low production in cities due to governors...

[Dr.Zoidberg]

The first civ4 game that I played, I set all of my workers on auto just so I wouldn't have to deal with them while figuring out the rest of the game. They tended to build windmills and cottages all over the place. As a consequence, I had a huge amount of money and science and zoomed ahead of all of the other civs in this regard. However, with a lack of forests and mines, I had pretty low production ratings.

In my second game so far, I did all the improvements manually. I made primarily farms on all rivers and grasslands, mines on all mountains, left forests in place for lumber mills later on, and only built cottages on plains or other less useful tiles.

Now my problem is that with the cities auto-governing of which squares to use, it tends to choose all of the squares that give maximum food, even picking tiles which only give 1 food over tiles which give 4 production. The result is that all my cities are at maxium population, but with very low production. Also, as a consequence of having large popualtions but fewer cottages, my sciense and commerce is stagnating along with my production. Things are not looking so good...

If I change the tiles over to the production squards, the city starves and riots and such. Also, manually changing specialty civs in every city is a huge pain without the governor turned on. By the way, this is with all governors set to prefer production and minimize growth.

So, what is the solution to this dillema?

[Solver]

The governors have an option to emphasize production. Turn that on and the governor will use tiles for best production output.

[Dr.Zoidberg]

Originally posted by Solver
The governors have an option to emphasize production. Turn that on and the governor will use tiles for best production output.

I'm guessing you havn't read my post all the way through. I stated that all of this was while the governors were set to limit growth and maximize production. Possibly the governors are not working correctly...

[Solver]

That is because "avoid growth" and empahsize production at the same time don't make sense. Avoid growth means try to prevent the city from becoming any larger (like to prevent unhappy citizens). If you run that and emphasize productions, then the governor won't work tiles that have good production but also food. So what you want is have the governor emphasize production - but without avoid growth turned on. That will give you the best production output possible with the city.

[Dr.Zoidberg]

I've tried that approach to no avail. Even with just the production mode on, the governor avoids mined hills giving +4 production and favors tiles giving any amount of food. In this way the city grows to the point where none of the good production tiles are utilized, in favor of specialized citizens. If I try to manually change the city, it falls into dissarray for being oversized.

[Aeson]

Can you post a screenshot of the city view? Would really be helpful in diagnosing the problem.

My guess would be that the specialists are locked, and so the governor can't put them to work on the tiles, and so is stuck using the high food tiles so that the city won't starve. Do you have yellow boxes around your specialists?

The city's happiness (disarray) shouldn't change at all regardless of how you swap the laborers/specialists around.

[Dr.Zoidberg]

Well after fooling around I found that enabling the focus on science button does take workers off of production to make extra scientists, but this wasn't the case all of the time. In this picture the governor uses every single ocean square possible to get as much food as possible to sustain the city size.

[Aeson]

It's the 1f2p tiles that are the problem. They generally aren't good tiles that late in the game, though they will be useful once you can build Lumbermills on them and have Biology so your Farms can support their use.

Chop the Forest on the Grassland Hill, build a Windmill there. Irrigate that other Plains tile. You will then able to use that Gold tile if all the other tiles you are using are 2 Food. That will allow you to swap 2 of the water tiles to land for now, and give you more overall production and commerce than you are getting currently.

Then once you get Biology you can grow.

[Dr.Zoidberg]

so it's better to chop down forests and build farms/windmills? Since you can't plant forests I thought it would be better to keep them around for lumber mills...

[Aeson]

The only Forest I said to chop was the one on the Grassland Hill. Forests are good to keep around, if they aren't limiting your growth. You have plenty of Health. Having a Hill Forest next to your city is also about as bad a defensive liability as a city can have. Even if it were just to Mine it (thus not getting any more Food) Hill Forests with Lumbermills are outperformed by Hill Mines. It's one case of terrain improvement where the balance is completely in favor of one option if Health won't be impacted.

I recommended a Windmill instead of a Mine because it will better allow you to switch from low yeild Ocean tiles to land tiles, without limiting your options later (as you could always Mine it later).

[Theseus]

Not having actually played yet...

Terrain usage and improvements, as evolving throughout a game, need a LOT more explanation.