What to automate and what not to?

In general default just overestimate gold. The other thing I'd watch for is that I think default is like food focus which means hammers tend to be neglected.
While the main rule is to keep growing you do want some hammers and making sure you work a few mines.

I only automate stuff once there is nothing that can be screwed up.

I automate scouts and caravels but only after I have mapped out the edges of all the major continents manually. I automate workers after all the resources in my cities have been upgraded. I partially automate citizens in a city after the city grows to size 15 or so, I will select all the good food tiles, top production tiles, and any great tiles, and then let the city manager do the rest, but I do look just to make sure it isn't stupid and I set the goal (e.g., "science focus").

Although some say "automate nothing", I think the real answer is "automate nothing that might significantly impact the outcome of the game".

I wish that you could set sensible automation for military. I remember in earlier versions of civ being able to set waypoints for units to follow. Wish you could still do that, and then say put a knight on a patrol so it walks around the dark areas looking for barb camps or something, or better yet, a frigate patrolling trade routes for barbs, etc.

I sometimes automate my scouts but don't over do it because city states sometimes get mad when the automated scout steps on city states' land. Caravel explorers are the best automated explorers because you don't have to worry about city states getting annoyed with you as much as city states get annoyed from automated scouts. Another thing about scouting automatically is that you can't over do it because city states get mad. So one easy way to not over do it is by putting only 1 scout in automatization.

reddishrecue said:

I sometimes automate my scouts but don't over do it because city states sometimes get mad when the automated scout steps on city states' land. Caravel explorers are the best automated explorers because you don't have to worry about city states getting annoyed with you as much as city states get annoyed from automated scouts. Another thing about scouting automatically is that you can't over do it because city states get mad. So one easy way to not over do it is by putting only 1 scout in automatization.

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I stopped automating any scouts because I got sick and tired of embarked scouts launching themselves at fortified barb units on land! It's tedious moving them manually but not half as tedious as getting them healed only for them to do the same stupid thing again. It's a pity you can't give limited programming to units, e.g. workers - don't leave this city boundary/continent; scouts - when embarked, move adjacent to land and check what's there before landing, etc. etc.

Xiao Xiong said:

I automate workers after all the resources in my cities have been upgraded.

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I should try that, relax a bit, see how it works out. I am kind of AR about my roads though, as I take pains to avoid 4-way intersections (just because they are ugly) and I want most cities to be on two routes.

I will select all the good food tiles, top production tiles, and any great tiles, and then let the city manager do the rest

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In my experience, the city manager heavily favors all of those, so what is the point of locking them?

but I do look just to make sure it isn't stupid

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What stupid things have you caught it doing?

The auto-manager cannot know what is going on in the players head. As a player, I can know that I won't need the hammers for x number of turns and can safely go crazy on food focus. At other times I may want the hammers to finish a wonder or key building, so working a bunch of farm grassland tiles could really delay it. Or, say it is a game I plan on early domination of a neighbors capital and perhaps a city or two. I know population cannot get too high and that gold is higher priority than usual (for the military), so I want to make sure those luxuries in my cities are actually getting worked.

In short, it is less about not trusting the default manager and more about making sure that it is going along with what the current plan is at the time. Often it is, so I don't feel the need to check it every turn. After a while you get that intuition of knowing when you will likely need to lock down tiles or specialists, and when you can let it go.

As for the various "focuses", I tend to stay away from them. Because as I said earlier in the thread, I typically automate workers after about turn 100, and it does mess with them. If you put it on gold focus, they will start spamming trading posts over your farms. If you put it on hammer focus they will start replacing hill river farms with mines. I find it easier just to keep it on default and lock down what I need.

BEFanatic said:

The auto-manager cannot know what is going on in the players head.

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Right, so use the different focuses as needed.

