Is there a way to stop the governor from using citizens as spy specialists ?

It is fairly annoying. :cry:

Force another kind, or use emphasize food/commerce/hammers combos to produce the desired result.

Or, turn the governor off and watch for growth.

Often, spies aren't that bad anyway.

Often, spies aren't that bad anyway.
Polluting a pure GS or GM farm sucks, though.

Polluting a pure GS or GM farm sucks, though.

Not really, 90% of the time you simply get a faster GS/GM. And there are cheap golden ages for otherwise useless great people.

If you assign one GS/GM, the governor will never make spies until you run out of slots.

I was hoping for some mod :(

I have to cycle through all cities every 5-10turns to reassign those citizens. Maybe I suck at using the empasize buttons. I'll try harder next game.

Bug mod warns you when cities grow, but in the end game I am overflowed by warnings so I always miss it.

How can you "turn off" the governor? Do you mean that one box with the yellow outline in new cities that goes off once you change anything? My specialists still get changed :( but are you saying that the game only reasseses(is that a word?) specialists when cities grow? I had been doing the random city cycling too...very annoying...

I don't use the automatic governor. I was talking about the default placement for new citizens.

I believe they change when a new citizen pops, but I think it might happen also when you improve a terrain for some reason.

Pretty sure I saw a fix for spy specialist weighting in one of the BetterAI threads. Apparently it had some weird code and it got changed to be more in line with selection of the other specialists.

Edit. From BetterAI changelog
- Smoothed and rebalanced AI's weighting on espionage yield, previously was either equal to production (!) or 0. This issue caused the overemphasis on spy specialists by governors.
- City govenor weighting of espionage yield now responsive to player's positioning of espionage slider

Not really, 90% of the time you simply get a faster GS/GM. And there are cheap golden ages for otherwise useless great people.

If you assign one GS/GM, the governor will never make spies until you run out of slots.
Well, 10% of the time, I get annoying spy specialist and it doesn't come faster since I would rather have had another Caste System scientist which brings me to my other point. Most of my games, I run CS eventually to get GP fast. Since you can have unlimited scientist specialists, there's no way to run out of slots. Yet I always have accidental spies in my GP farm thanks to computer assignment at growth (which I failed to notice).

If you assign one GS/GM, the governor will never make spies until you run out of slots.Is this true? would be very helpful but i seem to remember that i assigned a gs or gm and still get spy specs later. But i'm not really sure, could well be that i deassigned it later and only then got the spy spec.

This doesn't help you against that first spyspec but makes managing things a bit easier.
Often the comp assigns a spec when you don't want that, messing around with the governor , max food helps here but has often nasty side effects. I tend to watch cities closely if i have less than 10, once i have 20 or so i don't mind that much.

Is this true? would be very helpful but i seem to remember that i assigned a gs or gm and still get spy specs later. But i'm not really sure, could well be that i deassigned it later and only then got the spy spec.
There's no way that's true. At least not in BTS 3.19 with BUG mod (what I use). No matter how many scientists I assign, if I don't look at the city every time it grows, there's a 50/50 shot that the computer will assign a Spy in my caste system scientist GPFarm.

There's no way that's true. At least not in BTS 3.19 with BUG mod (what I use). No matter how many scientists I assign, if I don't look at the city every time it grows, there's a 50/50 shot that the computer will assign a Spy in my caste system scientist GPFarm.

Or the CPU assigns a priest specialist in my GArt farm when I am going for a cultural vic.

I think the 'assign until run out of slots' only works when the governor is active, and CIV calls the specialist you assign "1 locked" instead of just 1. If the governor is off, the 'locking' is off, and so is the correct assignment of new specialists.

This needs testing, every setting that makes managing specs easier without creating a total mess of other things is a huge +. Will begin by reading TMIT's article about all this.

I think the 'assign until run out of slots' only works when the governor is active, and CIV calls the specialist you assign "1 locked" instead of just 1. If the governor is off, the 'locking' is off, and so is the correct assignment of new specialists.
So in order to prevent the computer from assigning the wrong specialist we have to turn ON the governator? Crap. I hate automating anything.

Can someone just post how to do this "locking" thing? I've never been able to do it right.

You just assign a specialist as normal, and it will have a yellow box around it (not 100% sure if this is a BUG mod feature, probably not). The governor will never reassign such a specialist, even if this means death by starvation. Though I don't think I've ever seen the default governor reassigning specialists that I've specifically assigned (except, for example, if the city dips in unhappiness so the specialists get removed automatically for a while).

Pretty annoying sometimes if you force an artist in a size1 city to pop borders with Caste and forget him there for a few hundred years... Not that I'd ever do such a micro-blunder... :rolleyes:

You just assign a specialist as normal, and it will have a yellow box around it (not 100% sure if this is a BUG mod feature, probably not).
??? I've never seen this yellow box in my games. Do I need to do something before assigning a specialist in order to get the yellow box?

I'm not actually sure when it appears; I'll probably be embarrassed soon by someone who actually knows how this stuff works. :crazyeye: I guess my main point was that if you manually assign a specialist, it's "locked" for most purposes (i.e. just lowering the working population through starvation/unhappiness/whipping can remove it).

got ya.

I have seen the behavior Silu describes but never figured it had to do with locking. Indeed the city can starve in this case if you don't remove the specs. Some room for exploration here, i definitely don't know about how this stuff works :lol:.

Shoot them. They are all untrustworthy scum.

Seriously tho - if you assign a city governor, and assign another specialst (it will appear in a yellow box, to indicate that it's forced) the city governor will only assign that type of specialist (or none), so you will not be surprised by those spy's

People should dig old stuff from time to time before posting :D

Yeah... tried that... no yellow box... still get spy specialists. Hence the need for further discussion.

Oh, I seee... Refar forgot one tiny detail in this quote.

This is it:

Enable city governor
Shift-Left click on the specialist of choice

The governor will assign specialists of that kind only until the slots are filled.

Ah ok, that helps, thx.

Oh, I seee... Refar forgot one tiny detail in this quote.

This is it:

Enable city governor
Shift-Left click on the specialist of choice

The governor will assign specialists of that kind only until the slots are filled.

:bowdown: Thank you! I knew there was something missing.

I found in my games that, with the city governor on, it's enough to click on the plus sign next to the desired specialist. Then the governor automatically reshuffles the specialist allocation, getting rid of the annoying spies.