Note: I have not played the demo yet.
Micromanagement can be interesting and fun if in my point of view if it is not overwhelming. So this thread gives some suggestions regarding micromanagement.
Multiplication of the stuff to manage: Most 4x games seem to put micro management on the cities, the problem is that's the element I would not allow any micromanaging because the amount of cities to manage increase with time making it harder and harder to manage. I remember in Orion 2 refusing to colonize to prevent me from managing new colonies.
Some will say that this can easily be overcome with an artificial intelligence, but I think you always end up doing it manually because of the following rule: "If people can micromanage, they will micromanage". I remember in PTO 2 where tactical battles did not give the same results than the fast resolution battles. So in the end, I ended up watching all the battles to get better results.
What I propose is that micromanagement should be done for elements that does not get multiplied with time. For example, your spell casting or management of your tower/covenant could use some micromanaging because what ever your empire size, you will always have 1 to manage. You could also micromanage your heroes by giving them magical items and leveluping them because you will never exceed more than 3-5 heroes per player.
Harder Adjustment: In Master of magic, you can adjust the amount of farmers VS workers and the taxes. I remember in a game of MOM, in order to destabilise a great empire to try attack him, I decided to cast a famine spell in each of his cities and corrupt all the land tiles around his cities. In therory, he should be lacking of food and his army would have shrunk making him easier to attack. But in practice, nothing happened.
Why, because the players can adjust the amount of food they produce by reducing production. So all the work I did above had the impact of reducing the amount of workers which slowed down it's production. But it never destabilised his army.
So by making players not be able to micromanage a city, it would force the player to react and try finding solutions to the problem which in this case is the lack of food. Here are a few example:
Buy food with gold as 2 for 1: It's penalizing but it can help temporarily.
Improve technology: Increase the farming technology to increase the quality of the output.
Farming: You could have an action like "Trade good", "housing" which convert half your production as food. It paralyse your production for more food.
Raise taxes: You could raise food taxes which could also raise unrest as a price for survival.
So you see, the fact that you cannot simply adjust your production forces you to find different alternative to some temporary or permanent problem.
By the way, In MOO2, I found it so stupid and annoying to constantly shift all the population from research to production to build an new building and when everything was done, shift everybody back to research.
Else, if you really want players to be able to adjust stuff, make sure it is applied globally to the whole empire. For example, raising taxes is something applied globally. In this case you would micromanage your empire rather than micromanaging each city which is better because you will only control 1 empire.
