Do you use the build governor?

[Pep]

Okay I'm noticing a definite (and expected) trend here, no-one uses it, some would be interested in it for babysitting captured cities or new colonies.

What I've done is made it build basically in this order:
1: It builds culture to get the first border pop (sensibly, it only does for cre if the city is culturally pressured).
2: It builds a workboat if needed (this is generally the only unit it will build!) (will whip)
3: It builds growth emphasizing buildings - granary/lighthouse (will whip)
4: It builds a culture building if the city has no culture, unless the borders are already popped and there is no need for culture. (will whip, sometimes)
5: It'll build any old cheap building.
6: A happy build to cure unhappiness. (will whip)
7: A healthy build to cure unhealthiness. (will whip)
8: It builds a courthouse if at least 6 upkeep.
9: It builds a specialist-enabling building if it's running citizens.
10: It builds +exp buildings.
11: It builds any building.
12: It uses build research/wealth.
13: It gives up and trains a unit.

Note that the building order is the "guidelines" it uses. Where I've said "will whip" that means it WILL whip the build. The lack of will whip doesn't mean it wont whip it. It simply uses the AI whipping logic here which is fairly good if slightly on the gentle side.
It will NEVER choose a limited class building, meaning no wonders, no national wonders, no cathedrals. Of course you can still manually get the city to build anything you want.

Some comments:
5. Isn't it a good idea to build a Forge at his point? More hammers for the rest of the building queue...
13. I think it should NEVER build units (Research or Money is better). Specially settlers...

 

[Harrier]

Some comments:
5. Isn't it a good idea to build a Forge at his point? More hammers for the rest of the building queue...
13. I think it should NEVER build units (Research or Money is better). Specially settlers...

I think 13 is there as a catch all - if you can not build Research or Money.

.....

If it gives up and trains a unit can you put in a check to see it it should build a missionary.

i.e. You have a holy city or are running state religion and not all your cities are converted.

Or you have open borders and could convert foriegn cities.

That may be better than building a military unit as you could get income or line of site from said missionary.

Just a thought.

 

[Jaybe]

Nothing bothers me more (in Warlords 2.08 and all previous versions) than the AI founding a new city and then starting out with building a unit that will take 50-100+ turns! Start out getting some culture, damn it!

 

[Lanthanide]

I'm assuming that #6 and #7 would take into account resource bonuses? Ie if you have gold, silver and gems, a forge would effectively give +3 happy and would be better than a temple that only gave +1? Forges should probably get a little extra boost here, even when happiness numbers are equal, to account for the extra production increase they give. I don't consider the unhealthiness of a forge to be a big deal - it's effectively only -1 food, which is a good trade off for 1 or more happiness and extra production.

Will the game correctly score a recycling center as a health building?

What about UBs for different civs, things like the Roman Forum which gives extra GPPs or the Cothon which gives an extra trade route?

I also note you don't have +science/commerce% buildings specifically in the list there - are these just covered by 4, 5, 9 and 11?

It may be useful if when the player is in a state of war, barracks / walls are regarded more highly than otherwise, or possibly swap to a separate build govener that only builds units (and then alternates between best ground/best siege/best mounted). Usually if you were in a war, you'd want to manage what everything was building yourself, but this would help in the situations where you are caught off-guard and forget about checking all your cities builds for a turn or two, having it automatically swap to units would help here. You could even get really fancy and throw in power ratios, so if an opponent (there could be several, so take the worst one) were 2x more powerful than you, then the build governer would try and whip units out, but if they're even or weaker, it would just build them normally.

 

[etherealcat]

People would think about using the governor if they were "rewarded" somehow for their loss of control. A local leader could handle things more efficiently, so what about giving a small production bonus for x turns of uninterrupted use of the governor ?

This sounds interesting. Although the governor sometimes suggests really poor builds, usually the ideas are simply mediocre choices. Surely the local leader would appreciate your confidence in his decision making and this could translate into a bonus of happiness or production.

I dunno... the governor is interesting as a second opinion. Sometimes it prods me into creating more military units. But usually it simply nags me to build the Globe Theater (anywhere) or theaters (everywhere) or some other irrelevant building.

