Automation: how and how much?

[tour86rocker]

Howdy:

I was curious about the habits of some of the more experienced players of C4Col. Do you do much automation? For example, do you simply join colonists to colonies and let the computer decide their profession, etc? Do you build wagons and just set them to full automatic?

If you ever do any of these things, do you only do them for conquered colonies and colonies founded after turn 100, for instance? Just curious what people's takes are on the automation options, which I don't tend to avail myself of.

 

[Sickbean]

I'm no CivCol expert, but so far the AI is nowhere near intelligent enough to do any automation for you.
Plus it will just randomly start producing bells and alarm the king.

Micromanage ftw tbh.

 

[majk-iii]

First: Me = No "expert".
That said:

1. No
2. Yes... but seldom full auto (not on all wagons anyway), rather specifiy a trade-route. (...so that industry doesnt starve in the interim.) Full-auto go on "extras".

2b. Never Full-auto on ships, always specify routes, since they always count europe as a port, and hence become slow/ineffective traders on full-auto.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

No expert as well, and no I do micromanage the crap out of each turn.

The wagons which do tools, guns and lumber I load/unload and move myself. Every 10 turns I do a city round to see if everything is still rosey and to catch cities which have run out of recources.

Having said that, I'd love to have some sort of indication that the carpenter has ran out of wood for instance.

 

[Gath]

I was trying to automate the wagon trains, but they start doing a really crappy job of it when you have a bunch of colonies.

And the computer doesn't seem to pay attention to colonist skill class when assigning them jobs.

 

[majk-iii]

Oh... try to start to specify after priorities i.e;

minor city1 - food city (A), with rec. B and C as extras
minor city2 - lumber city, with A (food) and D as extras
minor city3 - Ore and Silver city, with A and B as extras

Now if c1 is further away then a few squares then it should have a wagon that only runs food from that city, if close then it could also run a secondary resource.
Same kinda goes for c2 and c3, depending... one or two special-runs plus perhaps one or two that runs re-specific rather then city specific in closer citys... after that, you can easily full-auto any extras to pick up all scraps that's left on the list... if there's no scraps to pick up they will help out with what shouldn't need helping; but thats a good thing anyhow... then again i build A LOT of wagons.

Midgame they only take a turn to build anyway, max two.

All eurotrade however i do manually, and as soon as my galleons return to the new world their homeport is always brimming with new goods, all thanks to the wagons.

Some management needed, but not what i would call micromanagement + the computer, if given detailed enough instructions, really does theese things better then the human anyway.

(Perhaps i should write; better the ME anyway?)

 

[majk-iii]

Sorry, that was a rant of sorts i guess... still if i try to sum it up:

"Make the computer do as much as possible, but NEVER let it make any decision for you."

It's doable, if not easy in col2... at least thats my take on it.