Wat. All players would have to be awake to be playing in the first place. There's no difference between having a GM or having a player in this case. It's more convenient and less annoying because you have someone who knows everything that is going on doing the turns as they need doing. Instead of a bunch of people expecting one time increment and getting something else. It also can't be ruined by some idiot troll just deciding to never click/always click 5 seconds. As mentioned above, players could get bored while waiting for battles. With a GM they can just go off and do something else whilst the GM and the involved players do the battle. Additionally, having the GM control time actually allows for limited play to continue whilst one of the players is not there. You still haven't told me why you want to eliminate the GM.
Well obviously I want the GM gone because every single one of his functions that you mentioned is something that would be better if automated. Automating these things would be both more convenient and less annoying.
Having the turn automatically process when everybody clicks "ready" is more convenient and less annoying than having to wait for a third party to wake up and hit a button. The "GM" (whoever has the host computer) actually
could just go to sleep this way if all he was doing was hosting the game and not actually playing. If you can't see why automating this is still an improvement no matter how small, you're either slow or being deliberately obtuse.
As for getting different increments due to a player either picking something else, having an interrupt, or fighting a battle, you could just have everybody whose increment is still pending receive a prompt (without unpausing their game) when a different increment happens asking them if they want to gain control back and do anything. If you ignore it, nothing happens and the game continues treating you as if you're waiting on your increment. That way you can step away and do something else while you wait for whoever is fighting or dealing with an interrupt to resolve whatever is going on. All you'd need to do is give the game an alarm sound that plays when minimised to force players to be aware that an interrupt is going on and they have stuff to do.
Another feature would be to force increment syncs at certain times, e.g every 6 months or at the end of every year, which would pause every player.
Even having limited play while somebody is away could be solved by having a feature for somebody to flag themselves as absent (or have the host do it) so that the game ignores all of their interrupts. This would last until the player reconnects to the server. This requires near-zero GM oversight.
And why are you playing games with idiot trolls? Mentioning idiot trolls is an absurdly hypothetical scenario because Dominions 4 is very rarely played with idiot troll randoms off of the internet, rather than people you know and trust not to do stupid things. I'm not even sure if current
A4x """multiplayer""" is played with a high concentration of idiot trolls.
The need to control idiot trolls is basically the only thing that can't really be automated, and even then it can be solved by just letting the host have a button to kick players and turn their faction into an NPR. The host could actually do this for players who decide they don't want to play anymore, or similar to Dom4 have it automatically set up to cede players to NPR control if they don't submit another turn before a set time.
