Annoying - Automated cities rush buying?

[varus]

I have researched this to death, I really have, and I can't find anything.
Regardless, one of you will no doubt be able to post a link directly to the information I need and make me feel ********, but here goes anyway:

When I automate production in a city, that city seems compelled to spend every nickel and dime in my treasury rush buying whatever it's making at the moment.

I want to save up a little gold now and then please!
There has got to be a way to disable this rush buying without UN-automating the city... please tell me there is.

Note, obvious simple solutions are:
Switch out of a rush buy civic - duh... OR:
Disable the automated city.


Obviously I realize either of those would work, but I want to keep my suffrage for the occasional buy here and there that I choose to make, without needing to switch civics. I also like to automate production in big commerce cities of my larger empires because it almost doesn't matter what they are constructing after a certain few things are built. However, once I have enough cities the constant "WHAT TO BUILD HERE" popup is quite annoying, particularly when I dont care what's being built.

Certainly there is a way to have the best of both.

 

[Balderstrom]

Can't say I have automated production in a city. Though I do select the emphasis icons: at times.

Instead of automating production, why not just make a manual stack of buildings to make?
Grainary, shift+click + Forge, shift+click + theatre, shift+click + temple.

The AI is really bad at deciding what to build...

 

[varus]

Well I do all my micromanagement for most of the game. However, towards the middle of the modern age I often have a large empire with many cities, most of which I really dont care what they're building because they're useless as hammer cities and they already have their banks/libs/unis/ what have you.

What annoys me is the constant popup of "what do you want to build here".

I really only want my cities asking me what to build when they are production cities, and are making useful things.

There's got to be a way to disable rush buying in auto-cities. There has to be.

 

[Balderstrom]

Set them to build culture, or gold Then you can crank your research%% back up. Or culture if they're near other civs.

Especially if you don't care what they are building, they would definitely be better off not adding useless buildings, and just buff up culture or gold.

Otherwise I really don't know of any way to limit rush-buying when under that civic & automated production.

Honestly though, if the AI can't be limited from rush-buying seems like a bug...

 

[Mik1984]

Well, serious players don't use automated cities anyway...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Except that when the game's long been in hand and you just want it to end, there's no need to have to micro 40 cities just because the game is too stupid to prevent automated cities from rushbuying like idiots. What if I only want to micro 10 cities - production cities - while the rest just build infrastructure?

Now granted, this has workarounds...like telling a commerce city to build all the multipliers in queue which may well never end. Still, the fact that the game doesn't have an option to handle something so simple is pretty stupid and it bothers me...even if I'm rarely in US when I'm not just making units with every single city while trying to end the game.

 

[gilfan]

Assign your preferred general purpose build queue to a hotkey. Get into a modern era game with all the techs (you can use worldbuilder), found a new city, and queue up every building in the order you want them built (Granary, forge, lighthouse, factory, etc). When you're happy with the order, press control-#key. That build order will be saved on that hotkey in subsequent games until you overwrite it. It will skip buildings you don't have the tech for. From now on, in all your games, just found a city, press your assigned key, and move on. Whenevery you get a new tech that unlocks a building, just go through your citys and press the #key again

 

[PibbZ]

Well, serious players don't use automated cities anyway...

This does not answer his question, nor does it make you sound like a pro', i would refrain from useless comments.

On subject though, i have also been losing money to something i couldnt identify, this might be the answer. Though i never use auto-building until modern age anyway, but thats where the gold usually piles up.

 

[AfterShafter]

Well, serious players don't use automated cities anyway...

We're not all as hardcore as you I'm afraid.

As for the subject, it is a bit silly that there is no option, but just setting your cities to build wealth will solve it for you. You'll never get another pop-up, and it'll up your gold income to boot.

