Redoubts
Chieftain
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2009
- Messages
- 44
Automated workers need more ways to interact with them. I propose something more than the Civ4 version. In that system, you just had Make Roads, Build Everything, or Build Everything near a city. What we really need is Build According to User Generated Plan.
The workers seem to act off a predetermined plan of recommended improvements. The user should be able to edit this plan as he sees fit, rather than having to micro the workers turn-by-turn, or assume that the AI knows best. Ideally, you should be able to edit the plan through the city screen, in a manner similar to citizen allocation. You would plop down improvements like farms, TPs, mines, roads, plantations, etc (regardless of your current tech) in a virtual worker queue. The plan should probably auto-update with every tech that reveals a new resource, with a small notice that alerts you to a conflict ("we're putting a pasture here now, so maybe rethink that farm placement"). Once the plan is generated, a simple linear list should be generated. Ideally, empire resources are prioritized, then everything else, with tiles in your nth city coming before tiles in city n+1. Roads may need to have a separate automation queue.
This should be easy to implement, because workers do this already (else they recalc a plan every turn, which seems foolish and CPU intensive). It seems natural because, for me at least, the tiles are already decided in my head as soon as I plop a city. Furthermore, I see no loss of gameplay here; you're still deciding what goes where. You just don't have to remember or internally recalc your master plan every time a worker comes off cooldown.
Is this not a natural feature to have?
(also, I'm an idiot. move to ideas sub-forum plz)
The workers seem to act off a predetermined plan of recommended improvements. The user should be able to edit this plan as he sees fit, rather than having to micro the workers turn-by-turn, or assume that the AI knows best. Ideally, you should be able to edit the plan through the city screen, in a manner similar to citizen allocation. You would plop down improvements like farms, TPs, mines, roads, plantations, etc (regardless of your current tech) in a virtual worker queue. The plan should probably auto-update with every tech that reveals a new resource, with a small notice that alerts you to a conflict ("we're putting a pasture here now, so maybe rethink that farm placement"). Once the plan is generated, a simple linear list should be generated. Ideally, empire resources are prioritized, then everything else, with tiles in your nth city coming before tiles in city n+1. Roads may need to have a separate automation queue.
This should be easy to implement, because workers do this already (else they recalc a plan every turn, which seems foolish and CPU intensive). It seems natural because, for me at least, the tiles are already decided in my head as soon as I plop a city. Furthermore, I see no loss of gameplay here; you're still deciding what goes where. You just don't have to remember or internally recalc your master plan every time a worker comes off cooldown.
Is this not a natural feature to have?
(also, I'm an idiot. move to ideas sub-forum plz)
