City Governors

princeofamber

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
13
Location
New York
I haven't seemed to master the use of city governors. Ideally, I want them to maximize production and commerce without letting the city ever go into disorder due to unhappiness. But those commands seem at odds with each other. I'm also not sure what the "manage production" command actually means. Any thoughts?
 
I would like to give you an answer but I have never used the City Governor. I'm a control freak.
 
Originally posted by Clubber
I would like to give you an answer but I have never used the City Governor. I'm a control freak.

I just don't trust them. They might defect.
 
I don't use em, I will queue up stuff but that's it, I don't automate anything, not even my workers.
 
I don't like to use govenors either, I always have a game plan in mind and I know exactly the units I want etc. Par examplé, I always build two spearmen for each new city and upgrade them through the cycle. I never stray from thi as it always seems effective. Does anyone else do this? Any road up, the thought of some computer-controlled "govenor" dictating what gets built in my cities gives me the willies! I do however automate my workers when I've finished all my roads and get steam power. It's so much easier to just let them run round railroadalising for you and clearing up ghastly pollution.
 
I am guilty of micro-managing also - but it requires so much time! I figured there must be a better way (or at least a slight improvement) than visiting the domestic advisor screen almost every turn!
 
I've tried letting the city governors run things in my last couple of games. It didn't work out too well in those games, but I still want to give the governors a chance. I think if you set them up right they could do a decent job.
 
I only ever let them manage city moods. Production always seems to build things in a different order to what I would like. The option of choosing the next build without having to enter the city (like civ I/II) makes things quicker though.
:goodjob:
 
Agree, governors are good for managing citizen moods. Also, you can switch on the Build-no-Wonder options for every city, since thats definitely something that should be in control! You can build them anywhere btw, but the governor will not suggest it. The governor isn't the smartest when it comes to suggesting next builds anyway.
 
Back to the 1st half of your question, I think they are at odds myself. I've used them to manage moods occasionally but it doesn't seem to work the way I think it should. However, governors do a good job for managing unhappiness and also re-picking the cleaned up polluted squares.

Basically, I've seen no difference when I pick different "emphasis". For instance, I expect when I pick "emphasize production", that the governor will pick squares with high production over squares with high food and high commerce. I've found that's not the case & they always pick the food squares.

An easier tactic for me is to semi-micro-manage by going to the city and double-clicking the city itself in the city-view screen to re-optimize the workers. Moods are auto-handled upon the double-click and the worker distribution is usually good, if not one or 2 adjustments away from perfect.

Anyone with good results by picking "emphasize production"?
 
Anyone with good results by picking "emphasize production"?

Nope, never really worked with me, either. I think the problem is, that the governor still wants the city to grow, so it still selects some food squares (so the city will grow faster than say 1 person per 20+ turns for example). This is fine, but what if I don't have hospitals yet, and I'm already at size 12?:mad: That's my main problem with the governor,. I say just have enough food to maximize the city at 12 and fill up the granery, then put it so there is -zero growth- or producing like one extra food. Then when I get hospitals, it can go back to growth again.

Managing moods works pretty good, it focuses on happiness, so if you micromanaged, you might be able to squeeze out a few more shields or gold by having more unhappy people working. But riding that happiness/unhappiness borderline is too risky for me, because you can lose a turn of production if you aren't watching them closely, and the more happy people helps your score, so I like it that way. The only problem with the governor on managing moods is that it doesn't work when you have a large change in happiness (like changing luxury rate from 30 % to 10 %, I'll have tons of cities go into disorder, even while using the governor).
 
To get a grasp of any CivIII self-management idiocy and total incapability, let a city choose it`s tiles in despotic gov after poprushing (click the center squar). it will select 2 food no production tiles over 2 food, 2 prod, 2 trade squares since you might irrigate and change gov, while the other tile is minde and will never give more food than the other :confused: :confused: :aargh:

sema goes for the governor - tell him to keep people happy and he will react after they are in disorder - F***! I check at end-turn and never have disorder!
 