As a player, I can know that I won't need the hammers for x number of turns and can safely go crazy on food focus. At other times I may want the hammers to finish a wonder or key building, so working a bunch of farm grassland tiles could really delay it. Or, say it is a game I plan on early domination of a neighbors capital and perhaps a city or two. I know population cannot get too high and that gold is higher priority than usual (for the military), so I want to make sure those luxuries in my cities are actually getting worked.

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Three great examples of letting the focuses for food/production/gold work for you, rather than manually locking tiles.

After a while you get that intuition of knowing when you will likely need to lock down tiles or specialists, and when you can let it go.

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I would appreciate some more specific examples to look for.

As for the various "focuses", I tend to stay away from them. Because as I said earlier in the thread, I typically automate workers after about turn 100, and it does mess with them. If you put it on gold focus, they will start spamming trading posts over your farms. If you put it on hammer focus they will start replacing hill river farms with mines. I find it easier just to keep it on default and lock down what I need.

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Thanks for this, I think I understand the reason for our difference of opinion now! Yes, automated workers pay attention to city governor focus. Which I would argue is bad design. Improvements are pretty much once-and-done, whereas city focus changes regularly. I have plenty of experience with workers making questionable choices. I don't find manually managing workers to be a chore. I do find locking and unlocking tiles to be tedious. If you are in the habit of to automating workers, then I can see more justification for manually managing tiles. It seems like a roundabout way of doing things though IMHO.

Keep in mind domination is my game of choice, so while improving 3 or 4 bases and calling it done is no big deal, I really don't like the idea of micromanaging 12+ workers to hook up roads, trading posts, new resources, etc. On top of already micromanaging wars, which as many players feel is already micro intensive enough as is

Not to mention I believe there is an option to make workers unable to replace improvements.

So if you are looking for a specific reason why or why you should not manually work tiles, I cannot give you one. Just for me out of all the games I've played, I prefer letting workers do their thing and manually taking care of my core cities.

BEFanatic said:

Keep in mind domination is my game of choice, so while improving 3 or 4 bases and calling it done is no big deal, I really don't like the idea of micromanaging 12+ workers to hook up roads, trading posts, new resources, etc. On top of already micromanaging wars, which as many players feel is already micro intensive enough as is.

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I am trying to get better at domination. Worker management does get more tedious the more one has. (I find tile locking/unlocking tedious even with just four cities.)

Not to mention I believe there is an option to make workers unable to replace improvements.

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I was going to mention that when you complained of workers spamming trading posts over farms and replacing hill river farms with mines.

So if you are looking for a specific reason why or why you should not manually work tiles, I cannot give you one.

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NP, I am just trying to challenge my own habits, especially those which seem so contrary to forum consensus.

Just for me out of all the games I've played, I prefer letting workers do their thing and manually taking care of my core cities.

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I do think that’s main thing: micro-manage the play aspect that you enjoy. Just don’t assert that it’s a terrific advantage (unless you can make the case with a skeptic).

As far as automated workers goes, you can check an option so that they never replace an already improved tile.

beetle said:

Just don’t assert that it’s a terrific advantage (unless you can make the case with a skeptic).

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Well, to be fair the only thing I've been assertive on are the GS slots (and even then backed it up with "but there are exceptions to the rule"). The rest has merely been throwing out various pros and cons of manual vs. automation.

I mean, when my first reply was that I will automate workers in a deity level game should show my general attitude towards the game. That being I am content with sub-optimal play if the results are "good enough".

I am also content with sub-optimal play when the results are good enough. My own experiments with tile locking only demonstrated that I lack discipline. I played the same map for 50 turns and was only a couple turns ahead in my cap build queue for the one where I locked tiles. The game was taking four times as long (mostly I am sure because it was new to me, and I double checked every turn before and after a city grew). Plus, I really was not enjoying myself! I imagine that once you have the habit, it very little extra time.

Prolly I should lock the GS slots and not worry about missing others. I wish you could lock some specialist without putting the governor into “manual specialist” control mode. Locking some tiles does not prevent the governor working / not worker the others. Why are specialists different than that?

