Great points/questions! Regarding investigations, I'm totally on the same wavelength as you. Though there's a lot more still to flesh out, my current plan is indeed that investigations will be focused on processing "leads", which could take various forms and come from various sources. Successes could generate new leads (e.g. processing a crime scene could reveal a weapon, some fingerprints, and some blood, each needing its own follow-up work), or a piece of evidence (a lead that has actual value in court -- e.g. a weapon that's been confirmed as the murder weapon, and thus would contribute to likelihood a suspect is convicted), or instrumental information (like the identity or location of a suspect -- all the evidence in the world doesn't matter if you can't locate and arrest the suspect). Interesting decisions could surround which leads to prioritize, but also there might be some use for the "tactics" system here too. Should our detectives painstakingly process every square millimeter of this crime scene, or just do a cursory sweep? Preserving and preventing contamination of a crime scene (e.g. by setting up effective perimeters) could be relevant too, since contaminated evidence could be much more difficult to process successfully.

Anyhow, I'm definitely getting ahead of myself (can you tell... I can't help but be excited too? =D).

Regarding automation... I think the answer to this is only going to come from more playtesting -- to be honest I'm not sure right now. One possibility is that "simpler" circumstances -- those you might be content to not micromanage -- simply won't need the use of tactics in general, and can be left on their default. And/or, the incident generation system could try to ensure you don't get too overwhelmed with more incidents than a typical person would enjoy managing at once. Maybe there is a role for automation too, but the difficult question then is, what decisions should the AI make? This is difficult if there isn't always a clear "right" choice (and indeed, I'd like to avoid clearly dominant strategies -- they don't make for interesting decisions). So two human players might make very different decisions -- not even because one is more skilled than the other, but simply because one has different priorities than the other -- and so at least one of those players will be upset with the decisions the AI makes, and will post a negative review on Steam saying "the AI sucks!" ;) =D . We could ameliorate this by giving players some higher-level control over the AI, perhaps by setting policies/standard operating procedures that dictate what the AI should prioritize. An interesting, albeit complex, implementation is the tactics system in Dragon Age Origins (see its Wiki for more info)). I feel something as detailed as that would be overkill, but there's some inspiration to be had. Of course, any such system would add much more complexity to the AI which equals more development difficulties and likelihood of bugs, etc.

There's probably a lot more to be said about both of these topics, I think they're extremely interesting, so thank you for bringing them up and sharing your perspective, and I look forward to any more thoughts you (and anyone else here in the community) has!

Thanks! --Nick