Thinking about Govenors

from Stardock Forums
I know that the Govenors aren't going to be put into the game for a month or two, but I thought I'd think out loud a bit about how they were implemented in OS/2 and how they might be improved.

I found the social govenor very helpful, but I often wished I could have two or three different govenors so that I could adjust the timing of different improvements depending on the resources of the planet and how close the planet was to enemy systems -- so a planet that was in the center of my civilization would have less need of planetary defenses than one on the border. So I might have Govenor Alpha for good planets and Govenor Beta for marginal planets. Then in the planetary screen, I could choose which govenor would control production.

Also, it would be nice if you could set up the govenor with all of the improvements (even the ones you haven't researched yet) and have an option to either finish the improvement you've started working on when one with a higher priority becomes available (assuming that there is a penalty for switching production) or to immediately switch to the higher priority social project.

Also, I was wondering if there was any plan to have the four corners of the galaxy meet -- where going off the edge of the map would put you on the other side (of course this would mean that there are no strategic corners of the galaxy).

The Military Govenor was less useful as I recall. I'm thinking that a military govenor might need to be a system wide govenor rather than a planetary govenor. This is because a system is secured jointly and not planets individually. So I don't really want to have 5 defenders defending a single system with 5 colonies. I'm not very clear about how I'd implement this however.

Thanks!
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
You have mentioned one problem I had with the OS/2 version: adding a newly discovered improvement to the galaxy wide governer
resulted in a change to the projects of those planets that were beyond that item in the list to that item. If a planet happened
to have expended more resourses on the project it replaced, that was too bad. The resources were lost. I like the idea of being
able to choose, for each planet that is affected, whether or not to continue with the current project or switch now. Alternatively
I would like being able to choose only for those planets that would loose spent resources.

Also, I tended to keep wonders out of the list. I would build them as I could selecting the planets I thought had the best chance
of building a wonder the quickest. A nice option that might fit in with the above would be allowing a player to direct a planet
to build something not in the governer's list, then continue with the governer's list when the special project was completed.

As to wrap mode, I really think this is quite contrary to the idea and feel of a galaxy. A galaxy does not wrap around at the
edges (to the best of our knowledge), and I think Galciv also should not wrap around at the edges.

I never used a governer for the military projects. I always was very specific about how many of which ships I wanted. I would
only ask that it be possible to do the mass changes (like in the OS/2 version) from one ship to another, so that, for example,
when I completed the research on Avatars, I could tell Galciv to change all of my Battleship projects to Avatars.

I never did find defending stars with orbitting defenders very useful. I found it better to plot intersept courses with powerful
attack shipsand attack, rather than waiting for them to attack me. Of course, there was the rare supprise attack by a race I
thought was my friend....

Cheers,
Jack