Production automation like in SMAC

[ssgeneral]

I`m really frustrated, because when i put some of my cities to build stuff automatically, every now and then they produce some useless military unit, that i have no use for.

Is it possible to make cities build only buildings and no units at all? Like the governor-option in Alien Crossfire. It was great, because i could let some of the not-important cities develop themselves until they were ready to build military units fast.

Please help because running a big empire is getting a bit weary....

 

[carl corey]

I never automate my production, but I think that if you do that there's no way to get around the occasional unit. The AI controlling this might think you're too low on power, or the city isn't protected enough, etc.

What you CAN do is queue up several buildings in that city. CTRL+click puts a building on top of the queue, SHIFT+click puts it at the bottom of the queue. If you have for example a newly conquered city with nothing built in it you might want to queue a Theater, Granary, Courthouse, maybe a Forge if it's a production city, a Library if it has towns, etc. Just put them all there and production will switch automatically to the next one in the queue. After the basic buildings you'll want to check on it's state anyway. If you don't want to develop it anymore you can even let it build research/gold. I sometimes do that with 'useless' cities in a big empire.

 

[ssgeneral]

Ok, thanks anyway for the queing tip. Gotta find some other way to ease my managing

 

[carl corey]

There's also the tile assignment automation, but I rarely touch that. I might click on one of the "emphasize" buttons (food, hammers, commerce, great people) or a combination of them. But after a certain number of turns I still end up checking what each city is doing and what tiles it works. Sometimes the AI is really stupid and will assign a citizen to a 4 commerce tile instead of a 5 commerce one even if I'm telling it to emphasize commerce. I just don't care about it that much if it's in a recently conquered, undeveloped city.

And I never automate things in my main cities. Those are worth checking and reassigning and controlling all the time. You're likely to produce more than half your research from the Oxford University city, you don't want Merchants assigned in it. Or build a whole army in the Heroic Epic city, so you don't want it working commerce tiles.

 

[Elandal]

The build governor in BetterAI mod is way better than the standard build governor. There are some quirks still, but for most parts I now use that for all but my key cities.