Do you use the build governor?

[Quagga]

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

I think it's better that it just doesn't cash rush at all. By the time one is running US, speeding any of the builds suggested probably isn't critical. Better to have the player intervene than have the treasury depleted at a critical moment.

Another thought: Never use more than, say, 25% of the available treasury to complete a building. No, I guess that won't work either. The first city will use 25%, the second 25% of what's left...

 

[Julian Delphiki]

I usually just click the recommended option for the cities that I don't care about.

Then you should really try BetterAi governor - old one (and the recommendations) was bit mentally challenged , trying its best with good intentions in mind but failing inevitably. I think new, young, sporty governor is buffing himself with steroids to get everything out from you cities .

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

My opinion would be to disable it; whipping only affects one particular city whereas US affects your whole empire - some of the cash you have been collecting for army upgrade, newest shiny wonder or just for some wines for your thirsty people might suddenly disappear :/.

 

[Harrier]

I think it's better that it just doesn't cash rush at all. By the time one is running US, speeding any of the builds suggested probably isn't critical. Better to have the player intervene than have the treasury depleted at a critical moment.

The exception being, if you build the Pyramids from Masonry and choose US. Then you are extremely unlikly to have any towns (+1 hammer), so the only reason for adopting US is to cash rush.

So why not put a cap on the amount of gold used for rushing instead.

It has to be an arbitary figure for the AI. Something like:

a). On the turn a switch is made to US - store 1/4 of the current gold level. Then ensure it never goes below that level, by cash rushing - in any future turn.

Example: amount of gold on adopting US is 800, therefore never go below 200 when gold rushing.

or

b). On the turn a switch is made to US - store 1/4 of the current gold level. Then ensure it never goes below the sum of the stored level plus the current income, by cash rushing - in any future turn.

Example: amount of gold on adopting US is 800. Current income per turn is 50 gold, therefore never go below 200 + 50 when gold rushing.

For the later game, you could disable this feature once Democracy (or some other suitable tech.) was researched - if you did not want to rush the earlier buildings etc (granary, lighthouse, workboat. etc.) at that period of the game.


Know doubt Blake has a better formula.

 

[Blake]

Okay I'll probably go with:

Rush only if:
1) It's an essential growth enhancing build. By default these are Workboat, Granary, Lighthouse.
2) Rush only if the gold is surplus and above 15x that in the coffers - ie if it costs 100g to rush, you must have 1600g...

They might still siphon off some cash you wanted to rush a wonder but at that rate they shouldn't be stealing any reserved for unit upgrades. Often later in the game I just build up like 4000 cash in reserves and I wouldn't really mind if the governors get their grubby paws in that because it's pretty much there for rushing stuff and upgrades.

edit: I also want to note that the Build Governor is intended to be a competent and conservative city manager. He doesn't necessarily know best so you shouldn't feel reluctant to insert your own builds, or to rush what he is building. His objective really is to avoid screwing you up, like he tends to keep more population on hand than is strictly optimal for if you wish to switch to something expensive and rush it, or switch to units and poprush a bunch out. And like how he doesn't build National Wonders, because that could screw up your plans. But you shouldn't feel reluctant to order a NW built if it makes sense to do so, he just isn't empowered to make that call regardless of how good an idea it might be.

 

[HardCoder]

Actually I want to know if even a single person uses it *laughs*.

I've used it occasionally, but not in a while, when spamming cities late in the game.

On the one hand I'd say it's not all that useful, but on the other it seems to work for the AIs, so in reality it can't be sucking all that bad.

 

[HardCoder]

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.

I freakin' hate maintaining ocean resource tiles with workboats, to the point where I've stopped even using them for now. (Ever since seafood madness went away it's not nearly as big a deal anyway.) Gotta admit, not having to worry about boats being pillaged is a relief especially when very little can be done about it when you have have a less-than-large navy. The AI just keeps on sending triremes or whatever and you can't see them coming, and units garrisoned on them get sunk anyway. It's a petty nuisance IMO.

I despise this part of the game and would be happy to see any kind of useful workboat automation, especially if I could have them automagically fixed after a war. Anything to keep from going through: "did I have any seafood tiles? are they pillaged? let me open up this city and start a couple of workboats ... now repeat for every coastal city ... now move the workboats to the resources ... oh drat another war."

The only thing that seafood is really handy for IMO is a coastal city with a bunch of hills and/or as an easy way to run a few specialists. But although the huge piles of bread are great, the rest of it is too un-fun for me.

 

[Julian Delphiki]

I despise this part of the game and would be happy to see any kind of useful workboat automation, especially if I could have them automagically fixed after a war.

Just keep some automated workboats ready on your nearby cities, they will fix damages automatically after the war. This why i usually build some spare boats.

 

[HardCoder]

Just keep some automated workboats ready on your nearby cities, they will fix damages automatically after the war. This why i usually build some spare boats.

Huh! I build spare boats but I didn't know that automating them would Do the Right Thing. Thanks!

 

[Blake]

Not only does automating workboats do the right thing (mostly), but also in the next version of Better AI if you automate a workboat on or next to a presently unconnectable seafood, the workboat will camp that spot and hook the seafood up the moment it's possible (ie by expanding borders or researching Optics). This means you don't lose a turn by having the workboat hide in a city until the seafood is ready, it can always move one space and deploy. It's a cute little feature I just couldn't help but implement.
(The workboat will still sail away if it finds something ELSE to do, like running away from a maurading barbarian galley, or if another seafood somewhere else becomes workable...)

