I mentioned the state of the planet earlier, which decides how the governor behaves, what orders he’ll issue to the planet. Just like planets, the governors are more effective when they specialise. It’s not inconceivable that just one governor could provide you with a reasonable planet management, but with more than a handful of planets, this approach soon falls through. Whenever even small, insignificant changes are needed to the governor, you’ll need to scrutinize the ramifications of that change on dozens and dozens of rules and conditions. You’ll often have to make the same kind of change in several places in the governor, and sooner or later it’ll outgrow your capability for information handling.
Right, so two governors are better than one. It allows you to split up the responsibilities that you leave to your governor. What responsibilities would you put in each of your two governors? One governor for growing planets, one for the maxed ones? Where does the build orders go? How about research, and should banker behaviour go before or after that?
OK then, you might think. I’ll set up 35 governors, that’ll do the trick! I’ll have the five specialities, each of which has a governor for growing and maxed planets, and those governors each have two governors, one for behaviour when it’s producing facilities, and one for when it’s not.
You already know this isn’t a good idea. Do you know why?
It’s because you forgot about the re-usability. With that many governors, you’ll have to repeat rules and conditions in several governors, just like you would with only one governor. So, there’s a middle ground to be found. What the ideal number of governors is for you depends solely on you – how much responsibility you want to give your governors, how complex you tend to make both the overall structure and the governors themselves, how many planets you’ve got at the moment, and so on. You’ve got to find your own way in this regard. Try different things out, experiment and see what fits you best.
On the forums, Cerrynity asked me a question pertinent to governor sections: ”What is the significance of using “stop processing rules”?”
To which I replied:
”Well. hm. You don’t really need it. I think I remember some even think it’s a sign of poor ‘governorship’, but that’s not true.
I use it because I’ve chosen to go for a fewer number of governors, in total, which increases my chances of finding what I’m looking for relatively quickly. So, when I put a lot of responsibility into a governor (or at least ‘more’), it becomes more important to keep the various parts of the governor separate (so every planet don’t get treated first as a maxed planet, and then as a growing one afterwards).
In the governors I posted here, I could do without some of the ‘stop processing’ rules (for example after the maxed section is over, since the group condition that leads into the section for growing planets has a check for just that), but I put them there also to show myself what’s going on (”Once here, everything should be done. Make sure of it.”).”
I call it ‘my way’, but it’s really not. Many players structure their governors after the method below, and I’ve taken my cue from them. When I still use that term, it’s because I want to stress that this is just the way I do it. It’s a tried and tested approach, but it’s certainly not the best. Some players have tremendously complex and powerful governors, and while mine are not, I’m sure they build on the same principles, the most important of which you’ll find here.
You already know that I have 5 governors, one for each speciality, and that I use a number of ‘auxiliary’ or helper governors. In total it’s about a dozen, +/-2 depending on what changes I’m trying out in the given galaxy.
The helper governors are:
Fundamentals
Build Base
Build Loyalty
Build <speciality>
As the first order of business in each of the five ‘main’ governors, I call these four governors (there’s actually 8, since there’s 5 variations of the last), which takes care of resetting the population to farmers, resetting the recruitment rate to 0%, building facilities and ships, and finally hurrying production.
The five ‘Build <speciality>’ governors are a good example of where I’ve chosen a less complex architecture (over-all structure), over re-usability. Each of the five governors are only used by the corresponding ‘main’ governor, which means that I might have to place an order to ‘Build 3 Banking Centres’ in both the ‘Build Banker’ and ‘Build Miner’ governors. Ideally, this is what we want to avoid, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too, or in other words, you have to make priorities. In this case I see the resulting over-all simplicity as clearly outweighing the annoyance of having to duplicate rules. The similarities between the build orders of the five specialities aren’t that striking, after all, and those orders that really do coincide, are mostly handled in the ‘Build Base’ governor (setting up farms, factories, defences, etc.).
Now that all the trivial stuff is out of the way, we’re left with two important states of the planet, which will determine how we deal with the population (which, along with the military, is really all there’s left to handle). These two states are 1) Population Count, and 2) whether the planet is currently producing anything.
Of these I’ve chosen to make the population count my focus. Each governor has a section for when the population limit is reached (it’s ‘maxed’), and one for when it’s still growing towards the limit. Within these two principal sections of the governors, I deal with planets that are both producing and not. This means, of course that some behaviour is again duplicated, as I handle currently producing planets twice in each governor – once for maxed planets and once for growing. The same is true of planets that aren’t producing anything.
You might opt to change that around, having the two main sections check whether the planet is producing anything, and then within each section deal with planets that are maxed and those that aren’t. You might even chose to separate out the handling of producing planets to a third main section, reducing the size of the two other sections, but adding the complexity of a third section. Not that this is necessarily a good idea, but you should play around with these main sections of a governor, what states they should check for, and use whatever suits you best.
There are many ways in which you can structure the individual governors, but whichever way you go, you should do it in a similar way on all your governors. Test out one approach to sectioning your governors at a time, for the entire empire, keep each experiment somewhat close to what’s familiar, and you should soon see improvements (or at least you’ll know what isn’t improvements for the future, which is an improvement in itself).
You can also play with the overall structure of the governors; their responsibility and how they make use of helper governors. I know some players, for example, that have just one governor for all growing planets. They assign this governor to all newly colonized planets, and once the planet has reached a certain size, or perhaps when a certain set of facilities has been erected, this governor can then hand over control of the planet to another governor, presumably one of the five speciality governors. This means that the players are left with ‘cleaner’ speciality/main governors, since they don’t have to deal with growing planets in those. On the other hand, they’re left with some problems in regard of situations where the population has been reduced, or where basic facilities are gone for whatever reason. These are not trivial concerns, but certainly not without solutions, and I tend to think that this approach does offer other advantages as well.
At the time of writing this, I’ve played just half a galaxy with this ‘Growing Planet’ governor, and I recommend it strongly. It’s important to understand that you’ll have to develop and adjust your governors, not just from the start of a galaxy to the end, but more importantly from galaxy to galaxy. To me and many other players of Cosmic Supremacy, a large part of the challenge is to nurture forth a set of governors that suits our style and preferences
guides\nongolfguide\governorsectioning.txt · Last modified: 2012/02/26 22:17 by jackjack
