Factory manager

[Arakash]

If the automated system is implemented well there's no reason for people to have a problem with it.

Ive found people just do anyway. Many are uncomfortable with having part of whole of their game automated. This is just my personal opinion as a Gamer who has played and read about several games that use it.

I agree with you on adding other optional automation into the game, but i think production automation is a far more likely place it might actually be used. I dont think you can really add on optional automation options to most of the game at such a late stage, but perhaps in one area i think its more practical.

However, the important thing for any automation like this to make it less efficient in some way than the player so using them remains totally optional. That's the main reason the system needs to make its decision based off the results of the previous turn because the player can't do any better!

I dont think there is really any need to worry about giving people motivation not to use the system, by intentionally making it less effficent/cost etc.
AI is rarely able to achieve the exact same positive results as people and the vast majority of the time, if you have a really specific narrow idea of what you want, a person can do it better than an AI.
So using your comment, you said that

The thing about the system I suggested is that it could potentially save the player a shed load of money but focusing production in the factories closest to where the sales are.

I highly doubt it ever would. IMO you would be hard pressed to find an AI that is more efficient than a human manually micromanaging everything. (Unless its something extremely straightforward, which predicting sales and production numbers certainly isnt)

This is basically what happens in Distant Worlds (which i mentioned earlier).
All sections of the game can be automated, with a ton of choices on AI behaviour and the like, but if you look on the forums, you will find that most (probably all) people are of the opinion that a person micromanaging can do a better job. The idea really is that the AI is competent, but certainly not highly skilled.
I can give an example from my own games, where i start out with a lot of micromanagement, but when your empire becomes much larger, such massive micromanagement of colonization/construction etc becomes time consuming and tedious, so i leave it to the AI while i micromanage fleets/war.

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As an aside, we should discuss this on IRC it might be easier since our posts are getting very long

There is a link in my signature if your interested.