 

[Elandal]

The idea behind the governors is that the lazy players (me inlcuded) don't need to micromanage cities. I rarely run SE because that requires more MM than CE does. I mostly let the governor to handle tile assignments, microing them only in the beginning and later in the game only for my most important cities. Having a build governor that would do something reasonable would be nice - even less MM for me

However, I don't think giving bonuses for using the governors is a good idea. They're meant to lower the amount of MM needed, and if they do well in that, it's enough.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

well a few ideas
I would change # 3 to 11 to
3. Build building with the highest Benefit / Hammer Cost

I'd say the 'Relative Benefit' for the things a building gives for a Generic Governor should be

Growth (Very highly valued)*

Culture (if needed)*

Happy (if needed)*

Health (if needed)*

Production
(Defense)...unsure of the value of this..its real value would vary greatly
Boosts to NET Gold +Science (this includes Courthouses as all they do is increase the NET gold coming from a city)

Allowing Specialists (if Citizens)

All other buildings (+Experience, excess Happy/Health Buildings, excess Specialist allowers, excess Culture buildings) give a benefit of "1" (for this generic Governor)

*Things that should go in the 'will whip' category

Then # 12+13 can be changed to # 4+5

Also it should only build the Workboat if there is no water based threat nearby.

I'd say definitely vote against those who want the Governor to build units, there is already a separate "Military Governor" it is the Repeat build function, something that only works with units.

 

[seady]

To a certain extent I'd be happy if I could setup my buildlists using "show all buildings, future and past" and then have the city automatically start... I'm happy to insert, or force build, or whatever, if the circumstance warrants but most of my cities could use the same list most of the time.

I could use some sort of "switch to war!" mode (latest military units) and "switch to peace!" mode (buildings) but that's about it.

 

[Blake]

Oh by the way the most recent version of Better AI does have this new governor enabled now, try him out and see if you like him. He works much like I originally said he would, but more refined, basically going food/(culture/)happy/production/health and then choosing commercial buildings on merit (comparing like the upkeep saved by the courthouse with the beakers from a library).

Personally I've found it to be a "Must use" ever since I implemented it, the freedom to turn over new and captured bases to the governor greatly speeds things up.

 

[Harrier]

To a certain extent I'd be happy if I could setup my buildlists using "show all buildings, future and past" and then have the city automatically start... I'm happy to insert, or force build, or whatever, if the circumstance warrants but most of my cities could use the same list most of the time.

You can already do something like this.

In a city create the build queue you want. Then press CTRL and a number from 1 to 0 (from the querty keyboard).

In your next city, just press that number and you get the required build queue. You can have up to 10, useful sometimes for different eras of the game.

What would be nice, for forgetfull or lazy players like myself - would to have a default build queue set up in the ini file. Already there for every new game you start.

 

[Julian Delphiki]

Oh by the way the most recent version of Better AI does have this new governor enabled now, try him out and see if you like him.

I tested it around (not a real game, warlords 2.08, ice age standard map, around 4000bc - 0AD), here are some of my observations. Testing was done with world builder - i dropped in extra settlers and observed what was gonna happen. Techs i researched myself.

I mostly planted my cities next to seafood, something like 7 cities and only one started with workboat as initial build, most of them started with barracks (?) (no sailing yet, so no lighthouses). I would have always started with wb. And these cities kept building buildings (nice wording) later.

City that started to build wb was on ice - so it did not have food on land. Almost all other cities had at least some 1 f tiles other than sea. Later i founded city on 1 tile island with seafood. That city started to build lighthouse straight away. Is it more efficient to build lh before workboat?

Only one city build obelisk, but it was also the one that had visible resources nearby. Other city that really needed culture was right next to Tokus borders but it preferred to build barracks/lh/courthouse. I suppose library would have been next, though. Other cities build libraries when available.

It was nice to see my health capped 4 size city to whip aqueduct on its own! Sadistic governor that is . City next to it had also health cap 4 and governator preferred to build settler on there holding it size 3. Aqueduct there too would have made a better choice.

I also let it take care of my capital for a while.. it build temple, courthouse and scout (hmmm..) there. This is of course special case, i would never let governator actually work there .

Governor probably works better when you have most of the building technologies available so this is not by any means a good test, and the only thing that seemed _really_ not right was the barracks instead of workboat. Not sure about the workboat/lh thing. As it is, i can always start the workboat myself and switch to automation after that.

And thank you - i think this will greatly speed up nursing of new lesser acquisitions and late game fillers!

 

[Quagga]

I tried the new build governor in a Build 12-09 game after I had decided the game was lost. I had gotten way too far behind after a protracted war with Monty and Toku, while Asoka, Freddy and Mansa all happily tech'ed away. (Destroyed Monty and Toku got vassal'd by Freddy.)

I turned the build governor on for all cities. It took me a while to remember how to turn it on. The button had become invisible to me after ignoring it for so long.

I have to say that the governor may be a better player than I am -- at least under circumstances when no units are needed. It seemed to be whipping some buildings -- very effectively. A couple times it built a fishing boat. My research really took off. I think it's partly because I was researching old techs, but I was still surprised how quickly I went through the tech tree. Maybe also because all I was doing was pressing Enter!

