Solution to avoid micromanagement?

Franses · April 1, 2002, 05:03

If you build a unit or improvement in a city many shields may be wasted. For example, if you have a city that provides 90 shields per turn and you build a tank in that city (cost 100 shields) it will take the city two turns to build the tank. Since all excess shields are gone, 80 shields will be lost every two turns.

You can often (partially) overcome this waste by micromanaging the city. For example making the citizens work on the coast instead of on mined land will produce more gold and less (not needed) production. I hate this kind of micromanagement which is very time consuming and does not add to the fun at all. Personally I refuse to do this kind of micromanagement. Did anyone find a solution to this problem?

Firaxis: Can you alter this behaviour of CIVIII or is there a good reason to let the excess shields go down the drain? I could not think of one but that perhaps there is? If there is not, I request the excess shields stored such that they are used for the next unit/improvement to be build. This way we do not need to micromanage cities or (in my case) loose a significant amount of shields every turn.

Thrawn05 · April 1, 2002, 09:39

Not really. I've stop production once on Mech Infantry once the one city built one and the advisor said something like "But this will lose 10 shields" or somthig. I believe that those shields are carried over. I would hope so anyway.

Franses · April 1, 2002, 13:56

Thrawn, what you mention only happens if you change production to a unit/improvement that costs less than the number of shields you already produced. Shields are carried over in case you change production to something that costs more (or less) than the shields produced.
However, the shields left if you produce anything just go down the drain.

Purple · April 2, 2002, 17:32

A different but related loss occurs when you're building a Wonder, someone else beats you to it, and you don't have an alternative available to switch to! Maddening!

I've seen suggestions that some portion of the excess production (or lost production in the case of Wonders) be carried over, say 50%.

As far as micromanagement is concerned, CTP had a nice feature which allowed a city to be optimized in terms of gold, food, or production with a single mouse click in the City Manager screen. I think we could reasonably ask for this feature in a patch or XP.

Franses · April 3, 2002, 14:38

I see your point but... the wonder problem does not occur that often. In case you have 6 cities with a production of let's say 100 shields and you can only build cavalry, you loose 6 x 20 = 120 shields each turn. On the least that is, you loose more if you build cheaper units. If you have smaller cities of say 50 shields production you loose 120 shields every two turns.

My greatest problem though is that I am tempted to avoid such loss by micromanaging the cities. Not so much against the AI but if Multiplayer comes around, I need to be efficient if my opponents are too. A waste of time for all of us, I think.

randommushroom · April 3, 2002, 15:45

I agree that the micromanagement can be tedious. My own partial solution is to look at the things I would like the city to build, and if there's a case of where I consider of them equally useful, I build the unit or improvement that has the least shield wasted. Or I'll spend a little time tweaking the cities to become optimal builders of a certain unit, and have them produce those units, and a neighboring city produce another kind.

The AI knows nothing about this, so far as I can tell. A little micromanagement can pay off into a big advantage.

GeneralTacticus · April 5, 2002, 21:31

A potential solution would be to have the excess shields turned into wealth. It's not very efficient, but at least you'll be getting something for it.