My comprehensive list of bugs and issues with the Planetary Governor. I'm looking at this from the perspective that the goal of it is to significantly reduce micromanagement of most colonies and ways that it fails to do that should be considered "issues". I will do my best to not devolve this into a wishlist, but some things need to be changed for it to reach that stated goal.

1.) BUG. Changing the order of items in the build list does not save when the screen is closed.

2.) Usability Issue. Items go in "backwards" to the way you'd think they'd go. The list goes "first in, last out" order when it should be in "first in, first out" order.

3.) Usability Issue. Accessing the Planetary Governor chooser is tedious. It should be available from the main planet screen and preferably available from the control panel at the bottom when you click on a colony so you don't even have to go into the details for it. This fits in with the goal of reducing tedium which is the broader goal that reducing micromanagement fits under.

4.) Functionality Issue. There is no way to set up a "Repeat Build" for an item, either a specified number or infinite build. Typically a specialized planet will be something like "Factory, Farm, Morale Building, Economy Build x infinity". In order do this I have to add like 30 Economy Buildings to make sure it always fills up the planet. The ideal situation would to be able to specify a specific number, but even adding an infinite loop on the last item would go a long way towards fixing this.

5.) Functionality Issue. This is the big one. Right now the Governor basically populates all the tiles at the time it is set and then does nothing. If new tiles become available to build upon (special event, terraforming technologies, various special race techs that add tiles, etc) the governor does nothing to handle these. The MAIN micromanagement to deal with panets is dealing with newly available tiles! It's easy to fill all the tiles of a planet up upon colonization of a new planet with 20 seconds of spam clicking, and that's all the governor currently saves you from. The real micromanagement is going back through every colony every time you unlock something that increases PQ. The governor needs to continue doing it's work until you stop it or the game ends. Right now it doesn't govern anything.

6.) Functionality Issue. No way to save build lists between games and have to update build lists to reflect new tech. It's kind of annoying to have to build multiple bulky lists every time I start a new game. I realize there's issues with different races and whatnot but this is seriously a pain. One solution is to simply make it so your build list is only compatible with the tech tree you made it for originally. Another issue with this is having items in your build list that you don't currently have the tech for. Obviously it's easy enough to skip over these, but what if you want them built once they are available? The easiest solution is, assuming you implement "infinite build" items as mentioned in point #3, allow the governor to overbuild the infinite build item at its leisure with limited build items that become available.

Example of "ideal" functionality:

Altarian Tech Tree

Economy World

* Factory

* Farm

* Drathian Temple

* Biosphere Modulator

* Economy Building (repeat build X infinity)

So say I set up one of these within the first 5 turns of the game. Most of that stuff won't be available. It'll build a factory and then fill the world up with economy buildings. Say I get Xeno Farming relatively soon, it'll then automatically overwrite one of the economy buildings (specifically one with a bonus first) with a farm. Later on in the game when the Biosphere Modulator becomes available it'll overwrite one of the economy buildings with that, and then proceed to fill out the 3 new slots with more economy buildings. Same is true whenever Soil Enrichment, Habitat Improvement, or Terraforming are unlocked, as well as when (specifically in the case of Altarians) Paradise Worlds adds 1-2 PQ to my planets.

In conclusion, what's there is a great platform to build what's needed, but it currently doesn't achieve what I think the goals are. The goal is to be able to set up a planet so that you don't have to touch it unless you want to add custom buildings. Right now it simply saves me 10-20 seconds of clicking upon creating a new colony which is far less valuable than it could be or than it needs to be to facilitate me personally wanting to play on an Immense map. If I recall correctly, the original desire to add this to the game was that the developers found Immense maps very tedious to play due to planetary management. In its current iteration it will not fix that. The changes I have outlined above would allow the governor to go the entire game without being fiddled with.

I found the new governor list a tad hard to use but once you get the idea of the listing it does save time so thank you! However please add a 'TICK' button to save changes you might make to the list so it holds the new layout and allow lists to save so we dont have to re-enter the list every single game.

After my first game looking into espionage, here are a few tidbits to know:

-Each spy allocated to a race will allow you to get to another level of intel after the number of spy-weeks are completed.  This means if you want medium, you must have at least 2 spies in, high 3 spies, advanced 4 spies.  Sitting with 1 spy on a race for 1,000 turns will still only net you Low intel.

-When an AI is destroyed, any passive spies you placed on them are lost.  Monday a dev can chime in if this is on purpose or if it's a bug.

