Automated workers make a border wall?

[dbwithlemon]

I've played quite a bit since G&K. One of my games, I saw some odd behavior amongst my workers.

I manually control my workers 90% of the time, but after I am done with them, i put them on automate, in case my borders expand to a resource out of city range and I don't notice.

In one of my recent games, after I had automated my workers, they promptly walked to my borders and created a wall of sorts along my border. I was at peace at the time, but a few turns later 2 civs attacked me and stole almost all of them pretty easily due to their location.

The other civs paid for their transgression, and I reclaimed all my workers, but the question is why did they do that? Were they trying to block enemy missionaries?

Has anyone else seen behavior like this and know a reason for it?

[nefloyd]

It's like in the movie 300
Your workers are sacrificing themselves to make a wall of bodies to help funnel the enemy forces down a channel
Honor their bravery

[Miravlix]

Idle workers will head for cities to idle in, but if all your towns where full, it could be random coincidence they choose that spot to idle?

[dbwithlemon]

I only had 3 cities, and they all had generals in them, but it was 5 workers, seemed odd they would all decide to idle on the border with an enemy.

[Miravlix]

Remember the peons from warcraft...

They are not the smartest people in your empire.

[s0nny80y]

I've seen this behavior with enemy AI workers during a few games.

Basically, by the time my army grouped up along the enemy border, the AI workers would take over the plain tiles.

[shaglio]

Are you playing with any mods? I remember in Vanilla, when I would use CivUP/VEM, if I automated my workers and they ran out of things to do, they would gather on the edges of my borders. Unfortunately, once when playing on an Archipelago map, my borders expanded far out into the ocean. So my automated workers embarked and hung out at the border where they promptly got picked off by Barbarian Galleys. It serves me right for being too lazy to manually move them. I haven’t used any mods yet in G&K so I don’t know if this is still the case. I don’t remember seeing it happen when I didn’t use any mods.