the wrong level with autos still enabled. I've found that, in general, the autos tend to do more harm than good on the regular levels if left enabled, except at the very beginning. The exceptions to this are auto-draft and auto-smelt, which I nearly always use.

There are other features I would like, such as:
1. Suspend or reduce auto-conquer while a hospital is upgrading (continue capturing free to take territories during this time).
2. Upgrade hospitals when the value of the upgrades is expected to cost less per army than the most expensive mercenary. This can be an estimate. For example, upgrade a hospital when the following equation is less than the most expensive mercenary would be:
upgrade cost / (new distant savings - old distant savings) / number of territories left
3. Allow me to set different defaults for battles, regular levels, and challenges.
4. Provide an interface that lets me create rules for when to use autos.

On first glance, I would support (nearly) all of those points. I only have two Auto-advs right now and I usually don't use them (except for battles and challenges) but they are really far too simplistic.

For example, the Auto-Smelter could make use of more options. Z already mentioned some options for the Auto-Conquer that are really interesting (another option would be only auto-conquer if covered by hospitals to at least xx% (if set to 100% it would only conquer territories that wouldn't cost any armies). And just like your attack strategy in battle can be chosen from four given defaults, the Auto-advs could at least have several pre-configured options how they behave. Or - as I said before in some other thread months ago - let the player script the actions, given some basic programming skills. But I digress, what I wanted so suggest for the Auto-Smelter, would be which recipe the auto-Smelter chooses next. Currently it just chooses the "most expensive" one (so probably the one with the highest sell value), but there should also be options for "most profitable (per sec)" and at least "needed for (next) tech", too.
As I said, each Auto-adv should be configurable to some extent. I wouldn't mind if those options were bound to the level of the Auto-adv. For example a 5% Auto-Conquer can only use the current dumb approach, but if you've reached 15% you can enable "only with JS", with 25% you can toggle "not while hospitals are upgraded", and so forth. And definitely add a slider such that you are able to reduce the Auto-adv level even if you maxed out the adv.

Slider is definitely needed.

And also we need to be able to choose to turn off auto-advancements in Idle Battles.

Currently I have a bunch of auto-advancements not unlocked simply because I don't want them to hurt my battling.

> “I have gotten to the point where AP is basically meaningless…”
> “…the treacherous upgrade button should no longer be next to the check box to activate…”

Which is it? ;-)

Sliders are absolutely priority #1. Tweaking auto-conquer so it defaults to filtering joint strike territories from low to high, then non-joint strike territories from low to high should absolutely be priority #2.

I agree with essentially all the suggestions but recognize it’s a one man dev team trading off clan wars with new levels with everything else. Both these things should absolutely be in the next sprint cycle though, the rest is just nice-to-have.

In terms of the visibility stuff, I think the proper fix here is a HUGE one and it involves caches/camps/markets/etc being procedurally generated so the maps are different every time. Realize this is a massive change but is probably the single best change in terms of player retention I can think of.

In terms of the visibility stuff, I think the proper fix here is a HUGE one and it involves caches/camps/markets/etc being procedurally generated so the maps are different every time. Realize this is a massive change but is probably the single best change in terms of player retention I can think of.

While you always have to be confident that the level generation algorithm will produce useful maps, Fizzer's level generation algorithm can't be too bad currently. At the moment there are a limited number of maps and as often as Fizzer feels that a re-generation is necessary, he (in theory) can check all the generated maps manually before publishing them. If each attempt of a map would look differently, he wouldn't be able to check each variant anymore. So, while commuting to this step means that he has to trust his own algorithm enough to make decisions on its own, I would think that the algorithm is already in good shape to accomplish that.

And... I would actually like that. I can imagine re-doing levels to feel a bit repetitive. Sure, it would make different attempts less comparable, but then (1) the visibility advs would actually be useful, (2) all players would be on the same level, whether you know the level by heart, or you know a guy who knows the level or you are a new player to WZI, and (3) this would be the perfect opportunity to also add what I mentioned a while ago, that you only see bonus rewards where you have at least one border to one of the territories of this bonus.

I agree with all you've proposed.

Here is my top wish list for auto-advancements:
1) Add a slider for all auto-adv.
2) Differentiate between levels (i.e. enable activating different auto-adv. on simultanously played levels)
3) Add a max cost for auto-upgrades (particularly for army camp and hospitals, but the same applies to mines which i don't use)
4) Use boosted sell values (including all alloy/item value advancements and artifacts) instead of base sell values as criteria to auto-purchase from markets

Nice to have:
5) Possibility to prioritize w/r to spending money (e.g. hospitals > mercs > army camps > mines)