 

[GenMarshall]

I never touch the Governor option. I prefer to have full control of my production.

 

[Cump]

I tried the build manager in CivIII, but gave up on it quickly. I haven't used it at all in IV and am not likely to. Build queues are useful, however, and a really useful thing for speeding up game management would be if I could select several items directly from the "build next" pop-up that appears after a city has finished a build job. It is slow to have to go to examine city in order to set up a build queue.

 

[Pinstar]

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 ?

Master of Orion III was thinking of doing somthing like that. They called it IFPs or Imperial Focus Points. The idea is that you as a supreme leader can do anything, but being only one person, you can't do everything.

That would mean you could only issue so many direct orders per turn. Everything else would have to be trusted to a local governer. In fact, instructing the governer how to act 'Build culture... build science" would take up a point too.

However that, along with just about everything else cool in planning was scrapped to make MOOIII rush out unfinished.

Now applying the idea to Civ, that would be interesting.

 

[Greybriar]

Ah, yes--Master of Orion III. What a disappointment it was. But that is a topic for a different thread.

Do I use the build governor? No. I have not used it in any of the Civilization games.

 

[gdgrimm]

Master of Orion III was thinking of doing somthing like that. They called it IFPs or Imperial Focus Points. The idea is that you as a supreme leader can do anything, but being only one person, you can't do everything.

That would mean you could only issue so many direct orders per turn. Everything else would have to be trusted to a local governer. In fact, instructing the governer how to act 'Build culture... build science" would take up a point too.

However that, along with just about everything else cool in planning was scrapped to make MOOIII rush out unfinished.

Now applying the idea to Civ, that would be interesting.

Yeah, I was really looking forward to that aspect, and was really dissappointed when they pulled it out of the game.

But I kind of understand why. It basically makes the "management" aspect more prominent. And the group that mass buys computer games is primarily younger types that aren't interested in such builder type aspects. One only has to read these forums to realize that most of the discussion is about how to make the short term, tactical aspects of warring "better", with little to no discussion of how to make the longer term managing and planning "better".

So while I would certainly enjoy such a game, the company will almost certainly generate more sales by avoiding it.

 

[HardCoder]

Blake, the 12/21 build governor seems to be doing pretty good work.

 

[Quagga]

The build governor does work pretty well, but I still find myself unsatisfied with its choices sometimes. It is easy to add things to the queue, but it is not possible to stop it from building things, unless you turn it off.

For example, it builds drydocks. I know in a previous post that I complained that it didn't put enough priority on building barracks, but having used the governor more, I think I had that exactly wrong. If one is using the build governor on a city, it's likely that no units are going to be built there. Therefore, why build barracks or drydocks? The latter having a negative health effect, I prefer to see it not built unless I stick it in the queue.

The same is true for coal plant. Factory and forge are different because they have the benefit of allowing more engineer specialists.

I'm thinking if the build governor looked at the emphasize settings, it could be directed somewhat. For example, emphasize commerce could cause it to boost the priority of market, grocer, bank. Emphasize GP might cause it to avoid building anything that would negatively impact health. Well, maybe that won't work, since some of the emphasize settings take away most of the hammers.

Perhaps another approach is to look at the fat cross and see what's there. If it appears to be fat with food or running out of tiles to work, prioritize specialist-enabling buildings. Fat with commerce, prioritize financial buildings. Et cetera. Just a thought.

In any case, I tend to use the build governor in cities where I want it to produce some culture and reasonable commerce but mainly just raw population. That, plus prioritizing courthouse and bank (to allow the building of the associated national wonders), is probably all that's needed to run non-strategic cities.

 

[paperchase417]

I tried using it before, but I just don't trust the ai to do whats best for my people.

 

[Blake]

The build governor does work pretty well, but I still find myself unsatisfied with its choices sometimes. It is easy to add things to the queue, but it is not possible to stop it from building things, unless you turn it off.

For example, it builds drydocks. I know in a previous post that I complained that it didn't put enough priority on building barracks, but having used the governor more, I think I had that exactly wrong. If one is using the build governor on a city, it's likely that no units are going to be built there. Therefore, why build barracks or drydocks? The latter having a negative health effect, I prefer to see it not built unless I stick it in the queue.

The same is true for coal plant. Factory and forge are different because they have the benefit of allowing more engineer specialists.

Thanks for the feedback I didn't tweak the Build Governor in the 1/1 Build but I will tweak it for the next build to make use of some new functionality, including the ability to distinguish barracks from dry dock (which I'll probably just have not built) and also for avoiding building relatively useless commerce structures.

Is the coal plant thing a problem with the AI building coal plants or not building coal plants? I always build coal plants because they are the best power structure unless you can build a hydro plant and even if hydro plants are just around the corner the coal plant will probably still pay for itself since they are simply really good value and mean the hydro plant gets built quicker. This isn't so true for Vanilla but in Warlords the fact that 100% of production multipliers go to build Wealth/Research means that coal plants pay off massively whatever you are doing with the city.

 

[Quagga]

I'm fine with building coal plants in production or hybrid cities. I'm all for prioritizing it in such cities. In these cities, I usually boost production first, then come back and fix the health problems later.

But I don't think it is an overall benefit to build one in a commerce or specialist city. Doing so has a negative impact on population with little impact on production. I'm not sure what the cutoff should be, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to build a coal plant in a city that's producing fewer than sixteen to twenty hammers. Given such a city, I would prefer building gpt rather than coal plant.

 

[Moxxa]

Blake, you're going to program the game so that all you have to do is roll a map and hit enter 500 times to win a domination victory.