Building Wealth/Research - a nice trick

[rfcfanatic]

Tired of city governors messing around with your tiles every time when you order them to build Wealth or Research? Here is the solution - turn off citizen automation by using that button on the lower right part of the city screen. On the screen below the automation has already been disabled:



Citizen automation must be disabled before you start building Wealth/Research. Here's a step-by-step description of the problem.

1. Let's start with a city that builds a normal project - an unit or a building. Citizen automation is ON. The choice of workable tiles makes perfectly sense:



2. Now let's switch to Wealth. Citizen automation is ON. As you can see, everything gets messed up by the city governor. As few hammer tiles worked as possible and the CG has even assigned scientists



3. Let's fix it. Insert a normal project into the queue before Wealth. Everything looks normal again. Citizen automation is still ON:



4. It's time to turn citizen automation OFF

5. Now when citizen automation is OFF, we can remove Lighthouse from the queue. Everything looks now as it was on the very first screenshot.

As a conclusion - the problem of tiles getting messed up is caused by citizen automation which is enabled by default. When you see that button glowing, the automation is on.

 

[Robert FIN]

Terrible!! Are you tellin' me that my idiot governors have always messed my tile choises when building wealth/research !!?? That's such terrible, horrible and catastrophic thing !! Anyways.. Thanks for sharing this, I'll have to use this !

 

[tijup]

An other way to quickly check for that Citizen Automation, is to use the "F1" screen.
On the bottom left, there's a drop down menu, select the 2nd kind of status.
(sorry, can't be more precise, I'm at work, and don't have Civ4 installed.)

There, you will see the specialist status for each town, and a "C" in one of the
column. The "C" mean that the Citizen Automation is activated.
Just double click on the city name, desactivate it, and voila ;-)

I found that a few months back, while pestering after Civ4 which kept creating
spy specialists in cities. I was wondering what that "C" was for, since I got it in
some cities (newly conquered mostly) and was not present in my old cities.

Hope that helps

 

[Tristan_C]

I dunno. Riverside mines are nice tiles but if you can get a GS off that quickly while delaying the onset of — I'd say the automator has a point.

 

[elmurcis]

When you build wealth, governor try to work best science output (because thats the point of building wealth.. to get research engine on )..
And you play as PHI civ (2 scientists.. 6 GPP/turn.. but its 12, so 2x), so in very short time (from screenshot about 17-19 turns) you will get great scientist.. Your capital (most likely) has Great Lighthouse so there is some chance that next GP will be Merchant.. nice but safe GScientist still would be better idea And that will give you back much more than maximum 19x8 (extra gold you get from building wealth if you won't let change tiles) + difference in turns that you can run on 100%.. thats around 200 golds profit vs Great Scientist
/sorry if anything wrong... just some math and analysis
Enjoy that Earth map good position /
p.s. I can add that emphasize production (that hammer button) is thing that Civ really do right and I almost never micromanage tiles with that button on (city will use best production at happy cap or if building wonder, workboat or granary, but will grow fast normally). Some things in game really are done well

 

[Ghpstage]

The governor when building wealth/research is utterely moronic, favouring food so heavily as to work unimproved grassland, or in your case a farmed plains, over a grass mine..... but I have no clue why its assigning specialists
I don't think the govenor focuses solve this even.

 

[rfcfanatic]

Yes, Earth map it is Played it for testing some strategies on Prince.

If Munich were a low-production city, preferring scientists would be an easy decision, but choosing whether to run scientists or work mines in a hi-production city is strategically always a tough choice to make

I also tested the F1 button that tijup recommended and which brought up the Domestic Advisor screen. I guess the learning of new control keys of civ 4 never ends



I guess I'm lacking some mod (BUG maybe), but I can't find the specialist status controls anywhere. But what's strange is that there's something to the right of the "Producing" column that doesn't fit to the screen and there isn't a horizontal scrollbar either. But I can still sort that column.

 

[tijup]

ops, sorry, I forgot about that, I use BAT since last year, and BUG way before that.
I don't know from which of these two that function come from, but I'm pretty sure
that's from BUG.

 

[s.bernbaum]

ops, sorry, I forgot about that, I use BAT since last year, and BUG way before that.
I don't know from which of these two that function come from, but I'm pretty sure
that's from BUG.

Yes, it is from BUG. BAT adds graphics changes like new flags and unit appearance varying among empires.

 

[Kjotleik]

What happens if you choose to emphasize production (the middle button in the 2nd row) before starting to build wealth? Will the governor still take citizens away from production-tiles?


Yours Sincerely

Kjotleik of Norway

 

[rfcfanatic]

What happens if you choose to emphasize production (the middle button in the 2nd row) before starting to build wealth? Will the governor still take citizens away from production-tiles?


Yours Sincerely

Kjotleik of Norway

Hmmm...I have tested it and sometimes it does but most of the time it doesn't. It seems the background mechanisms of building Wealth/Research are stronger than Emphasize controls.

 

[Patchface]

Good tip, thanks.

 

[dankok8]

I'm guessing that same happens when you build culture...

Terrible indeed great find crazy I never noticed it.

 

[Manco Capac]

Vranasm asked to look into this once and I found out when doing a process (that's how it is called when building research, wealth or culture out of hammers), the value of hammers deplete in the code and that's why the tile choices look funky.