automated worker

Civilization IV has finally become available in Asia. Thank God! Started playing the other day.


I noticed that a worker has more options available to him. I always select automated mode. Would the worker automatically create farms, and workshops? Or do I have make him build those?

Also, conquest by cultural expansion - does that happen in this game?

I do wish that religion had a more impact - kinda like what they had in medieval total war.

 

The worker will build anything, if it thinks it's worth it. It rarely builds workshops, but rightly so. In fact the few it builds is often annoying.

In lower levels you can usually culturally dominate your neighbours. Especially on small maps with many civs.

Check the mod forum, sooner or later someone will make a mod that suits you.

 

It isn't bad to automate workers on lower levels, but once you hit Noble and above you should look more closely into manually controlling their actions. By default, workers will build what they think is the most useful for the tile, and they will overwrite previous improvements if they think it is appropriate.

Once you begin manually controlling the improvements, you might want to disable this by going to Options and checking the box to disable workers from overwriting previous improvements. I had units stationed in a fort once and had an auto-worker build a windmill over it. It was kind of funny, but it taught me one of the early problems with the auto-worker.

 

Automate all your workers until you get the hang of the game, then watch what they build closely. After a few games past that, don't automate them any more and use the blue-circle recommendations instead to build improvements yourself. Using the recommendations over pure automation will allow you to learn which choices to make when making improvements, and eventually you can even improve past the capabilities of the computer itself, and make better decisions all on your own, without the recommendations even visible.

It's a learning process: tackle it when you're ready, have a good handle on the rest of the game, and are ready to start moving up the difficulty curve