It took me the better part of two weeks of fairly steady play before my COHs were progressing as rapidly as the computer's with everything set at the easiest level. At all but the extreme level, Destiny allows you to hire a governor to manage the more mundane administrative tasks for you, such as undertaking to build the correct number of academies to support your COH's educational level and ensure that sufficient housing for your population is constructed. You can also choose how much notification of events to receive. Micro management fanatics can leave the game at the default settings, which notify you of everything no matter how mundane. Sensible players will soon decide on which notifications are important, which can be left to the governor, and will check off the notifications accordingly.
Destiny is also extemely flexible in terms of the number of opponents.
You can play against up to eight computer opponents, play against a human opponent via modem, or play against up to seven other human players via a network. Because of the game's complexity, however, I would recommend spending quite a bit of time learning the game's nuances against computer opponents before plunging into multi-player games. Just like your favorite word processor, Destiny offers a timed, adjustable autosave option so that, if your computer freezes up, you lose at most a few minutes of your game. There's nothing unusual these days about a game publisher maintaining a home page for a game where players can find the latest game patches, a message board to exchange ideas with other gamers, and an on-line chat room. Not only will Destiny players find the latest patch at the Academy, the latest on-line version of the game manual is also available for downloading.