Worker/Former Bug is alive and kickin'

[Nomad_Wanderer]

Had a few turns where there weren't any other city imporvments to build....I already had a positive economy, and was growing fairly rapidly, so I decided to have most of my cities build workers, so when I reached industrial/modern ages rails/pollution would be easier to handle.

So I have about 30 workers, and I make the mistake of Automating 25 of them.

They seemed to just "Wander" : ) from one corner of my map to another, without really doing any work...... It was like they all shared the same agenda, but once 1 began that particular task, the others moved off en masse to the next one, and then all - 1 moved on to the next one....

A few times, it was nice, when they all worked on 1 fledgling city.....but most of the time was spent walking from town to town....

This worries me a little....I was always planning on (A)utomating a majority of my workers, to keep the micromanagement in mid to late game down to a reasonable level.....Now, I'm not sure this is possible........

Also, What happened to Raising/Lowering terrain? Nothing like dredging an isthmus to slow down AI advancement.....


ALso, Offtopic, but does anyone have any tips to speed research? I still am barely making the Modern age by 2020......

[DaEezT]

When I first played a huge map I justed automated workers and was suprised by their wisdom. they actually built a "channel" from the only freshwater source to my cities on the other end of my empire by irrigateing a single line of squares. they even got throug some mountains by irrigating diagonally between the gaps. but then they grew more and more dumb with each passing round(growing old i guess). first they built mines and connected them with roads, others connected my cities with roads and others cleared forests & jungles. but when the work got less and less they started to group and soon i had 5+ workers on one square building a road. especially stupid did they become when i got pollution.every worker(even if a polluted square was next to them) moved to a single pollution squere, as soon as the first one started cleaning the others moved on to the next. and so on and so on. i turned them all manual then. maybe if you have 100% railroads you'll be able to use automatic workers but until then they'll just wasted turn after turn.
I am also dissapointed by the automatic-anti-pollution-worker(I think it wa shift+p) that is supposed to do nothing but cleaning pollution. It does, but as soon as there is no polution left it turns manual again... kinda stupid, so I have to fortify them and reactived when pollution comes up, this is as good leaving them manual...

[virt]

If you have more workers building a road/cleaning pollution/etc it will happen faster.

You want that pollution gone ASAP, right?

I once had a nuclear accident because one of my cities was unhappy for two turns (gah!) but since I had a huge amount of workers, they were able to clean up the whole mess in just three turns.

[Agni]

I noticed the same thing. Now I create workers and automate them to do work ONLY for one town (Shift-I). The good part is that they will not wander off too far from the city. The BAD part is when they have nothing else to do they become active and you have to waste their efforts. But in the end, it is better than them wandering all over the map and therefore waste a lot of turns.

I have yet to try Shift-P on some workers to automate them for pollution cleaning only. I don't know if they will wander off everywhere or not

What are your experiences with this type of worker automation?

[ironfang]

I have also noticed this problem. Especially on the huge map when there is SOOOO much going on its just a pain to try and keep up with them.

ironfang