In general the city governors are pretty good but their certainly not perfect because they are not me and can't read my mind and i could forgive them that if it took more than a few seconds to change tiles to my perfect set up when needed.

Usually you want at least some balance even if you are heavily leaning in one direction such as production or food and too many times i have clicked food and it has just been pure food with no production or i have clicked production and my city has gone into starvation so i have to adjust it anyway.e.g. by locking down a tile which means the governor adjusts it again because i have changed it's focus so i have to adjust it again because it is again sub optimal for what i want so not only do i have to adjust it i have to anticipate what the governor might do when i adjust it so it is generally just simpler to place the citizens myself.

There are also times when i have chosen a focus and the governor has arranged the citizens and i have left it only for me to come back to that city to find it changed (no city growth involved) so i might like what the governor does but then come back and find it has changed to something i don't like.
And you still have to check when your city grows to see what the governor has done because again it may have had it right before but with the extra citizen may have screwed it up, production focus being the prime example where with X citizens i gives a good set up but on growth of the city with Y citizens you find the city starving.

So if your checking the city when it grows anyway you may as well spend a second or two locking the new citizen in place as it's not a great amount of effort and it can mean a great difference.e.g. the difference between a city starving and not starving being a obvious difference but also shaving turns off of production while still growing at a decent rate or adding that couple of extra gold to your empire without radically changing your growth or production.

As for caravels, i used to also automate them once i had discovered the main parts but now i also just bring them home for defence or attach them to a fleet. As for when actually discovering you can semi automate them when crossing large tracks of ocean by simply giving them orders for many turns ahead from which they will generally wake up if they find anything interesting and then i usually move them each turn because i am looking for something and want to find it as quickly as possible.e.g other civs or CS's because the sooner you find them the better and i will probably have an idea where they are and want my caravel to beeline towards them instead of run around in circles (seen very often) completely discovering an area rather than exploring the whole map...you don't have to discover every single tile to know what is there and a couple of straight lines shooting across the map will tell you everything you need to know which can be done in a few semi-automated clicks (multiple turn orders).

And my other favorite is sending units on elongated trips (usually workers) and having them jump into the water. This was much worse when land units would be destroyed instantly whenever an enemy ship entered their tile and isn't as bad now but it is still not good and can potentially lose you a unit needlessly.
I did mention it was usually workers because i tried to work around this by actually following the track they were meant to take to ensure they didn't go into the water and found workers in particular are susceptible to changes of route due to them not being able to occupy tiles with certain other units or not even being able to pass through a tile that unit occupies and thus get their route altered thus you cannot even send them on a safe route and be sure they will follow it.
Again the effort required to counter this by doing it yourself is minimal.e.g. send them on a route to the water/hazard area then give them a second set of orders once they reach that point ensuring the avoid it.
Losing units, especially important or well trained units can make a significant difference to your whole game. You may not go to the extreme of losing the game but has a high likelihood of making it longer.

Even if you don't lose the unit it can make a big difference automating units on long journeys. Many times i have seen units move off of roads to avoid another unit.e.g. they would end their turn on the same tile as another unit for example and if that happens in a forested area that can add 2 or 3 turns to that units destination and if that unit is heading to reinforce a city under attack that can be the difference between keeping and losing that city.

People often say it makes little difference and on lower difficulties it probably makes little difference but a simple question is how does a end game turn take, including the waiting?
If spending a few seconds every now and then making sure something is the best it can be can mean you finish 1 turn quicker is it worth it? what about 2 turns or 3 turns or more?

Micromanagement can make a huge difference to games both good in improving your gameplay, chance of winning and winning times as well as the bad which adding to the time it takes to play but once you know what your doing i find micromanagement to be much better then allowing the AI to do very much at all especially when it might matter in the slightest because there is a high chance the AI will do something sub optimal which is why the enemy AI is generally panned in this game.

Not managing citizens yourself doesn't allow you to use the new citizen prodction trick though.

Acken said:

As far as automated workers goes, you can check an option so that they never replace an already improved tile.

