Do you use City Governers?

[Cruddy]

Do you use City Governers? Up to know I never have, and I think I've been wasting an awful lot of my time.

[Kuciwalker]

Never.

[MattH]

I only let my govenors manage citizen moods. There is no way I trust the AI to build me an army or the improvements I want.

[badams52]

MattH has it correct. They do a good job at keeping people happy, but mismanage what tiles I want them to use, esp when your city is size 6 or 12 and you can't grow at the given moment. Then I manage those cities mysefl.

As for build orders, the build prefernces is a good idea, but never works the way you want it. Once I most of my cities were maxed out on improvements, then I got ecology and wanted the largest one's to build mass transit. I tried to make the city manager change production in all my wealth building cities by changing the appropriate categories, but it didn't work as I hoped.

[Fosse]

No governors. Late in the game, I just queue up six or eight things at a time for all but my core cities.

[Menlas]

Never. I am the perfect omniscient leader

[Kuciwalker]

/me applauds

[vmxa1]

Never for the most part. Once the game is very late and I have tons of cities, I relent. Even then they mess things up, but I am too lazy to fight them and they do not have enough time to ruin the outcome.

[Cruddy]

Looks like the banana option is going to win this - not what I expected. OK, the AI is terrible at improvement priorities (the manual does warn you to keep an eye on them) BUT...

It just saves me so much time late in the game if they manage attitude, typically when I have a democratic government and need to research quickly.

Another point: artillery production. I'll normally have a couple of heavy producers chuck out artillery and nothing else. Again, saves a bit of time if the governor is set up to do this.

[peterfharris]

I haven't used governors at all. Umh, haven't even bothered to find out how to contact them.

How do you queue production requests? I had no idea you could do that and I like that idea very much.

[badams52]

Originally posted by Cruddy
Another point: artillery production. I'll normally have a couple of heavy producers chuck out artillery and nothing else. Again, saves a bit of time if the governor is set up to do this.

That works, but I have the "continue last built unit" option checked, so all I have to do is set the city to build artillery, and they'll do it till I tell them not to.

Originally posted by peterfharris
How do you queue production requests? I had no idea you could do that and I like that idea very much.

(I hope I remember this correctly)
Go into the city screen.
Click on the production button.
Selecting an item will make that the item to build now.
Shift click will queue the selected item to build after the current one is finished.
You can queue up to 10 items I believe

[Cruddy]

To contact a city governer; right click on the city, one of the options is "Contact City Governor".

You can set just setup options on your capital and click the "all cities" option rather than "this city".

Now if you want to fiddle with a few cities where the governers are not up to scratch, zoom to the city and try moving workers. You can then get the option to turn the governor off in that city.

It took a few attempts to sort out exactly what they're up to, but once I got the hang of it I haven't looked back.

[Jamski]

There are two good times to use the governor to manage happiness:

1.) After Sanitation, when you have the hospitals built and you get civil disorder all over the shop, and
2.) In multiplayer (unless you have very patient opponents)

-Jam

[Daz]

Uhm... there are governors?





Kidding... No I never use them.

[CerberusIV]

I use them to manage moods only, they should not be trusted with anything else. It mostly stops cities rioting and is particularly helpful when changing governments.

They do make some weird decisions though, like putting all the citizens onto coastal tiles, but usually correct them straight away.

At size 6 or 12 I find the governors fill the food box and then cut back on food production to 12 or 24 and maximise production/commerce so they do quite well at that - but you have to manage them by controlling which tile improvements are done by your workers. I never automate workers except to clean pollution.

Conclusion - yes, governors make life easier but have to be used carefully.

[bongo]

They are very useful for controlling citizens mood. I also have them maximize comerce/production. I never let them decide what to build, I use right-click for that purpose.

[HAND]

I have never used governors...I would use them if they gave the possibility of not building certain improvements/units(or is there?) like Nuclear power plants and explorers....I really don't like the idea of nuking my core cities!

[vulture]

Although I voted 'never' I do occasionally use them, but not often. Pretty much the only time I do is if I am expecting war weariness to increase to disorder-inducing levels soon, when I'll set all governors to manage moods. The downside is that you can't then correct the tile choices for a city without disabling the governor, so when it makes bad decisions I still end up managing the city by hand.

Of course all you really save is one city going into disorder - if WW increases without you expecting it you just go to the city screen of the first city in disorder, and use the arrow icons to scroll through all the cities to reallocate workers in affected cities to prevent rioting there. So only one city ever goes into disorder, if you do right.

[Agathon]

Only for happiness, and then not often. Trying to get them to increase production never worked for me.

[Catt]

I find them quite useful in managing moods, but never let them do anything else. Even with managing moods I generally: (1) won't use it until sometime in the mid-Middle Ages; and (2) frequently manually assign laborers in several cities where the "rounding effects" of shields / production can be better exploited and/or where governor decisions are simply a bit silly.

I sure wish they had a "Maintain WLTKD" setting.

Catt