When setting out to design your governors, the first question you have to answer is what responsibilities you wish to leave them. Should they only take care of distributing your populations, or should they handle construction too? If they handle construction, should they handle ship-building too?
The responsibilities usually given to governors are (in no particular order):
Distribution of population (farmers/workers/miners etc.)
Construction of facilities
Construction of ships
Setting the recruitment rate
That said, many chose to order construction manually, at least to some degree.
You should also be aware that the governors you have at the end of a galaxy, aren’t the same as when you begun it. It might have all the same rules and conditions and in the same order (though I’ve never managed to accomplish this), but the values will have changed here and there, some rules might have been disabled and so on. Your situation will change continually over the length of a galaxy, and therefore so must your governors. It’s not a sign of poor governors, it’s just perfectly normal adaptation.
Governors are based on conditions, or rather, the state of the planet. Whatever a governor does, it does so based on the current state of the planet, which means that you’ll have to carefully consider which states are important to your style of play and what you want the governor to do. Say, for example, that you want to order your governor to build a colony ship. You could set up a great variety of conditions that will have the governor start production, but there are good and bad conditions for gauging when a planet is ready to produce the ship. After all, ordering your planets to build a colony ship when research out-put on the planets is over 200 doesn’t seem like a good choice. You’ll probably want to test whether the planet has enough men to crew the ship, or if its production out-put is high enough. Possibly both.
The above is a trite point, but no less important for that. The way in which you structure your governors is crucial to their robustness and not least how easily you can extend them. The larger and the more complex a set of governors become, the more important it becomes that you’ve set up a sensible ‘flow’ through the governors - that you can easily identify under which conditions a governor will execute a given rule.
One of the best ways to increase the legibility and extendibility of a governor, is to gather behaviour common to two or more governors, in a third governor. That is, if you’d like all your planets to have 5 farms, you set up a governor that does this for you (probably along with all the other facilities that all planets should have, like factories and defence), and then you run or ‘call’ that governor from within the governors that are actually assigned to the planets. In this way you can cut down considerably on the length of your governors, and you reduce the complexity of all the governors that would otherwise need to run those rules themselves. Furthermore, you only need to change one governor if you decide that all your planets should now have 6 farms. If you take just one advice on governors from this, take this.
Using these two principles, the overall structure of your governors will likely end up as a handful of ‘main’ governors that are assigned to your planets. These governors represent the specialization of the planet it’s assigned to. That is, all planets that are to specialize in credit generation, have the ‘Banker’ governor assigned to them. These main governors then call upon any number of ‘auxiliary’ or ‘utility’ governors that represent common behaviour
That’s how I currently structure my governors, as do other players. But there are many ways, naturally; I’ve tried using conditions that tested the planet’s name, and if it found certain characters in the name, would treat the planet as a Farmer, or Producer or whatever else, as the case may be. I would then add something like ‘-R’ to the name of the planet, which would result in the governor treating the planet as a research planet. This allowed me to have just one ‘main’ governor, assigned to all my planets, which then calls upon auxiliary governors to perform the actual changes needed. I wouldn’t recommend this approach, however, since it brings no distinct advantages and increases the complexity of the governors (with all that this entails).
I also personally like to have the corresponding, ‘specialized’ governor assigned directly to the planet that are to specialize in the given area. This allows me to sort the planets by governor in the Planet List Screen, which is often handy, and it yields an excellent overview to how many planets are assigned to what tasks.
A final note of caution if you plan to have your governors react to your planet names: Never let on what kind of planet it is through the naming scheme. Thus, my approach with suffixing ‘-R’ for research planets is a poor choice. It’ll only make it easier for your enemy to identify your weak spots.
guides\nongolfguide\designing-governors.txt · Last modified: 2012/02/26 22:17 by nongolf
