posted 03-11-99 02:20 AM ET
In my case, I NEVER use the govenors. That's where the queue (how the hell do I spell that?) is so helpful. I follow predicatable patterns of development, so early on it's usually rover, pod, recycling tanks, terraformer, pod... whatever, you get the idea. I enter all this stuff and go on to other things and let the cities grow. There is a way to make a template of this stuff--right-click something, but somebody else will have to remind us what that is. I always just enter it with each new city.I also make sure the terraformers are set to the correct home base and then I click "auto-improve home base." Once they run out of stuff to do, I send them to another base, set that as home base, and move on. Thus, at some point in the game, any new city pretty quickly gets a fleet of terraformers heading that direction and the city grows quickly with minimal effort. In certain case, of course, for certain cities, you might need to drill a borehole, etc.
Finally, for a sprawling empire, the cities on the perimiter produce war/defence units while the interior cities boost my reasearch and energy flow.
Keeping all that in mind, and hopefully with the 3.0 patch coming soon that will(?) fix things like needlejets that don't bomb and return to base properly, there really isn't much to micromanage. It ain't intuitive, though, but I guess a person learns to make do.