Until recently I would just set my workers to automate after my city got going enough to where I could focus on other stuff, but they wind up building imrpovements on EVERYTHING even if that title is not in any fat cross. Is there any benefit having every single tile improved even if your city can't work it? With the exception of titles with resources of course, I also improve any that are in my boarder so i have those resources and roads connecting cities and stuff.

After reading the City Specilization article I started really micro-managing my works to help my game play and its worked out nicely and I leave titles alone that aren't in a cities fat cross.

Sometimes you'll farm tiles outside of cities' crosses to chain farm a region. Also sometimes you'll want to place reserves on forest tiles to grow more forest. And resources, as you already noted. Otherwise no.

The only real safe worker automation is "build trade network". A road and/or railroad everywhere arguably never can hurt.

Sometimes you'll farm tiles outside of cities' crosses to chain farm a region. Also sometimes you'll want to place reserves on forest tiles to grow more forest. And resources, as you already noted. Otherwise no.


I forgot about the farm chain and forest reserves. Thanks.

The only real safe worker automation is "build trade network". A road and/or railroad everywhere arguably never can hurt.
Unfortunately this is no longer true in BTS as forest growth (which is accelerated by forest preserves and highly desireable near a city that builds the National Park Nat. Wonder) is inhibited by the presence of roads...and you can't pillage the darn things so automated workers can really mess up your long term planning in this area.

Unfortunately this is no longer true in BTS as forest growth (which is accelerated by forest preserves and highly desireable near a city that builds the National Park Nat. Wonder) is inhibited by the presence of roads...and you can't pillage the darn things so automated workers can really mess up your long term planning in this area.

Are you talking about the latest patch because I have never been prevented from building a FP in BTS where a road existed, in fact I sometime plan the road in advance so /i can build the FP quicker (no movement turn lost)?

IIRC roads hinder neither the growth of forest into unimproved tiles nor the use of the forest tile for typical forest improvements.

Automated works do an OK job if you tell them to leave your old improvements and the game is later on or in mop-up mode. They actually make improvements based on the specialization you set for the governor, and they do a halfway decent job at it once you know all the improvements.

HOWEVER, they move poorly, wasting worker turns. They occasionally make a sub-optimal improvement decision. They tend to get themselves killed at war. Worker automation is pretty inefficient so be sure you can afford the inefficiency before you allow them to automate.

That said, if you know what you're doing you can get away with automated workers even at high difficulties...just not in the first half of the game. I usually won't automate mine until after 1000 AD barring an unusual start.

If you look in GlobalDefines.xml you will find the value ROUTE_FEATURE_GROWTH_MODIFIER is set to -50. This is used by the SDK when determining the chance of a forest growing in an otherwise unimproved tile and means that the chance of the forest spreading to that tile is reduced by 50%.
The relevant code in the SDK is in CvPlot::doFeature(), specifically...
if (isRoute())
{
iProbability *= std::max(0, (GC.getROUTE_FEATURE_GROWTH_MODIFIER() + 100));
iProbability /= 100;
}