Ok I've been try out the city governors more and I'll give them a luke warm thumbs up. They are most useful if you use "never" and "all cities" liberally on the production menu. I was really starting to like using the city governor until they did something dumb towards the end of the game. I set them all to produce only offensive units, and what do they build? Cavalry! I can build modern armor and the governors want to build cavalry. :spank:
 
However, governors do a good job for managing unhappiness and also re-picking the cleaned up polluted squares.

I haven't observed this behavior. In fact, I find I have to go back to the city after the pollution is cleaned up and reassign workers.

The action when hitting the center city square usually works for me. But the problem I have is that I have to periodically go to every city and hit the center square.

This is tiresome and I would like to see a solution. A macro perhaps? That would be like hitting the center city square on all of your cities at once?

I guess if I can get the governors to do this, then that would be enough, but I haven't been able to.
 
Originally posted by Gavrilo Princip


I haven't observed this behavior. In fact, I find I have to go back to the city after the pollution is cleaned up and reassign workers.

The action when hitting the center city square usually works for me. But the problem I have is that I have to periodically go to every city and hit the center square.

This is tiresome and I would like to see a solution. A macro perhaps? That would be like hitting the center city square on all of your cities at once?

I guess if I can get the governors to do this, then that would be enough, but I haven't been able to.

Turning on "Manage Citizen Moods" does exactly what you asked for...
 
Some things that would make Governors much more helpful:

1. An option to set the default specialist setting. While managing citizens moods, the Governors will only allow enough entertainers to keep the city from going into anarchy. I like to keep my people happy, so this doesn't allow me to have access to the nice things governors do, like put people back to work after pollution is cleaned up. As it is, the Governors seem to do the opposite of what I'd like with specialists. With my tax rate high, everyone becomes scientists, and with the tax rate low, everyone becomes a tax collector.

2. An option to disallow the Governors to change specialists. I like to set my specialists on a per city basis, but with Governors managing citizens moods, they change the specialists to what they want every single turn. Again this keeps me from being able to turn them on, and I have to manually reset workers who turn to specialists when pollution inevitably shows up. Having both option 1 and 2 would be nice, but either/or would do.

3. If 1 and 2 aren't feasible, then an option to keep working on polluted squares. I always clean up every pollution square every turn anyways, it's just annoying to have to go into the city screen and put the land back to use. If I had specifically set up a city to avoid the continual starvation loop, then it just adds more headaches trying to get it right again. Not only in the affected city, but often in surrounding cities with overlapping tiles as well.

4. Being able to give the Governors a build queue that every city should follow. Often in the late game all I want to build in a vast number of corrupt cities is an Aqueduct, Marketplace, Hospital, and Mass Transit, then switch to Wealth. I can set them all myself quite easily, but it does involve a lot of extra clicking. Especially on Large/Huge maps. Once an important city improvement becomes available, it would be nice to be able to instantly insert that into the build queue in every city.

5. Not really Governor related, but a late game issue. Being able to lock a cities population growth. Half the cities eventually get to a point where there is only 1 more food per turn available. Once they grow, they starve back down and do it all again. The starvation notices become annoying, and it's hard to know when a city is legitimately starving because of a terrain change of some sort (pollution, global warming).
 
The one thing that would really help would be the mood-managing kicking in when the town grows, not when it goes into unrest. Until that`s included in a patch - I won`t use them!
 
4. Being able to give the Governors a build queue that every city should follow. Often in the late game all I want to build in a vast number of corrupt cities is an Aqueduct, Marketplace, Hospital, and Mass Transit, then switch to Wealth. I can set them all myself quite easily, but it does involve a lot of extra clicking. Especially on Large/Huge maps. Once an important city improvement becomes available, it would be nice to be able to instantly insert that into the build queue in every city.

There is a way to save a build queue and use it again. It isn't done through the city governor though. I don't remember what the command is, but when I get a game up I'll look for it, if you haven't found it yourself or someone else hasn't posted it by then.
 
Ok here's how you do it. Queue up all the units you want in the Q in your city zoom-in window. When the Q is set, hit shift-Q to save the list. Then when you want to produce that sequence of units again (in any city) pull up the Q window like usual but press 'Q' and your list will be copied into the production Q for the city. You can only have one list at a time though.
 
Top Bottom