a little question about micro

[guermantes]

Hi,

I am trying to learn the nity gritty of micro and city specialization... it goes slowly...

Anyway, for playing on noble, should I try to start manually re-arranging white circles for my respective cities, or does the governor generally do a good enough job if I just use the maximise food/production etc buttons?

[Blake]

Governor does an acceptable job so long as you set the maximize buttons as appropriate.

You should manually tweak the population in order to get Great People of a specific type, and in order to get stuff done ASAP - such as building a wonder at negative growth, or getting absolute max commerce to get the next tech in 1 turn instead of 2.

Also the Governor has trouble with freshly captured cities and will often needlessly starve them down, paying no heed to maximize food. So just make sure a city fresh out of revolt isn't going to starve.

[rjmatsleepers]

I don't completely agree with Blake. Certainly the governor does a pretty good job, but no computer program can know what you are trying to do. I think it's always worth checking after every growth in population whether the citizens are in their best positions - particularly where cities "fat crosses" overlap. As Blake says, it's worth thinking about allowing food to shrink for a while in order to achieve some short term goal. And I'm very unimpressed by the way the governor handles specialists - you're much better at that yourself.

RJM at Sleeper's

[axisworks]

Once in a while I'll shift a circle to a square with hammers for faster production of a wonder, for instance, but it's always at the cost of the speed the city grows. Otherwise, I might focus all the circles on farms for some cities that I want to grow really fast in preparation for a massive bout of production later, but that's the extent of my regular strategy, generally.

[Blake]

I don't completely agree with Blake. Certainly the governor does a pretty good job, but no computer program can know what you are trying to do. I think it's always worth checking after every growth in population whether the citizens are in their best positions - particularly where cities "fat crosses" overlap. As Blake says, it's worth thinking about allowing food to shrink for a while in order to achieve some short term goal. And I'm very unimpressed by the way the governor handles specialists - you're much better at that yourself.

Well I agree the governor is rubbish with specialists. I never let them create specialists unless they literally are the best "tile" (ie the city has run out of decent tiles to place workers on), otherwise I lock in specialists manually. In fact preventing specialist use is one of the main reasons to use the maximize buttons.

I have noticed case of gross governor incompetence where they manage to choose an absolutely inferior worker placement, where an alternative placement will result in equal or increased yields in every category:

Left is what the governor does, right is the optimal configuration, the difference is exactly 1 hammer. The governor cannot be convinced to use the optimal configuration, regardless of maximize settings.
(this bug is extremely old, it was in SMAC and probably Civ2, might be a computational complexity problem)

Okay, so the governor isn't perfect. If I had unlimited attention span I would definitely manually allocate my population at every growth or more often. As it is though, the governor, while not perfect, is "good enough" and I only pay attention to known problem cases - cities near starving and stuff, and during the early turns. On the whole I prefer to allocate my attention elsewhere, like the automated worker is more incompetent than the governor, so I micro my workers while the governors get free reign (or some minimal direction, anyway). Heck, if the automated workers could be given some direction I'd probably use them too. If the governor didn't have the maximize buttons I wouldn't use it.

[Blaupanzer]

Go manual in SP based on your own goals. Definitely manage your own specialists.