[BTS] Automated workers sleep in town instead working

[Enchanteur]

Hi, I get a problem with automated workers : they come back in town and idle there.
But there is a lot of things to build everywhere ! And they don't go to work !

I use them like this : I give them orders to build everywhere (not only in the city).
Options are :
- they can replace an existing improvement.
- They don't destroy a forest.

But there is a lot of forest where they could build a woodcutter giving +3 hammer, without destroying the forest.
And they don't build that ! They go to sleep !
DAMN!

Do you get the same problem ? Do you know a solution ?

 

[elmurcis]

Damn workers... don't want to work but costs money and give headache for management... oh, in Civ4 too
No idea - I always micro-manage workers (well, maybe at Railroad for network when global situation is more or less clear already) so.. they do job fast and are gifted to AI so AI can replace cottage with workshop forever

 

[lymond]

Automating workers is bad in the first place. Later in the game just stack your worker into stacks of 4 or 5, so you don't have to manage as many.

Micro-ing workers effectively is one of the keys to winning this game and moving up difficulty.

 

[Archon_Wing]

If they have nothing to do, they go into a city and sleep forever. If you press the button again and there's something to do, they'll go to work. What probably happened is that lumber mills weren't available at the time and at this point decided to stop working completely.

Do not have them be able to replace old improvements. Chances are they will ruin everything as they waste time trying to replace improvements and screw everything up. Furthermore, you should be manually improving tiles for at least your main cities and overwriting those is bad. If you end up with a bunch of workshops in your floodplain city, or cottages in a grasshill dominated city, you will regret it.

At the very least, you absolutely want to manually improve your special tiles, in particular food (any food resource) and commerce ones (gold, gems) asap. Don't compromise on this. So even if say, you don't know what to build on a particular tile, you want to get those done first.

Until you've secured at least a decent position, you shouldn't automate workers. If you find various bits tedious, later on, you may delegate a worker or two to "Build trade network", which saves you the tedious task of having to road everything. But even in those cases they are inefficient. They will road to a resource first, and then improve the resource, which is terrible because it takes forever for you to be able to use it-- at least improve all your special tiles first. But fortunately, roading every tile is the lowest priority.

As a side note, automated workers also are suicidal and seem to run straight into enemies. Another thing you don't want to happen early game.

Now obviously, if you conquered your continent, have 20 cities, have nukes when they have rifles, and you don't want to bother microing captured cities that are half improved by AI, then sure, just win the game and let the workers do whatever. I actually do this sooner, because I hate microing end and rather play more quick games (1-2 hours) since I have divided my game time between a couple of games*, but this is not something I would recommend to people as that often means I am slumming down in difficulies.

Oh. and chop your forests. For whatever reason you have for keeping the forest, there's about 10 to chop it.

(Well, that was the plan. Guild Wars 2 is my main game. But since I bought Civ 5 and 6 I decided to spend some casual time between 4-6 when I have downtime for my main game. What ended up happening is 90% of my Civ time goes to IV.... figures. It helps that IV runs on crappy laptops when I am not home.)

 

[Tristan_C]

Hi, I get a problem with automated workers : they come back in town and idle there.
But there is a lot of things to build everywhere ! And they don't go to work !

I use them like this : I give them orders to build everywhere (not only in the city).
Options are :
- they can replace an existing improvement.
- They don't destroy a forest.

But there is a lot of forest where they could build a woodcutter giving +3 hammer, without destroying the forest.
And they don't build that ! They go to sleep !
DAMN!

Do you get the same problem ? Do you know a solution ?

As above I only automate workers after the game has been decided. And never let them overwrite! Let the AI replace their towns with workshops. I'll keep mine

I have not seen the behavior you describe. I mean, I see them go to sleep but only after they've railroaded every square in the borders. It seems to me like they are very thorough. IIn the case of lumbermills there might be some sort of specific problem. Maybe they want to build a workshop there but since they cannot chop they will just do nothing (?).

 

[Archon_Wing]

Lumbermills require replaceable parts, which is a bit late in the game and also comes before railroads. It's very possible that they ran out of stuff to do before that point and just never woke up. Usually kicking them a swift kick in the behind will get it going.

Granted, I do not let automated workers leave forests and jungle. Unless you really want that national park, I 'd rather see everything chopped down.

 

[rah]

I usually only automate them once I've captured so many from other civs when you're rolling the map.
I do use leave forests and improvements because of what others have already said.

 

[Yin Cognito]

I never automate workers. It's simply not efficient. As someone else said, if you find micromanaging tedious, just stack them workers into "packs", and you have less trouble with assigning their jobs. The downside of the "packs" (or groups, if you like it better) is that sometimes you lose moves for individual workers - for example, if you assign 4 of them to build, say, a mine on a forested hill, it is possible that at the completion of the improvement 3 workers have 0 moves left while 1 worker might have the whole 2 moves available. In that case, if you want to go on with the group, you'd have to "sacrifice" the moves the last worker has, and wait till the next turn to move all 4 of them - otherwise you'd just need to "un-group" them and go with each of them individually.

I wonder if a mod could have been made to have a wider selection algorithm for how the workers operate, or it's just hard-coded. Sort of like "if worker on grassland, cottage it, otherwise farm it or whatever", since the 2 options that the game provides (autom. workers leave old improvements and autom. workers leave forests) are too basic to be effective for players, in general. Something like automating the workers, but with conditions (if/else) opened to modification...

 

[Archon_Wing]

Well, sorta. You can influence what automated workers do by selecting focus in cities. For example, production focus sees more workshops, commerce focus sees cottages. But they don't plan for food and are too obsessed with roads which sucks.

Better than nothing I guess.