Automated Elven Workers

[WCH]

Autobuild on the elven workers sucks balls. For one thing, they don't take advantage of the "can build on trees" thing -- they'll leave the ancient forest completely untouched, rather than lining it with cottages and farms like good little elves.

For another thing, they keep building forts on my goddamn resources. WTH? You really think that deer is a good place to build a fort? Wayyy behind my defensive line? And you're doing that while large stretches of forest remain unfarmed/uncottaged?

Autobuild seems fairly good normally... have seen them do weird thingsbefore like move back and forth between two tiles repeatedly, and occasionally they'll build workshops over resources, and then build the resource improvement over the workshop... but they can't handle the forest building at all. If you're completely covered in ancient forest, they'll declare themselves finished, nothing more to do, before building a single improvement that isn't on a resource.

Has this already been addressed somewhere?

 

[MrPopov]

yes it has. In the general Civ 4 forums...

In other words, automating workers always sucks balls. I ONLY use it toward the very end-game and ALWAYS checking options preventing them from chopping forests and paving over existing improvements.

 

[Fenboy]

The whole fort-building thing has been acknowledged elsewhere, and is a hangover from vanilla civ (where they were particularly fond of putting Forts on my supplies of marble & aluminium). It's not just elven workers that do that, though IIRC the team has struggled with getting the AI to understand that Elven Workers (and just Elven Workers) can build on forests.

 

[WCH]

Yeah, I know the fort thing isn't unique to the elves. Just put it in the same thread. Only reason it's worse for the elves is because they do that first, when there's all this other, actually useful, stuff they could be doing.

I find automated workers is generally alright, does a decent job, lets me focus on other things. It'd be nice if it worked with the elven forests, though.

 

[Demus]

you could turn off the "don't touch forests" option, maybe they'll start building on top of forests then? The forts are actually a good thing (in vanilla civ): they link up resources the same way the specific improvements do. Outside of your cities reaches, the defensive bonus from the fort is actually preferable over the (wasted) additional tile yield.

 

[WCH]

you could turn off the "don't touch forests" option, maybe they'll start building on top of forests then? The forts are actually a good thing (in vanilla civ): they link up resources the same way the specific improvements do. Outside of your cities reaches, the defensive bonus from the fort is actually preferable over the (wasted) additional tile yield.

Except they do it inside city radius as well. Which is just annoying.