Automated City Production is crap

[Zeatrix]

Hi,

Recently bought the game and loving it, however there's something bothering me. In games like these I love to expand a lot, meaning I end up having a lot of cities. The automated city production feature becomes a necessity or the game obviously becomes too tedious. If I don't have any specific plan with any given city, I click on the "City development will balance between possible improvements.".

However, this only seems to make the city use all its workers on industry, even when there's not much useful to build left. In fact, I got a warning one of my cities were starving because this automated feature didn't bother to put any workers on food production. Surely this is not "balance between possible improvements".

Unless I'm overseeing something, this should be fixed ASAP.

[Lady Crimson (RIP)]

Automated city production?
After 1,400 hours in, I didn't know that was an option.. personally I don't see it as even something that should be done.. auto'ing easy battles is one thing.. auto' building your empire is something competely different, and really not that time consuming.

[Carnasid]

Huh, I figured after how awful the AI would bungle this feature in Endless Space that it had just been removed. Never even thought to go looking for it, even.

[Zeatrix]

I had 16 cities, and due to the status of the game, it didn't really matter what I prioritized in 12 of the cities, so yes, it is quite helpful to automate a city and let it function as a mere "empire-wise resource" (control, science, dust etc.). This is why they added the feature to begin with, it's just horribly made.

Obviously nobody should use this feature at the start of the game (working properly or not).

[of Anwyl]

Are you aure the AI governor is set to balanced rather than focus production?

[Zeatrix]

Yes I am certain. It's set to "balance between possible improvements", but only focuses production/industry. I've observed that it some times, though rarely, puts one or two workers on food, but it only lasts for a few turns before it takes them back to production - likewise, I don't know what makes the AI decide to do it since I've also seen cities starve with all workers being put on production.

[Slunko]

Heh yea, It's the main reason why I very rarely play anything except the cultists. I can't stand micromanaging a lot of cities.

[Leng Spider]

I am going to speculate that setting to balance between possible improvements checks three things, a) increase in population b) production/building and c) research. It probably calculates if you can speed up one of these developments through allocation of the city population to food, industry, or science. Once your empire gets larger the affect of allocating one city's population rarely would speed up any of those. If anything I would expect it to be most useful on your capital at the start of the game.

I think this because I set a city to specialize in industry and it put everyone into food. I can only conclude it calculated that if I lost 8 production for one or a couple early turns that 12 production over the rest of the game would be better. I could be remembering this wrong because I gave up on these settings after that.