Would removing workers be so terrible?

I feel like one of the most tedious tasks in this game is worker micromanagement.

What if you could just set tile improvements and they would be built automatically? Each city could perhaps only improve one of its tiles at a time, and it would still require turns to complete the improvements. Surely the citizens working the tiles could also be the ones improving them? This would make tile improving a much cleaner and easier process and not leave 50 idle workers sitting around once your land is all improved.

Forgive me if this has ever been discussed, or if you think it's a terrible idea, I just think it would speed up games and narrow the players focus when it comes to tile improvements. Queueing them up just like buildings would save a lot of micromanaging.

Maybe the city could automatically expand to create improvements but you can also build workers to speed up the process or if you want to build something more out of the city's reach

I don't really think that moving improvement builds from workers to cities would actually reduce micromanagement all that much. I mean, what is the major part of worker micromanagement? Ordering them to build specific improvements. Putting this in a different screen won't reduce micromanagement all that much.

I see how this could also reduce turn times because minus about 20 workers per civ should equal faster turn times.

Camikaze said:

I don't really think that moving improvement builds from workers to cities would actually reduce micromanagement all that much. I mean, what is the major part of worker micromanagement? Ordering them to build specific improvements. Putting this in a different screen won't reduce micromanagement all that much.

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Except that you have to move Workers. You have to figure out whether it's more important to have them improving tile A in city X vs. tile B in city Y. I'd rather have each city have its own labor pool that would be accessed via the city screen.

duckstab said:

Except that you have to move Workers. You have to figure out whether it's more important to have them improving tile A in city X vs. tile B in city Y. I'd rather have each city have its own labor pool that would be accessed via the city screen.

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Exactly, you'd still have to decide what city plot improvements are the highest priority, but on a city by city basis instead of empire-wide.

There's a lot of room for generalizations like this, but I think there are too many people who would cry "It's not Civ any more!!" would be astronomical. Look at the uproar about integrating water transport.

It would be nice if there was a switch somewhere so you could tell the city what kind of city to be. Tell it to be a farming city, industrial city, science city, etc, and then the citizens improve the tiles to support that, without needing to buy actual worker units. You could build a labor pool that would do it, and then draw from that pool in a generalized way for each city. You don't directly control what tiles get improved or how.

By the same token, if you've taken a peek at Panzer General (or look up PGForever) you'll see that in some scenarios you have water and/or air transport available. It's not unlimited; you only have so many units able to use it at one time. Porting the idea to Civ, you build transport capacity and then it just shows up where you need it. Very similar in concept to the transport capacity in Imperialism, or the cargo ships in MOO2. Then when a unit wants to cross the sea, it goes to a city/port and converts to a transport, or to a city/airport and converts to an airplane.

By the same token, building Worker Capacity would be very similar to having a recruitment pool that can be enlarged.

If the work was done from the cities though the work could be queued up and there would be less continual micromanagement.

Then again I suppose you could just have workers that queued up build orders too...

I think that's a great idea. Not sure what the UI would look like though.

One other thing just occurred to me. Civ5 will have a one unit per tile limit; I've heard it suggested that this is technically one military and one civilian unit per tile. So you can stack a settler with an escort or a worker with a guard, but you won't be able to double up workers anymore, something I do a lot.

CivRev simply eliminated the workers... the land could not be improved anymore except by buildings. I would not be surprised if they go the same way with Civ5. Or they could make it so that each "worked" square is self-improving on the model of Civ4 cottages.

It seems also from the reviews that there will no be roads anymore.

Naokaukodem said:

It seems also from the reviews that there will no be roads anymore.

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No roads? Where did you read that?

I don't really care if workers are units are not. I just want an "automate" function where you paint which tiles you want which improvements in, and workers will not only build them, but rebuild them if they get destroyed. That would be a tremendous timesaver without really having to change the traditional worker system.

Dero Zero said:

No roads? Where did you read that?

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Are you talking about that pax east one on the homepage because they never said there was gonna be no roads, they said the roads aren't gonna ruin the naturual beauty as much as Civ 4

I could see a system where you assign a citizen to build something on a tile instead of working the tile. You wouldn't get the bonuses from the tile while it was being built. It would work well to mirror seasonal work that people would do for the state instead of farming and, later, you might be able to get an engineering specialist (citizen specialist, not unit) who could do the work without taking the farmer off the tile. It could make for an interesting change, without hurting realism or gameplay. The only downside is that you couldn't send workers to far off lands to improve tiles there. That could be fixed if soldiers could build roads and forts and clear jungle.

Not saying that's better or worse, just different.

On roads, they've implied that roads will mainly be for trade routes rather than movement increases, and that they will *decrease* tile yields (which just makes ZERO sense to me).

Surely there could have been a way to remove road-madness everywhere without the supreme illogic of reducing yields from having better transport.

If roads are representing only the really major arteries, then it does make some sense to have them reduce yields - you can't run a superhighway through a corn field without losing some corn production.

Who knows how they have balanced it out. Perhaps you get yield bonuses in connected cities. Or perhaps not all tiles suffer a yield penalty, only certain kinds.

you can't run a superhighway through a corn field without losing some corn production.

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But reducing an entire hex's production, from a road?
Roads really don't take up that much space.

You can't pretend that the space from the road takes up a significant portion of the hex. That's *way* worse than archers shooting over lakes.

No workers? They are one of my favorite things about this Civ franchise!

Public works would be nifty.

If it were done right, it could be a good idea.