Civ engineers

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by Dragonlord
Back on topic: I find the Civil Engineers to be very, very powerful. They finally make it possible to realistically build improvements in all those totally corrupt cities I take from the AI on Domination. Well-irrigated cities can support up to 5 or 6 CEs, sometimes allowing me to build a Temple in 4 or 5 turns, instead of 60!

My previous strategy had been to disband draftees in those cities and rush-buy the rest, now there is finally an alternative!

Grüße in's Schwabenländle!
(Greetings to Suabia)

I may use any specialists very rarely, since to do so especially if I've taken over a city from an enemy requires a good supply on luxuries. This becomes very difficult when playing on island or archipelogo maps (the later are the ones, I prefer).
So, the CE *may* help a little bit, but is far away from being a good solution.

 

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by ltcoljt


I was thinking of the AI's strategic overview of the game, not the simple mechanics of managing one city. The task of navigation you cited before is infinitely less complex than the most basic strategic level thinking required to play a civ game.

Well, my reply was based on your reply to a posting regarding the governors. Those are city-based and for that it is technically possible to make them behave in a much more senseful manner.

The addition of good city management for all cities would increase the overall performance of the AI as well.
I'm pretty sure that even most of the human players show some deficiencies in managing the overall aspects of the game. This, of course, depends very much on the overall size of the game. It definetely is easier to do so on a standard map than on a huge or a modified ultra-huge map, where you easily have to maintain 100+ cities.
In those cases a good governor would really be helpful for both, the human player and the AI. For the human player it speeds up the game since he doesn't have to visit half of his towns every turns, thus making his turns much shorter. Why it does for the AI should be self-explanatory.

 

[Rellin]

I'd think for most players, it takes a long long itme till they realize how poor the Govenor actually is, and by that point they are advanced enough at playing the game, have read some articles on how to effectively manage your own happiness and productions, and start to try it out on thier own, once they do, it is really almost impossible to go back to using the govenor at all because it is infact so poor at what it does. The only thing you can rely on it to do effectivly is to keep your people happy, but even that it does inefficiently because it uses entertainers instead of the luxery slider, which drastically reduces a cities production.

 

[microbe]

Originally posted by Rellin
I'd think for most players, it takes a long long itme till they realize how poor the Govenor actually is.

I agree governor is not smart enough. However, it's not as dumb as the AI when it is at the hand of a human player. For example, you can still control how to improve your tiles and that effectively makes a better governor. And as this thread suggests, if the game could provide more control in the governor dialog, it could be better.

The reason people use governor is not that it does better, but that those people don't like playing a micromanagement game when they have a lot of cities. Sure you could squeeze every tile of your empire when you micromanage, but it takes so much longer and I myself don't enjoy spending 10+ the time for that benefit. In any case, I could still win without too much micromanagement. It's just a trade-off.

Same for automating workers. I have to automate some of them in the industrial age when I get so many workers. Are they doing a smart job? Probably not, but there is just not much left for them to do wrong and saves so much time.