AI cheats at this game.

[Pangaea]

Thanks, since someone linked that to me, I've always wondered what that variable meant, and searching for it has yielded nothing. Cheers.

It did use the copper tile later, true. But using it in this case would have saved a ton of turns on that barracks. Suppose the default governor favours growth over hammers. Maybe it's the right move long-term too. In the shadow threads I've created, people criticise the fact I sometimes favour hammers over food, as I prefer to get out (important) buildings faster instead of a slightly faster growth.

Surprised me too that automated workers would pre-chop. Chopping wasn't used particularly well, however. Did notice that at least one chop did go into a settler, so that was good, but another went into a warrior, which is less good.

Maybe the main issue I noticed with automated workers, is that they kept way too long in the capital instead of moving on to the 2 new cities and improving food there. Roading to them was too late too, considering there was no sailing nor rivers. And I'd much rather improve a resource tile first, then connect it. They quite often doubled or even tripled up to improve resources faster, so that's mostly good I suppose. Though IIRC at one time all three workers were building a mine.

Clearly they leave a lot to be desired, and one would have been killed by a barb hadn't he mysteriously buggered off. It was almost as if the worker was seeking him out. There is definitely a difference here with AI workers, because they run to safety in cases like that.

 

[Kid R]

That kind of worker behaviour is more human-like that we give it credit for. Anyone who's ever had to manage a group of manual labourers will totally recognize the wandering about, the doing of random jobs, the doing totally the wrong thing and then having to redo the right thing, etc.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Most real-life workers, however, still operate under a basic incentive to survive. That incentive disappears from the "minds" of workers the instant they're automated. Worker behaviour while automated at war can be compared to a manual labourer willingly standing at the edge of a trench while it was being shelled in world war I...and occasionally wandering between them. Their decision to move next to enemy borders and start an improvement is THAT bad. It's pure suicide, and yet another example in a long list of controls that don't work.