When two cities are close to each other, only __one__ of those cities can get the good tile.
Where "good tile" is whale, pheasant, or maybe a highly built up tile (railroad + mine on coal). That means choosing which city gets which tiles becomes important.
Turning off the governor and picking-and-choosing locally suboptimal (aka: bad for City B) but better (aka: good for City A is better overall), especially in a game with cascading multiplicative bonuses (Rapture bonus * Bank bonus * Marketplace Bonus) really means that CityA might be favored more than City B.
Or maybe, City B is smaller, but overall in better placement. So maybe you want to have fewer resources overall, but grow City B to rapture size faster. So maybe City B deserves a more optimal placement than A.
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Civ is filled to the brim with "locally optimal, but globally suboptimal" strategies. That's why you have the option to turn off the governor and manually plan things in these corner-case situations. The governor works in 99% of cases though.
Getting it right in those 1% of situations is the difference between a rapture-to-size 15 vs getting stuck at size 3. The game is very "sharp". A slightly suboptimal move cascades as the turns progress. (Being 1 turn ahead can become 2, 3, 4 turns ahead as you progressively accelerate faster and faster into the higher-tech items)
Where "good tile" is whale, pheasant, or maybe a highly built up tile (railroad + mine on coal). That means choosing which city gets which tiles becomes important.
Turning off the governor and picking-and-choosing locally suboptimal (aka: bad for City B) but better (aka: good for City A is better overall), especially in a game with cascading multiplicative bonuses (Rapture bonus * Bank bonus * Marketplace Bonus) really means that CityA might be favored more than City B.
Or maybe, City B is smaller, but overall in better placement. So maybe you want to have fewer resources overall, but grow City B to rapture size faster. So maybe City B deserves a more optimal placement than A.
-----
Civ is filled to the brim with "locally optimal, but globally suboptimal" strategies. That's why you have the option to turn off the governor and manually plan things in these corner-case situations. The governor works in 99% of cases though.
Getting it right in those 1% of situations is the difference between a rapture-to-size 15 vs getting stuck at size 3. The game is very "sharp". A slightly suboptimal move cascades as the turns progress. (Being 1 turn ahead can become 2, 3, 4 turns ahead as you progressively accelerate faster and faster into the higher-tech items)