Why governers are so bad

[iamfishhead]

I was thinking about it last night, after I repeatedly became frustrated with the city AIs poor choice of tiles to work, and it occurred to me that part of the reason the governors are so bad is that the player isn't really able to give the computer all that much information about what it wants. What I mean is that, for example, you can tell your city to emphasize food, production, money, science, or great people; however all you're really doing is giving the computer a single bit (a 0 or 1) of information about what to do ... and for things that aren't always mutually exclusive at that.

It seems like it would be much better if you could tell the computer about the ratio of food-to-hammers-to-gold you want as input to the city, and then the human is tasked with managing what to build and what specialists to have. I suppose you could still have something like those little buttons in the corner to have the computer suggest something to do (but without altering where people are working). Anyway, back to the point ... it seems that being able to at least specify the food-to-hammers-to-gold ratio would go a long way toward fixing the retardedness of what the city AI does sometimes. Plus it provides enough information so that automated workers could actually "do the right thing" or something close to it with the tiles around the city.

In any case, I guess I've always thought of the game as a set of choices you have to make between a set of well defined trade-offs. Maybe it's just the computer scientist in me trying to automate everything, but it seems like there should be a better way of telling the game what to do when these trade-offs come up so that you don't have to be deathly afraid of any of the 'automate' buttons.

[snoopy369]

I don't think the governor buttons are all that bad at all... they're a huge improvement over past iterations of civ, and they tend to do what you ask them to do. You can usually do better by micro'ing, of course, but that seems logical to me; you should do it manually if you want to do a specific thing rather than a general tendency.

[iamfishhead]

Originally posted by snoopy369
I don't think the governor buttons are all that bad at all... they're a huge improvement over past iterations of civ, and they tend to do what you ask them to do. You can usually do better by micro'ing, of course, but that seems logical to me; you should do it manually if you want to do a specific thing rather than a general tendency.

That is true. In spite of some of the issues I have with the city governors, it is a vast improvement over the other Civ games

[TriMiro]

No matter what ratios and information you give the governor, at the end a human would always do better. No governor could possibly think ahead into the future.

Examples:
The city is at the happy cap, so a governor would stop it from growing, however, a player can predict that in x turns one would have connected that gold on the other end of the empire and so the city can grow.
In several turns I would have HR, so don't stop from growing.
Grow now, but build mines around the city, because in x turns I would have Engineering and need to go for Noter Dame.

And so on.

Governors should have some very predictable behavior to decrease micromanagement, but they can never be fully automated.

[mrp]

If you turn on the hammer one then it will either go engineer, priest or stupid citizen