I've just finished my first Warlords 2.08 game, and have noticed a few changes for the worse, over Vanilla 1.61.

Some annoying things I've noticed:

1) I like to automate workers, and group them together before doing this to increase their improvement speed (each automated worker or group of workers will not help another group). They make pretty good choices on the whole, and it prevents a lot of unwelcome micro-management.

I've never had any problems up to 1.61, but in this game, I had shizophrenic workers. Around one city, they continuously switched between farms and cottages. If it was just one group, it would flip between each improvement on the one plains space. With four groups, they would do the same thing but on four plains spaces. Needless to say, constantly rebuilding cottages completely kills their utility.

There's no good workaround, either. After telling them all to build a trade network (so they'd build railroads), I had to change the options to leave old improvements intact. But that didn't work when I took some cities over on another island, and wanted the improvements corrected. With that option enabled, workers won't even replace a road with a railroad.

2) Stacked bombers no longer work the way they did in 1.61 (i.e. the way they should). If I bombard a city's defenses with a stack, only some of them are used up. In 1.61, I could then use the same stack to attack the city, and it would use however many bombers it took to halve the HP of all occupants. In Warlords 2.08, however, the stack goes to sleep on the second order, presumably so they can all attack together the next turn. This is very inconvenient.

3) Units can't be given orders when they have no moves left. Well, they can, but those orders are ignored. Rather than carrying out the order I gave, the unit comes alive the next turn. In 1.61, I could tell a Destroyer, for example, to move to a given city, then sleep, while it had no moves left. The next turn, it would carry out those orders, and I wouldn't be bothered with it again until I went back an explicitly woke it up. Not having this option anymore is very annoying.

4) I had all spaceship components built save the engine, which had 8 hammers to go in a given city. I had that city generate research, so I could get a few more future techs before the win. At one turn left, I put the engine back in that city's queue, and hit the turn button. The engine finishes, but the game calls it a time victory. It should be a space race victory, which is what it is if I reload and waste a turn by having the engine finished with one turn remaining. This isn't Warlords-specific, but it would be nice if this were fixed.

5) Why is it called Warlords? I found the AI much more peaceful than in 1.61. They rarely went to war with each other, and I was only attacked twice the whole game (once near the end, with no hint of ground troops anywhere).

That rounds up my list for now. I usually play past the end, destroying civs that annoyed me during the game, and I'll do at least a bit of that with this game later, to see how combat is different. I'll see what other observations that turns up.

All in all, pretty minor issues. You must get annoyed when your shower doesn't spray at the exact pressure you enjoy.

1. If you choose to automate your workers, accept that their chosen improvements are going to suck.

2. I don't know what you mean by not all bombers being used up. If you choose bomb, they'll each bomb the city, stop after they brought the defense to 0%, they've all been hit by a SAM/Fighter/Mech Inf, they've all bombed, or a combo thereof. Same for doing airstrike.

3. Maybe annoying, but, well, whatever.

4. You messed up and gave yourself a time victory instead of a space victory. Not the game's fault.

5. Every game is going to be different. I've played games where only one war happened ever. I just quit a game because there seemed to be constant war. If you want more aggression, choose "Aggressive AI" from the custom game menu, or pick your civs to be the aggressive type to begin with. And I'm pretty sure the game is called warlords because of the Warlord unit that is available.

In regards to #1-
Automated workers aren't that good... BUT if you want to use them, theres an option that prevents automated workers from destroying already placed improvements.

EDIT: #5 also annoys me. Admittedly, I havent played anything pre-2.08, but in Civ 3 the AI was much better in that regard. It seems like in Civ 4 there are only wars when you dictate them to begin. Lame. And unrealistic. A "peaceful" game in Civ 3 involved about 5 wars. In Civ 4 that's NO wars at all. I don't like the aggressive AI option as the rebuttal to this either. All that does is basically turn all the AIs into Tokugawa and refuse to talk to you or do anything useful. I want the AIs to fight each other too... I think their evaluation of the power graph should be changed. I think they are currently too passive and afraid to attack "stronger" civs.

#5 definitely bugs me. Even the "agressive" civs aren't as much aggressive as they are stroppy. Either the AIs taken a step backwards, or it's become far too cautious.

