Handing your nation to an AI steward, and how much of it you keep · Operator: Chenyjunny
한국어 (Korean) · All guides & articles
Delegation is the 🤖 button. Press it and an AI takes over running your nation — moving armies, taking neutral land, signing treaties, spending your gold, and ending your turns — until you stop it. It is there for the long province scenarios, where a hundred small decisions a turn is more clicking than the decisions are worth, and for when you want to watch the world play itself out.
▶ Play nowMost of it. You do not get a toggle for each behaviour, because the right answer changes every turn and a switch you set on turn 3 would be wrong by turn 30. The steward handles, by reading the current position:
Stance is the steward's foreign policy — how willing it is to start a war. All five defend you; they differ in when they attack.
Never declares war. It will still fight back, expand into neutral land, and do diplomacy — it just never opens a front. Use it when you are behind and need to consolidate, or when you are playing for an era victory and want the army only for holding ground.
Attacks the weakest non-allied neighbour, but only when it holds a clear 1.5× advantage in total strength, and only while it is fighting fewer than two wars. Cautious and hard to overextend. This is the stance to leave on if you are not sure.
Attacks on an advantage as thin as 1.1×, and will open a new front while already at war. It conquers considerably faster and it will get you into trouble — multiple simultaneous wars is exactly how a position collapses. Best used when you are clearly the strongest power in your region and want to close the game out.
Refuses to attack the leading power at all and keeps it placated with non-aggression pacts, while aggressively eating everyone else to climb to second place. This is a genuinely clever stance and it exploits the diplomacy system: the coalition mechanic means the visible leader collects everyone's hostility, so being a strong second is safer than being a weak first. See the diplomacy guide for why.
While you are third or lower on territory, it attacks aggressively to climb. Once it reaches the top two, it goes cautious again. A catch-up stance — the right pick when you have fallen behind and a careful game will just lose slowly.
Your ministers — prime minister, defence, foreign affairs — propose the big decisions: changing stance, declaring a war, joining a coalition against someone.
This is worth trying even if you would never delegate otherwise. It removes the bookkeeping — the fifty small economic and diplomatic clicks a turn — and leaves you exactly the part that is a game: reading a border and deciding where to hit. It also changes what difficulty means. Instead of "the AI is stronger", the challenge becomes "how well do you fight", which is a much better place for the difficulty to live.
Deliberately, it is not playing at full strength. The steward runs with a throttle: on roughly 30% of turns it skips its attacks entirely, gathering troops instead of using them. It still builds, still does diplomacy, still defends — it just conquers more slowly than the engine is capable of.
This is intentional, and it is a design choice worth explaining. An unrestricted steward beat the player's own results comfortably, which makes delegation the correct move rather than a convenience — and a game where the optimal play is to press one button and watch is not a game. Throttled, delegation is a real option with a real cost: it plays a solid game and it will win for you, but a player paying attention beats it. You will sometimes see it sit on an army for a turn. That is the throttle, not a bug.
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