First off I love the concept that SMAC introduces whereby you can control your own level of control. You can micromanage every detail, or set your civ on autopilot if you wish. However I do think that the average person would rather have automation of workers/other things down to strictly defined/controlled tasks. So I believe that having a set of scripts you cant have your "subordinates" execute would make many people happy.

For example (assuming this is SMAC)
(this might req some programming knowledge)

Assume that the unit/governor whatever being executed upon is global, that for all intensive purposes (conceptually at least) what the script is introducing is a new method for the unit/governor object.

For instance if we are dealing with a unit, a unit might have such accesable, (mostly non modifyable) values/constants as HOMECITY, CURRLOC, ATTACKSTR, DEFENSESTR, HITPTS, FIREPOWER, maybe for specific units such as workers: TIMEREQ_TILLDONE, TIMEREQ_BUILDFARM, TIMEREQ_BUILDMINE and so on.

And each unit might have associated operations like: goTo( location ), moveEast(), Exec( script ), buildFarm(), buildMine()... etc.

so maybe a sample script might look like:
(and this of course is open ended and doesnt need to look like C++)

while (inHomeCityBorders()) { // Have a terraformer build a farm in each
buildFarm()
MoveNextCitySqr()
}