I find that if I completely automate a former it spends most of it's time clearing fungus. Then I get to middle or end of the game and find I have very few structures built on my land.

Now I will make one or two formers doing auto-roads but I manually direct the others. When I get super fusion formers I will make a few of them auto fungus removal.

Also, I usually customize my formers. I give them wheeled chassis so they can get around faster.

I tried using the governor option a long time ago, when I was getting tired of micromanaging my 30 or 40 bases. Until I noticed that it started to build Planet Busters for some unholy reason. After that It became SOP to use the queue list off to the side in order to keep things running smoothly without taking half an hour at the start of each turn. And terraformers only ever get the Automate Unit done to them when I've run out of things to build on that continent (or when playing the Pirates, until I can build in Ocean and Trench depths) and they get set to build roads. Never let them build on their own, you start to get boreholes and echelon mirrors in the weirdest spots.

Don't forget you can customise the governor. If I have some bases I don't care about, I disallow the governor to build any units other than terraformers and garrison units. Then it will spend its time building things and not useless units.

I automate my sea formers more than land formers. One warning is the sea formers will use raise terrain in ocean squares to turn them into ocean shelf so they can be further terraformed. This can mess things up if you let them, so you can go into Automation Preferences and tell them they can't raise/lower terrain. I use the Automate Sensors and Automate Tubes with my land formers sometimes, if fully automated they tend to be kinda stupid though.

I always automate formers.

I never automate bases.

Don't know why. Been playing this game all my life, and that's just always how I've done it.

Base governors aren't very good and build too many useless units. You can fix this a bit by going in the advance options and disabling units (apart from formers and garrison perhaps). Sometimes I leave an unimportant base in the middle of nowhere on this mode.

LOL I forgot I replied to this topic with the same thing before.