It would be nice if the AI could track how close any one player is to victory includeing other AIs, it would also be nice if thay tryed to obstruct that nation from winning unless thay are on good enough terms to try and merit an attempt to get on the nations team and share in the victory. (so something like if perm alliance is on and you start getting close to winning the first reaction of any frendly civs is to try and get on your team if thay cant then thay should start getting less frendly with you) (on the other end however any civs that are not at least pleased with you should start forming some kind of temp alliance to hold back you or who ever is getting close to a win) for the nations that are at a pleased state of being it could go eather way them trying to get on the winning team or trying to get on the obstructionist team, when was the last time in this game you had a world war namely one the player didnt start if and when it happens it is rare.

All in all, pretty minor issues. You must get annoyed when your shower doesn't spray at the exact pressure you enjoy.

1. If you choose to automate your workers, accept that their chosen improvements are going to suck.

2. I don't know what you mean by not all bombers being used up. If you choose bomb, they'll each bomb the city, stop after they brought the defense to 0%, they've all been hit by a SAM/Fighter/Mech Inf, they've all bombed, or a combo thereof. Same for doing airstrike.

3. Maybe annoying, but, well, whatever.

4. You messed up and gave yourself a time victory instead of a space victory. Not the game's fault.

5. Every game is going to be different. I've played games where only one war happened ever. I just quit a game because there seemed to be constant war. If you want more aggression, choose "Aggressive AI" from the custom game menu, or pick your civs to be the aggressive type to begin with. And I'm pretty sure the game is called warlords because of the Warlord unit that is available.
Since you seem to have had difficulty comprehending what I wrote, I'll address your non-rebuttals point by point:

1) Automated worker improvements don't suck. They're rather good, in fact. But in 2.08, there are places where the automated worker can't make up its mind, so it continually cycles between two different improvements, and gets stuck there forever. That has never happened in 1.61, and the only time I've had to manually take over improvements is when I want a particular city to have a temporary production improvement for the purposes of finishing a wonder before another civ.

2) The bombers are used in turn for one operation. When you've done that one operation, you're left with a stack of used and unused bombers. In 1.61, you could then use that very same stack to perform another operation, and the unused bombers in the stack would do what was asked. In 2.08, you can no longer do that. The entire stack goes to sleep when you request another operation. You have to either deselect the used bombers from the stack, or select a new stack with CTRL-click. The latter is simple enough, but if you have a number of damaged bombers that you want to heal, you're stuck manually selecting bombers regardless.

3) What, no snide dismissal? I've determined that it's somewhat worse than I originally described. Even if the unit is active, your queued orders might be interrupted. If you queue move and then fortify, the fortify order will be discarded if the unit happens to run out of moves after the move order. It will only fortify if it has at least one move left after reaching its destination. Otherwise, it will wake up and require you to fortify manually.

4) I didn't mess up. The spaceship was completed, but the game didn't recognize that. This is an old problem (not unique to Warlords), but I thought perhaps it may have been fixed, which is why I saved two turns from the end, and tried it.

5) The entire reason Warlords was created was to give those who prefer fighting it out for a win a better chance to do so. Yet the AI is more likely to fight in the original, rather than the supposedly-war-friendly modification. The new unit is Great General, incidentally, not Warlord.

4) I didn't mess up. The spaceship was completed, but the game didn't recognize that. This is an old problem (not unique to Warlords), but I thought perhaps it may have been fixed, which is why I saved two turns from the end, and tried it.

5) The entire reason Warlords was created was to give those who prefer fighting it out for a win a better chance to do so. Yet the AI is more likely to fight in the original, rather than the supposedly-war-friendly modification. The new unit is Great General, incidentally, not Warlord.

Ummm ...

4. Yes, you messed up. Fess up to it and get over it. When I'm one turn away from completing the Pyramids, click the button and another civ gets the Pyramids, I don't blame the game, I blame myself. Sure, you completed the spaceship, but not before 2050. The game ends at 2050. Since you hit the year 2050, the game was over, regardless of any other victory conditions satisfied.

5. The unit is indeed Warlord. There is also a unit called Great General -- you can choose to use the General as an Instructor (super specialist), have him build the military academy, or have him lead your troops as a Warlord.

As for the lack of war ... There are a lot of complaints folks can have about this game. The way the AI handles war, diplomacy, city building, etc, etc, etc. But the reality is that trying to program that kind of stuff would take an insane amount of time and Atari/Firaxis/Sid would have to charge us each $5,000 for a copy of the game to pay the programmers for their time. Look at this forum as proof: there are 110,000 users of this forum who have made 6,500 threads in the Civ4 Strategy section, with a total of 107,000 posts in said section. That means there are thousands of issues with dozens and dozens of opinions on each. Sure, conventional wisdom says that an early axemen rush is a great start, but there are plenty of voices who will say that those hammers could be better put to use elsewhere. My point is, if a human being can have a difficult time deciding when to use force and when not, how can you expect a piece of entertainment software to be good at it? Afterall, we have things like memory, future strategy, externals ... the best the programmers can do is come up with a reasonable bit of code that tells the AI when to make war. It takes in the diplomatic modifiers, multiplies by power differential ... then rolls a die or something. Not perfect, but better than a totally war-like civ that invades you every few years regardless of any other factors.

