emphasising stuff in cities

I've been finding out lately that the AI makes some utterly bizarre decisions for you when you turn on the 'emphasise x' button. On 'emphasise great person' I ended up with about 6 or 7 priest specialists and no others (and I may be wrong here but Great Priests suck after you've built your holy buildings, I just use them as GA fodder), on 'emphasise production' the city starved itself and still wasn't making the best of its production (I found by doing it manually that I could maintain growth and have more production - it ignored a tile where I had 6 hammers for chrissakes!)

I've also found that even with citizen automation turned off, cities still seem to automatically assign specialists. There always seems to be a few spy specialists knocking about where I don't want them.

lord, help me.

The truth shall set you free, to micromanage more.

You probably had Angkor Wat, making priests very attractive to run.
Some people love Prophets. Others don't. Your computer can not know.

You need to tell the Governor what type of great person you want, if you don't like what he chooses.
Use forced specialists to do so.

Also citizen automation with proper focus and 'good' forced specialist actually help prevent the governor spy-spam.

The govenor assignment of specialists is a mild annoyance. you just gotta learn to live with the MM. But your right, sometimes you open up a city and find that after its grown population, the govenor assigns the extra pop to a spy specialist. actually, it happens rather a lot. For some reason the AI tends to favour spy specialists. I tend to ignore espionage as much as possible, since i find it to be a pretty unfun concept. The no espionage option is pretty rubbish too, and seems like a bit of a rush addition to the patch.

But truth be told, if you want to be good at the game, you should never use any of the govenor options, as they will always make poor decisions. After all its based on coding and algorithms not intuition and intelligence.

You just need to know how the governor work.
I use citizen automation in all my cities, and it works quite fine - i have of course to check from time to time (when i feel like doing it or when a build is finished) and override from time to time.
But i never get any of these annoyances like GP pollutuion with something i don't want (spy...), just because i forgot/missed to look after city growth.

Sure, managing every city every turn by hand is still superior - tho only marginaly and hence not worth the time to me.

I reccomend taking a somewaht mature city on your current game (where you have some pop and slots for any specialist type) and just try different governor settings there to see how it will react. You can mix multiple focus settings and designate what type of specialist you prefer (by clicking + whie the governor is active and hence forcing that specialist).

If just running for economical reasons I would rate specialists:

1. Angkor Wat priest
2. Engineer
3. Spy
4. Scientist
5. Merchant
6. Regular priest
7. Artist

So the auto selection is not bad imo, it's just that it doesn't take GP spawning into consideration.

Force one specialist with the [+] button, and the AI governor will hire more of that specialist.