-Passive spies cannot steal tech, only active spies can.  I sat for YEARS with 4 passive spies on 2 AI's and not 1 tech got stolen.

Download via Impuse. Ensure beta versions is checked

Upper left corner where preferences are. Show prerelease versions.

But still some problems might occur. I had to reinstall Impulse to get beta.

Had v1.96 twilight going well so installed 1.99rc.  After startup it repeatedly crashed when asked to open new game.  Have uninstalled and reinstalled twice.  No change.  Still can't get it to run.  Any ideas.

Finding the ctrl+P thing was helpful, thanks to whoever first mentioned it.

Problem is right now you can only use ctrl+p if you go straight to the planet surface from the main galaxy screen. If you enter the planet screen from the colonies list ctrl+p does nothing. In addition if you go into the planet screen from the main screen and use the ctrl+p, then you hit next or previous in the upper right to go to another planet, when you hit ctrl+p again it still pops up the one from the initial planet and not any you have navigated to using the upper-right nav buttons.

After some quick playing around: the graphics are even better: big applause for that. 

Very dissappointing though is the spy update, which was proclaimed to be a major update. The new thing: you can place spies on a civ in general. But think about the following:

- is it not even more expensive (and less effective) with spies now that you need spies both for civs and planets!?

- I do not like the fact that you can scroll around and see all planets and their tiles of a civ even before you have placed any spy on any planet. This is illogical and it also makes it much less interesting to place civ spies in the game since you can learn so much just by pretending to put a planet spy. Info should be gold worth and difficult to get! A basic logic approach is missing here. 

- I did not really see any new spy techs (in addition to e.g. the krynn race techs), meaning that you would be able to research better spies and make them more efficient. For me this is a given thing to include if you want to have spies in the game at all.

- It does not seem like spying affects your diplomatic relations with the civ you are spying on! But this would be a wonderful way to make the game less predictable: make it more useful to spy on someone but include a risk that you might screw up your relationship (or have a war upon you) if the spy is found out.

- There is no thrill ( = uncertainty with potential for major impacts) in the way spies are handled now. It should be possible to put spies that can be found out or stay hidden if they are good. As it is today you just place your spy on a tile and wait for it to be cancelled. What's the added value of that? Even this updated spy system does not seem to really fit in the gamer: it still feels like a slightly undeveloped add-on branch which does not really affect the outcome of the game. You just can't play a spy strategy and win the game. Imagine how much more fun the game would be if you could actually place spies that could DO something against your enemy, like killing off population, blowing up a starbase or make tiles permanently unusable on a planet ... 

In my latest MVL league game I was using spies to hinder the Alterians from winning a tech victory before I won my ascension victory.  They would have won 3 weeks prior to me if I didn't do something.  Alas I didn't have many spies by that end of the game on hand and they cost too much for me as that point.  I was able to cut them back to 1 week before me befor eI pulled out a troop ship to destroy their highest tech planet.

In this instance, spies COULD have won the game for me if I had the numbers on hand that I normally do.  I was being lax near the end of the game, not thinking anyone was getting near a win.

I've also used spies to destroy the dregin economy and end their military production.  I put them into -500bc and kept them there for quite some time.

If you like to play the 'cold war' strategy, then they are fine as is.

As for the diplomacy thing.  In Galciv, spies are anonomous, so no diplomatic hits are seen.  There are two different special events that I think are directly linked to intel levels.  One was that you didn't know their ettique and the other was an assassination attempt.

Two (Possible) Bugs:

1: I'm not getting something about the new planetary governor, and I'm not finding it in the manual. How exactly do you add a new governor list? I can access the governor, but all I have is 'none' and the two checkboxes, various fiddling around has failed to activate any way to save a queue or add a governor.

2: Has the economic formula been tweaked harder? I've switched the Psilons from the Terran to the Altarian tech tree (I always tend toward good anyway and wanted to see these neat 'creative' techs I'd heard about), and the economic strain has increased immensely - I don't seem to be getting nearly the return on high population planets I was before. I would assume that I'm playing the tech tree badly, but everyone else seems to be expanding as slowly, or *more* slowly, as I am - Generally at this point in the game I'm running full out with a low tax rate, and I'm fighting to keep my tax rate <45%, and getting *killed*  on my output levels.

Thanks - Jonnan

Ah - I figured I was missing something obvious.

Jonnan

Just out of curioosity - does it save governors from game to game as a template? Hope so.

Jonnan