Civilization Wiki

As you play, you’ll undoubtedly notice that when a city completes a building project, it selects another one without your input. The city governors do this. Unless you give specific instructions, the governors will choose what to produce next by guessing at what you want. These guesses are based on the history of production orders you’ve given throughout the game.

The governors can be very useful, but only if they correctly interpret your previous orders. To help avoid problems, you can give your governors specific guidelines to follow in their selection of projects. At the City Display, press G or press the City Governor button to give instructions to that city’s governors. You can give instructions that cover only this city, all cities, or only those cities on the same continent as this one. On the General governor page, options are:

  • Manage citizens: This gives the governors your permission to control the allocation of citizen laborers to the terrain in the City Radius. Using the next three options, you instruct them as to your priorities for this task. If you select more than one of these three, the governors strike a balance between those you’ve chosen.
    • Emphasize Food Food – instructs the governors to maximize the food produced.
    • Emphasize Shield Shields – instructs the governors to maximize shield production.
    • Emphasize Commerce Commerce – instructs the governors to maximize income from commerce.
  • Manage production: This gives the governors your permission to assign building projects as they see fit. Using the next two options, you can put limits on what they’re allowed to do.
    • Never start Wonders – tells the governors not to begin construction of a Wonder.
    • Never start Small Wonders – tells the governors not to begin construction of a Small Wonder.
City governor popup (Civ3)

City governor popup

Click the Production button to switch to the Production governor page. Here, you can give your governors some more detailed production orders. Specifically, for every one of the options, you can specify how often the governor should select to produce that particular thing. This effectively provides your governors with a list of priorities. You can set priorities for:

  • Offensive ground units – those units that are stronger on offense than defense
  • Defensive ground units – those units that are stronger on defense than offense
  • Artillery – strictly offensive bombardment units, like Catapults
  • Settlers
  • Workers
  • Naval units – seagoing vessels
  • Air units – flying units
  • Growth – city improvements that increase the rate of population growth in the city
  • Production – city improvements that improve the shield production in the city
  • Happiness – city improvements that add to the happiness of your citizens
  • Science – city improvements that boost the scientific research output of the city
  • Wealth – city improvements that increase the tax income the city produces
  • Trade – city improvements that augment the city’s trading capacity and commerce
  • Exploration – units whose primary role is exploration, like Scouts and Explorers
  • Culture – city improvements that build the city’s culturalinfluence