 

[Spitefire]

Poke, Poke,

Civ 3 had a better auto manager system allowing you to customize what each city focused on or the entire civilization, just goes to show that the folks makeing civ games are makeing worse and worse products with each incarnation, civ is suffering a bad case of the dumb blonde syndrome (pumping loads into GFX and doing nothing to improve game play/interface/most game flaws made worse and more flaws forming the pumped up GFX also drives up the needed CPU specs 10 to 100 times more then it needs to be)

 

[oranges]

While an option to turn off rush building would be nice, it really shouldn't be too much of a bother to use either the already suggested wealth/science/culture building or queuing of production tasks. Give each city (or a group of cities) five or six things to build and you'll be free from pop-ups for quite a while.

Spitefire, I couldn't disagree more about CIV games not improving. I've actually passed on part 3, but according to others' comments very few would go back and it's not because of graphics. I would not go back to CIV 1 and 2 and it's also not for fancy graphics. The game is definitely becoming more complex and the dumb blond stereotype is completely misplaced. The fact that a number of things could be improved (please, oh please, give us the BUG interface options in the next incarnation, for instance), does not necessarily mean the game has not evolved in a very good way. All our various grievances aside, I think the predominant opinion is that CIV 4 is the best the series has offered so far. Given that I consider CIV 1 and 2 among the best games ever in their own right, that is an enormous compliment from my side.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Assign your preferred general purpose build queue to a hotkey. Get into a modern era game with all the techs (you can use worldbuilder), found a new city, and queue up every building in the order you want them built (Granary, forge, lighthouse, factory, etc). When you're happy with the order, press control-#key. That build order will be saved on that hotkey in subsequent games until you overwrite it. It will skip buildings you don't have the tech for. From now on, in all your games, just found a city, press your assigned key, and move on. Whenevery you get a new tech that unlocks a building, just go through your citys and press the #key again

This is actually VERY good advice. You can even specialize cities half-!@#edly this way!

Some hotkey setups:

- Barracks/forge/factory (power if you want) (production)
- Library/university/observatory/lab (science)
- Market/bank/grocer/mall (wealth)
- One with religious temples/monastery spam
- Common unit combos for you

You can slap granaries at the start of these too, or monuments

Put those 5 at like 6-0 on the hotkeys, and leave the others 1-5 for in-game setups that you can change on the fly. This is incredible advice, I'm glad I bumped into the thread. My games might be 10-20 minutes faster now =P.

 

[ICNP]

I still see no point in automating production... Why not just spam units or build money/beakers?

Thanks for the hotkey idea but I like the micromanagement although it does get annoying when I'm planning out what I need to do next turn and I get sidetracked by "What to build?"

 

[Airefuego]

OK - so all the solutions put forward involve NOT automating cities. Do we assume there is no way to avoid the auto-rushing if cities are automated?

I never automate cities either, because I found these cities also auto-whip, in slavery. Really annoying.

 

[varus]

It would seem as though there is no way to disable the auto-rushing.

That is most certainly bugged.

 

[Mik1984]

I just often don't care to finish games which have been already won and playing on is a formality and ending the game would take more than one evening.

 

[CivMonger]

could have sworn there was an option for this in the interface. Maybe I'm getting confused with an auto-worker option or something though.

I know personally I use build queues and when I want a lot of units I'll hit alt-unit and/or alt-shift-unit, putting one or two units in a build queue that loops. Nothing says good times like 19 exp modern armor ever 2-3 turns.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

It would seem as though there is no way to disable the auto-rushing.

That is most certainly bugged.

No its not bugged... it would be prefereable if it was different (I'd like the option to put certain cities on auto-buy even without auto-build.. ie unit producers), but once you go into auto-build you get both.
auto-buy and auto-whip
But both of those only happen in specific situations
such as important growth buildings, Wonders, buildings that you are producing really slow, emergency units, etc.



The ideal system I see is
settings like "auto workers leave improvements"...
"auto-rush buildings",
"auto rush units",
"auto rush Wonders",
"autorush all autoproducing cities"

possibly with separate autobuy and autowhip options

Because auto buy allows US, FS towns to be almost as good productionwise as a CS SP Workshop, and you get the multipliers (Banks) earlier than Factories with no unhealth. (and it allows transfer of that production throughout your empire)