You and I differ in opinion. I think most of your complaints are whiny and a lack of ability to take a little inconvenience with your game. You don't like how automated workers do their job. Simple solution is to tell the workers what to do. You should be able to do a better job, and it only takes a few moments at the start of your turn.

I agree that the bomber thing seems to be a bit of a bug. Similarly, I don't like that when I have units grouped it is difficult to select some, but not all, without ungrouping all the units. But I deal with it because it doesn't affect the outcome of the game, but simply the ease of gameplay.

Queued orders ... meh. I didn't respond because I don't queue my orders. I like to respond to whatever is happening, and would hate to realize that the tank I'd queued to go north could have really been used in the south.

The Better AI (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=204058) mod fixes a lot of this stuff. Give it a try if you don't want to wait for BtS.

Wodan

..........Queued orders ... meh. I didn't respond because I don't queue my orders. I like to respond to whatever is happening, and would hate to realize that the tank I'd queued to go north could have really been used in the south.

I too found this a complete pain when I first used the patch, but funnily enough, It made me micromanage even more accurately, so even though its still a pain (especially when you want to group 1 worker with one who is already "working", you have to give them the orders twice grrrh), I suppose I got used to it, and it might have even had a positive side effect.

4) I didn't mess up. The spaceship was completed, but the game didn't recognize that. This is an old problem (not unique to Warlords), but I thought perhaps it may have been fixed, which is why I saved two turns from the end, and tried it.
There is no such thing as simultaneous in computers. Things happen in an order. First is the turn changes and a new date is assigned. Only after that happens does your city provide enough hammers to the engine to produce the spacecraft. However, in your game this never happened because the time victory happened first.

There is no such thing as simultaneous in computers. Things happen in an order. First is the turn changes and a new date is assigned. Only after that happens does your city provide enough hammers to the engine to produce the spacecraft. However, in your game this never happened because the time victory happened first.
Things happen in the order specified by the programmer. It's truly amazing how far people will stray from reality just to defend the status quo.

I'll chime on in here with the "ease-of-gameplay" items. Hey, if the feature is there and you use it, it shouldn't be too much to expect it to work.

The automated worker has been a problem since CivII it seems (never played CivI so not sure there). I've never been one to use this feature, but I'm with you in that if it is something that is offered by the game it should do things properly. Can't expect it to do what a human might in terms of micromanagement, but I guess if you are playing on some huge map and can't be bothered you should not be faulted by idiot workers.

The move queue is another item I don't utilize myself unless it's the occasional ship travel. At least in most cases it stops the movement or worker task if there is an enemy unit close by, and I don't really feel hamstrung by the necessity to have movement available to fortify or sleep. However, my complaint is that it seems to ignore this with barbs. I seem to recall moving a scout two paces to a square that was dark, and when it did so it attacked the barb that was in that square. I've had this with other units as well. Stupid.

The stacking deal is one the frustrates me a great deal, but I see this more with my ground attack. If one has a group of siege units and ground units it seems to be at its worst. Have the stack bombard the city, and it won't let the ground units attack unless you double-click the stack - separating the units with moves still left. Same holds true if a siege unit or other unit retreats back to the stack - you have to double-click the stack once again to have the remaining units move.

I understand that this is not going to kill me with extra time needed to perform these duties, and some may call it nit-picking. True, I did not pay $5,000 for the game, but I did pay a fair amount for Vanilla and the expansion and the company is going to hope I shell out more for the next expansion, so perhaps expecting a bit more from these gameplay aspects is not such a horrible thing.

An AI that attacks more => increase difficulty.
You'll get Dogpiled soon enough :p

#5 definitely bugs me. Even the "agressive" civs aren't as much aggressive as they are stroppy. Either the AIs taken a step backwards, or it's become far too cautious.

QFT My biggest hope for BTS is that the AI will be far more agressive instead of just waiting for me to bring the hurt. I've only ever been attacked about three times or so.

Granted, I've only been playing for like a month-month and a half, and my difficulty hasn't gone bas Noble...BUT STILL!

:P