Should "auto expand" ever be used?

[Ilhan]

I am playing as communist germany and it is really laborous to micro manage constructions. Can I just auto expand important buildings?

[Lerry]

I always auto expands all factorys and mines. you might have to micro if a spesific resorce is required but auto expand is grate for making high gdp with litle work.

[Ilhan]

Originally posted by Lerry:

I always auto expands all factorys and mines. you might have to micro if a spesific resorce is required but auto expand is grate for making high gdp with litle work.

I hadn't done it for 200 hours but decided to give it a shot today. My GDP went up from 98 million to 177 in 4 years.

[endymionologist]

I usually set all Lumber and Fishing to autoexpand in States where I have peasants before unpausing at the start. I then select one State for an autoexpanding Iron Mine and decide if I want other things to autoexpand right away or if I want to wait a few turns to see what's up, Tools usually get added to autoexpand first and sometimes even before I unpause.
I normally rely on the AI building queue's lack of focus to generate smaller/distributed industries and use autoexpand to make sure I remember what State(s) I want max-height buildings in, and sometimes for Tools and Groceries and Clothes I will go through and queue one-per-State without autoexpand. So what I end up with is a huge queue that I add government and gold mines and emergency supply expansions to the top of with Alt-Clicking, but whenever I see I need more of a Good in my market I first look through the whole queue and move stuff to the top before adding new construction.

Eventually I'm doing this with autoexpand on all mines in all States that have peasants, and then in other States too, and I'm also using autoexpand to help me remember what States I decided to focus specific industries in.
Honestly, I'd really like to be able to have three or more build queues and use autoexpand in parallel to my government development and gold mines and whatnot.

[Jason]

With electricity. It will automatically expand when the capacity is almost full. Which is good because it can’t be supplied from somewhere else and they take a long time to build. Personally, (OT) I think bordering states with electricity should create a “shared network” of electricity.

[Vellsi]

Manual management is always superior, as it lets you set a smart order and priority for buildings and follow a strategy. It takes effort and attention though, which might not always be a thing. Auto-expanding is "smart" in so far that it waits for a building to be profitable and staffed before ever adding a new one. Save you a lot of constant checking.

One thing manual construction is much better at though is avoiding states with (temporary) penalties. If you have turmoil and low construction efficiency it might not be a good idea to build in it, as it is way too inefficient and wastes time. The auto-expand feature would still do it.

Either way, if you have a large empire it does not hurt to enable auto expand for important buildings and industries, so you can focus on other things without forgetting anything important in the long run.
Particularly helpful is auto-expanding infrastructure and power plants, so private constructions can keep on happening without you having to check regularly which states are hitting the infrastructure limit.

For some nations it's also okay to auto-expand government centers but that comes at the risk that low bureaucracy might trigger a building in every state auto-expand has been enabled in. That is because it looks at both taxation capacity in the local state but also at global bureaucracy levels when it comes to considering expanding the government buildings.

In case you ever want to construct anything manually you could always bump it to the front of the queue yourself, so you aren't hurting yourself either way.

[SIX]

Originally posted by jlane0710:

With electricity. It will automatically expand when the capacity is almost full. Which is good because it can’t be supplied from somewhere else and they take a long time to build. Personally, (OT) I think bordering states with electricity should create a “shared network” of electricity.

yes

[Dave Reckoning]

Originally posted by ilhanmete:

Should "auto expand" ever be used?

No. Go out and find a girl.

[Ilhan]

Originally posted by Dave Reckoning:

Originally posted by ilhanmete:

Should "auto expand" ever be used?

No. Go out and find a girl.

Not gonna happen :(