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I've always wondered about this option. If you build a farm on a riverside hill and later discover Coal there, will the Automated Worker refuse to change it to a mine?

I tend to like to auto-explore. Exploring on my own is pretty tedious, and I think I get adequate results by letting the CPU do it, as its the kind of thing that mostly just takes time.

I never put my workers on auto. When you realize that there's only a finite amount of tiles that you'll actually be using, you realize that overbuilding is an exercise in futility. Considering their maintenance fee, and low production cost, I just sell workers if I can't think of anything for them to build and there's no cities to connect.

I try to handpick the tiles worked (I wouldn't want to build a manufactory or hole site only for it to be ignored) in small empires and early on. But out of convenience and sometimes forgetfulness, I let the governors take care of things when I have bigger fish to fry. I'll go in and fix a city if I'm thinking of it, or if there's a need though. The governors tend to heavily ignore the specialists.

I think that the only way to auto build units is if the city's puppeted. They choose the most asinine things (I think that's intentional from a game engine standpoint, not an AI limitation) and its smart to unpuppet as soon as the revolt is over and you can afford a courthouse.

shaglio said:

I've always wondered about this option. If you build a farm on a riverside hill and later discover Coal there, will the Automated Worker refuse to change it to a mine?

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I guess so

beetle said:

I have been frustrated trying to figure out when and which specialist slots to fill. There never seems to be enough pop to fill everything and keep the city growing at a good rate. Definitely something I need to master should I ever take on deity, but in the meantime I just use the auto-governor and the choices mostly seem good when I look at the city screen. I will change from default focus to gold focus (during golden ages) or science focus (iff observatory) or production focus (for the rare hard-built wonder).

Can anyone guide me on balancing growth versus manual specialist control? Can I lock only the scientist slots (as you say, they are definitely worth working) and let the governor do what they want with the others? (I think locking a single one turns on manual specialist control for them all.) Are science slots really the only ones worth working? What about after you unlock the tenant from Rationalism that lets specialist consume less food?

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As long as your city doesn't take 9999 to grow to the next size, send some of those farmers' kids to school and make them specialists. Your growth will pick up again once your city levels and you can work the food tile again.

Alternatively, if you already have lots of production, go with specialist instead of a mine or lumber mill.

The scientists slots are not the only ones worth working, but IMO they should always be worked. AS LONG AS your city can grow to the next pop in a reasonable amount of time. Or it may be that your pop is capped because of a lack of food. In that case, You want zero surplus food, as much hammers as it takes to build what you need to build in order to raise the food cap, and settlers.

Naturally, your highest population cities should be working lots of specialists. In those cities, you want buildings that grant GP bonuses such as Nat'l epic and gardens. Your best city, 99% of the time your capitol, you will build all the guilds. This is really the best way, since one city can build a Great Writer, Great Artist, and Great Musician all at the same time.

In LOW production cities, you may consider working engineers. Guruism helps considerably. It is a great perk for liberty games. Eventually you will want enough food in a city to work all your production AND add engineers.

All of the above paragraph is true also for wealth and merchants.

TheologiaCrucis said:

All of the above paragraph is true also for wealth and merchants.

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With the exception of the fact that Great Engineers are situationally useful at certain time frames, and Great Merchants are almost never worth their cost. Every Merchant or Engineer spawned is one less Great Scientist that you get, and while an Engineer can get you a key wonder you otherwise would not have been able to get, a merchant just gets you a couple turns worth of gold.

I haven't spawned a merchant in probably 10 games now, and I don't miss them. I never work merchant slots unless I"m going freedom with SoL and it's way late in the game so I don't have to worry about accidentally spawning one.

Chum said:

I haven't spawned a merchant in probably 10 games now, and I don't miss them.

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That's pretty slick. I never resent a GE, but the GM are so blah. Is manual control of specialist slots enough to control which kind of GP get bulbed? Or is there more to it than that? During a Golden Age, will working GM slots compound gold, or is working tiles the only factor?