Workers or PW

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I haven't seen anything about this yet, but it seems pretty important to me. Terrain improvements in civ3 are done by workers. Controlling 50+ workers is very time consuming and irratating. The auto worker features never seem to work properly either. I would much rather have a PW, public works, system like CTP for terrain improvements than a workers system in civ4.

Post your ideas on terrain improvements here.
 
one more vote for public works
but don't restrict them to near cities: just have them cost more depending on the distance from from dities, not counted tile distance but the number of move points it would take to get there. so if you wanted to build something expensive far from a city, you'd have to build a road to there first for the cost to be reasonable.
 
You could always automate the workers if you find it annoying to give them individual orders. Others might like to micromanage. I feel the system we have right now is quite good.
 
I am in favor of CTP style public works. Workers are just too darn irritating. The drawback is you lose the captured worker/slave dynamic. The ability of workers to be captured forces you to keep a somewhat mobile force to defend your territory instead of just sitting back fortified on cities. Maybe if there was some kind of slaver unit that could drain your public works (simulating capturing workers) just by remaining in your territory... especially if it was a cool invisible slaver that says, "that's right, a SLAVER!"
 
of course this opens the door to slave riots, international incidents upon discovery of said slavers, abolitionists and the emancipation act. i like the idea of PW, but the least they could do is make a more efficient automate worker function and allow workers to be grouped.

welcome to cfc newbie :)
 
I like the public works idea, not sure how well it would work but in theory it sounds great. But it is still a tough decision im not sure which one I would prefer. If they even considered it I would like to be a beta tester or something so I knwo what its like
 
One thing that IMO made CTP suck was the terrible amount of invisible units, that you had to go around chasing - in later ages they could simply walk into your capital and - *PUFF* - your once-so-glorious capital was a park for hippies! This is a total NONO for slaver-units. (it would be terrible if they could just drain your PW's by being in some remote tundra tile in the periferia of my civ). The PWs themselves were quite fine, though, but the idea of somehow hampering your enemies' PWs (like you can enslave the enemies' workers now) should be rethought.

I would perhaps still be in Arathorn's camp, with one foot undecidedly in PW-camp. The workers should be re-thought, the AI of them should be better and automation possibilities good (now they only clean pollution as long as there is some - they don't sleep until some appears and rush to clean it, as I naively first though. It was a terrible disappointment). With worker gangs (as promised already to C3C-patch) would surely make the workers better.
 
The Public Works system allowed you to spent an amount of production on tile improvements. The advantage is less micromagement, the disadvantage is that there are no workers to destroy/capture. So there are also no workers that need protection and that means that a whole tactic in the game is lost.

My suggestion would be that if one would use production to improve a tile, then a worker would be immediately created that would walk from the nearest city to the tile and need a certain amount of turns to complete the construction. After the construction the worker would again dissapear into the nearest city. The worker itself would only be a visualisation of the production process that would not cost population or production itself. Those costs are already covered by the Public Works costs of improving the tile. But you would need to protect the worker as it can be captured or destoyed, which would mean that you lose the Public Works cost spent on improving the tile and maybe give the enemy a slave and a part of the public works cost you spent.

This way, we still have the less tedious way of improving tiles by using Public Works, but we also have to protect our workers and our investments.
 
Originally posted by enigma2010
You could always automate the workers if you find it annoying to give them individual orders. Others might like to micromanage. I feel the system we have right now is quite good.
Click to expand...
Agreed:goodjob: I have no problems with automating my workers.
 
workers are great until you have to cover every tile with railroads. I think their actions should be a little more limited or maybe improve as time goes on.
 
I like the current workers. The only thing I would do is add the ability to group some together to get long jobs done with one command. I find the current automation quite useful and after the first era, most of my workers (not all) are given specific automated tasks (build a road between these two cities, build a road to that resource). I leave about 10% under manual control at any given time. This means that on any given turn I only have a handful of workers to order around.
 
Yes. I think that you should make worker groups. Also, I think that there should be a queing system, so that you can que lots of jobs in one turn, and then not have to deal with them for the next 10 turns. Also, maybe you could have a system where you could do "cover this rectangle of squares (x,y) with (railroad) + (irrigation)" or "make this square + (all diagonals) (mined)" or "(mine) all (mountains) + (tundra)".
 
I am completely for the PW system like in CTP. The current worker unit in civ3 is just down right irritating.
I think the PW should not come out of shield as in CTP, but rather be paid for by gold. When a country wants to build road, their main concern is the money, not the raw material right?? The farther away the construction is from a city, the more it will cost and the longer it will take for the construction to be completed.
 
In CTP you can set aside part of your total production to go into the PW pool, such as 10% of 20%. It is like the national treasury. Once you have something in the PW treasury, you can build stuff, for example a tile of road would cost like 20 PW. You simply click on the build road icon and place it where you want it to be, and 20 will be deducted from the PW pool. After a few turns the work will be completed and you have a tile of road. It doesn't need a worker to do the work.
 
I agree a important tactical part of the game would be lost with no workers. You also lose the ability to "worker join" in MP games. So much for enslaving also. The downside to workers is that the become tedious in the later game. I dont like pw mainly because it allows actions like "build the road in front of my army in 1 turn" etc.
 
You can still enslave your enemy. I remember in CTP they have a 'slaver' unit, it can either steal population from enemy city to work as slave in your city, or in the case that it was stacked with military unit, it can capture defeated enemy soldier to work as slave. Slave in this case, is just like another citizen for your city, but they consume only 1/2 of the food, and don't get paid.

Slaves can have a chance to revolt, if you city have large population of slaves and no military unit, they might rebel and take over the city. That is a good thing to have, make the game a lot more fun.

CTP has many good things to offer, from its combat system to its civil war model. Civ4 should look to learn from CTP and CTP2.
 
I agree with Shadow Hawk
I think they should keep the worker system but when u automate a "governor screen" should come up with Mountains, Plains, grassland... and a scroll down box so you could have Plains:90% Mined 5% Road Only 5% Irrigated etc........ then set for all workers/ this worker only....... Only cities with less than 4 improved tiles etc etc . That way it isnt time consuming and isnt as irritating as u are getting roughly what you want.
 
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