auto city management?

[teoks]

does the game automatically change your city management each time u enter its city screen? i do no have any of the "turn on emphasis" buttons switched on.

i entered my capital city to check if i had already built an airport (i can't remember exactly because i have 32 cities ), and when i entered the city screen, my food production just shifted to a big red "starvation!" even though i obviously had more than enough food. i checked the automate buttons and none were turned on. i then enabled and disabled each in turn and no changes occured to my city food/production. it seemed that the game just decided to throw my population to attain max specialists, even to the extent of causing starvation. i had to manually click on the unworked squares to whip the slackers back to work.

and now i don't even dare to enter city screens anymore which cause me big management headaches since this happens almost each time.

is there any way to turn this off?

 

[fightcancer]

The problem you're describing, I'm not aware of its existence. I do not think the game auto switches your production when you enter the city screen.

Another possibility is that a neighboring city may have started using squares that this city (which went into starvation) was using. I've seen this situation often in my Civ 4 games.

 

[kamigawan]

There are a number of reasons why resource squares seem to suddenly change without notice:

1) As mentioned, shifting of borders between yourself and a neighbor, or between two of your own close cities that share resource squares

2) A barbarian or enemy unit from another civ (that you are at war with) moves onto that square...you will no longer be able to use that square, and AFAIK, you have to manually reset gathering there later once the enemy is gone.

3) Clicking on a city itself while already in the city screen causes the AI "governor" to instantly redistribute resource gathering in that city (if all emphasis are turned off, the governor will attempt to roughly balance all resources). To avoid accidentally doing this, try entering the city screen by clicking the city name, rather than double clicking the city itself. However I have never seen a governor allowing starvation.

 

[Shillen]

I'm thinking you clicked on a tile by accident, sending the city into starvation. This also turns the governor off. Even if you click the "emphasize" buttons the governor is still off and no changes will be made. You need to click on the turn on governor button. I could be wrong but that's my wild guess. Because I've never seen the governor behave that way. If it can prevent starving then it always will.

Oh another possibility. If you have specialists "forced" (this means they have a yellow border around each specialist) then the governor will never remove that specialist, even if your city is starving. You'd need to unforce the specialist.

 

[teoks]

hmm now that u talk about it, yes i believe the specialists were kind of "locked" - i had population 10 and only 7 tiles were being worked on with 2 priests and 1 engineer sitting behind. but when i click on an unworked square, the game would just shift one worked square to the new one while leaving the specialists untouched. the only way to make the specialists do some manual labor seemed to be having to manually click the minus symbol beside them to make a citizen available.

what is the yellow border around the specialist thing about?

 

[Shillen]

If you click the + sign next to specialist to add a specialist it will put a yellow border around the first specialist. This means you're forcing the game to use that specialist no matter what. It won't remove it until you remove it yourself. Likewise if you hit the + sign again it will put a yellow border around the second specialist, etc.

 

[Grogs]

One thing I've noticed is that when the governor is managing adjacent cities (sharing some of the same squares) it will sometimes emphasize one at the expense of another. For example, in my last game I had a size 14 city working a coastal square with crabs (+4 food.) A greek town (size 2) 3 squares away flipped, and when I turned the governor on there it picked up the crab square and sent the larger city into starvation.

 

[teoks]

actually, the city was my capital and i'm pretty sure there wasn'y any overlapping squares with my own cities, and it being smack in the centre of my empire, the closest other AI city was probably something like 30+ tiles away so that is out too. and while i mentioned my specialists were kinda "locked", i have not messed with the plus and minus signs before as i was still new to this concept. maybe its the double-clicking on the city thing that kamigawan was talking about as i always do that.

now in another game, i had one of my frontier cities build a factory and i realised it was going to take like 47 turns so i went in to check, and realised the governor decided to place all workers to man the food tiles lol. again this was without any emphasis buttons switched on. i guess ill stick to doing things manually for now. back to civ3 style MM