I lost the game to Space Race (Germany), but that wasn't the fault of the build governor. It looks to me like the improvement in the governor is really dramatic. My strongest congratulations go to the Better AI team for this improvement!

 

[Blake]

The workboat thing is a bit complicated...

The Build Governor Collective will only train one workboat at a time... (this isn't usually but a problem but would be if you WB in a bunch of cities)
It wont necessarily train the workboat where it is needed.
If it does train a workboat, it is needed somewhere it can get to, in other words, if you automate a workboat trained by the BGov it does something useful.
Another way of putting it is that BGov cities will build workboats if they can find an unimproved fish anywhere... it doesn't have to be another BGov city.

I am uncertain how desirable it is for mature BGov cities to help out fledging BGov cities with workboat builds. That's just how the default AI behavior works and I haven't replaced it with special case logic.

 

[Harrier]

The workboat thing is a bit complicated...

I am uncertain how desirable it is for mature BGov cities to help out fledging BGov cities with workboat builds. That's just how the default AI behavior works and I haven't replaced it with special case logic.

Well that is what I do. If a mature city can build a workboat quicker than a new or captured city and get it in place quicker - let the mature city do it.

 

[Julian Delphiki]

It is not always possible to send workboat from another city; existing ones could all be inland (this is when city would start with wb, though?) or missing route to send boat to new city. But as i said, its not a problem to manually build workboat first where needed plus you still need to tell workboat where to go.. governor would need to check distance, build time and the fact if its possible to send boat from city a to city b.

 

[Blake]

The governor already checks by area
if you have an astronomy island, it wont try to send a workboat across the sea.

however he doesn't care much for distance, he might think it okay to send a workboat the long way around a Pangaea (if the top is blocked with ice), that's the main thing which can go wrong.

 

[gdgrimm]

If by "Build Governor" you mean that list of things a city could build, which has a couple of "recommended" things on top, then YES, I do, sort of, use it.

Obviously, if I have a specific immediate need or goal that makes the recommendation silly, I ignore it. But if I don't have any specific build plans of my own for the city, I'll often agree to it's recommendations.

 

[Quagga]

I've been using the improved build governor on captured cities and other marginal cities, such as those built only to claim a resource. It works great and I've been very happy with it. For cities that one doesn't intend to produce units in, it's very nice.

However, there is one aspect of it that I must say is a serious flaw. Under Universal Sufferage, it eats up your treasury! It took me a while to understand what was happening to me. Here I am, trying to build up some cash for a mass upgrade of Grenadiers to Infantry and my cash keeps dropping back to almost zero! In this game, I have several cities running with the build governor, so it was happening almost every turn. Not good.

Here's a couple minor things I noticed about it.

It doesn't seem to prioritize barracks very highly. I've had to interrupt it to get a barracks built when I though I might have to use the city for building.

It built a drydocks on an inland sea (seven tiles or so). The only civs with coast on this sea were my vassals and I. No drydock needed. Wouldn't care, except for the health penalty.

Does it not want to build National Wonders? One of the captured cities eventually became my best science city. I ended up putting Oxford there, but maybe it could have built it there automatically. Not sure. It does seem like it could sensibly place Forbidden Palace, but it didn't try. I suppose there's more room to screw up here than to get it right.

Regardless, the improved build governor is still a wild improvement over the original. Thanks, Blake!

 

[Silver Marmot]

I never even considered using governors. If I'm playing a domination game that I'm bound to win (i.e. I'm approaching the required amount of land and I know that I'll be able to capture enough remaining cities with my military) I usually just click the recommended option for the cities that I don't care about.

 

[Blake]

I've been using the improved build governor on captured cities and other marginal cities, such as those built only to claim a resource. It works great and I've been very happy with it. For cities that one doesn't intend to produce units in, it's very nice.

However, there is one aspect of it that I must say is a serious flaw. Under Universal Sufferage, it eats up your treasury! ...


It doesn't seem to prioritize barracks very highly. ...

It built a drydocks on an inland sea (seven tiles or so). ...

Does it not want to build National Wonders? ...

Thanks for the feedback!

The barracks is a complicated thing... I think I have it build a barracks after food and production, before commerce, so that the city will be ready to pump out units if needed for that... but it's a balancing act, sometimes you don't want a barracks at all.

The dry dock is even more complicated.... I might take a look at fixing this generally.

It wont build National Wonders, this is definitely something better left for the player to decide - since there's nothing stopping you from just setting the city to build whatever you want it to. Obviously wasting NW's would be bad.

Finally Universal Suffrage, I can just disable it for cash rushing, or maybe have it only cash rush essential stuff - granary, lighthouse, workboat.