Governors

I have never used the governors and I was wondering if anyone else does. During the period of anarchy between government type switches, it would be nice to not have to switch every city to max food production and then back after the new government is established.

Can this be done with the governor?

That should be doable - go to the governor, set him to "emphasize food" (or whatever it's called) and apply it to all cities. Then after your spell of anarchy, repeat, except this time you deselect "emphasize food".

I used to use the governor to control citizen moods, but nowadays I usually only use it on corrupt hellholes I can't be bothered to manage.

When I play the governor seems to know when its anarchy. Without that I ask him to do it he emphasizes food during my anarchy periods

I only use the governor. I like having huge empires but I don't like micromanaging. The governor can be pretty handy, but it still needs more detail imo.

I believe all you have to do is set the governor to 'manage city' and it will handle that problem. I've messed with the emphasize food tab and checked up on cities and nothing ever changed ... so i dunno if that will help. When I hit anarchy usually at least 1-2 cities starve once and the rare time twice with the governor running and emphasize food is not clicked. Of course there are times when lots of cities starve for one turn because of the poor terrain they are on.

Hopefully in Civ 4 they make a smarter, more detailed, governor. Right now there are times when i'm -15 or so for gpt and i know i could get it fixed by micromanaging a bunch of my cities ... but i find that part of the game extremely boring. That and having to make friends on huge maps with 30 other civs

Never used a govnerner because of problems such as this

I would say using the governor is like automating workers. It is clearly a bad idea, but it saves a LOT of time, and can, therefore, make the game more fun for some people (like me).

You may want to look at it like a 1/2 difficulty setting. Having trouble on Monarch while Regent is too easy? Try Regent with the governor on!