Sid's the Governor

[Crouchback]

From Sid's interview in EB world:
The Governor feature allows players to pass some of the management of individual cities (or all of them, if desired) to the AI. Once a player activates the Governor menu in the City Management screen, they can direct that Governor to follow selected instructions for his city (as well as instruct the Governors in all cities, or even just those on the adjacent landmass). A player can also direct that a Governor NOT do certain things. For even ?finer? control, players can also determine the frequency with which the Governor will produce certain types of units (naval, artillery air, defensive, offensive, worker, etc.) and certain types of improvements/wonders (those which increase happiness, wealth, growth, science, etc.).

I never really used governor's in SMAC or CTP2, they always seemed determined to produce costly buildings and useless units. But this sounds like they've really thought the whole control process out.

Imagine being able to give precise guidelines as to what you want from a city and then get something close?

David.

[Green Giant]

Sounds good to me. I hated in SMAC when I put a city on govenor and 100 turns later end up with like 40 very useless artillery units.

[Simpleton]

My hope is that you will be able to create a build cache that you can use for all your cities. I think in SMAC you had to create one for each city which was tedeous.
If I remember correctly there was a thread that said Civ3 may have this option but I don't know for sure.
Of course, if the governors are good there will be less of a need for build caches.

[campmajor!]

I used build queues in ctp2, but the problem was that in the beginning you add the best defensive unit. A few years or decades later that unit is no longer the best one. Then you have to change the build queue again. So in the end it is more work to use those queues then just giving orders to your individual cities.

I hope these governers are as good as they are announced. In ctp2 they were kind of ok, but their objectives were too limited. Maybe civ3 will be better. Let's hope so!