Automated Workers?

capnlanky

Chieftain
Joined
Sep 30, 2010
Messages
2
I'm a casual player looking to get more in depth with my strategies. I'm wondering how efficient workers are on automate or if I should be managing them manually. If manually, what should my priories be improvement wise? Thanks!
 
Personally I would recommend moving them manually.

Generally resources are top priority to improve, and that's the one thing the automated workers are good at.

I'm also managing the work force of which tiles to work pretty much myself via locked tiles; but normally I can set a given tile and forget.

If you leave workers on auto; your land around the cities is likely to look like the AIs and improved in that order.
 
I tend to manually control my first two workers so I can make sure things I want built are actually built. As time passes, I try and control one worker per city in mid game and one per 2 cities in the later part....

When something new becomes available, Railroad for example I'll find all the workers and make sure I have say 50-70% of them building the railroad spine (main pathway between cities) and after it's close to being finished I'll put them back on automate.

Settings in options for do not chop down forests and do not overwrite improvements, those I do manually.
 
I manually control until I get bored with it. That usually occurs just before railroads. If I need something done manually after that. I deautomate a worker or two to handle it and put them back in auto. I also check the leave existing improvements in place box, so they don't screw up my production, economic, cultural strategy.
 
That's usually the total number of workers I have.

I tend to manually control my first two workers so I can make sure things I want built are actually built. As time passes, I try and control one worker per city in mid game and one per 2 cities in the later part....
 
In my opinion automated workers are horrible. They improve production tiles when I need food, and food tiles when I need hammers. They also do a poor job of building road networks most of the time.

The options for improving tiles in CiV aren't too numerous when you think about it. You can either build a farm, a mine, or a trading post on most tiles and lumbermills can only be built on forests. If it's a special resource then there is no choice. When you do have a choice just think about what you want that city to do and improve more tiles for that purpose. You can usually change your mind later.

It only gets more complicated when deciding to chop forest or jungle since they have long term effects and opportunity costs involved. Chop the forest and you get a lump sum of hammers now but lose out on a good production tile that half pays for itself in food. Chop the jungle and you get the underlying tile but you lose out on the university science bonus later.
 
This topic has been discussed at length many time in this forum. You might want to search to get more opinions.

The only thing I automate are my exploring Caravels. They aren't terribly efficient, but it saves me the time managing them so for me it's worth the few extra caravel turns unless I'm in a race around the globe. Then my 1st caravel goes one way my second goes the other and I automate the rest.
 
This topic has been discussed at length many time in this forum. You might want to search to get more opinions.

The only thing I automate are my exploring Caravels. They aren't terribly efficient, but it saves me the time managing them so for me it's worth the few extra caravel turns unless I'm in a race around the globe. Then my 1st caravel goes one way my second goes the other and I automate the rest.

I loathe autoexploring sea units. They love rushing straight for the ice capped poles, then swerving in and out of every crevice, nowhere near anything useful.

The only thing I sometimes will automate is a scout if I have already met every civ, map cleared my surrounding expansion area, and its enough turns gone to guarantee no more ruins.
 
The only thing I sometimes will automate is a scout if I have already met every civ, map cleared my surrounding expansion area, and its enough turns gone to guarantee no more ruins.

It's a pity the "auto" functions aren't smarter. They could relieve some of the tedium (such as navigating a trireme around pangaea). The naval scouts' strategy seems to be to sail in a straight line as long as possible, then hug whatever coast it ran into.

The land scouts seem just as stupid. Wandering into CS for no particular reason, and commiting suicide whenever possible. Case in point: scout is exploring the last few cloudy tiles of the far west when it encounters a barb camp and several barbs. I save it and send it on a long journey to the edge of the large unexplored area on the east, then set it to autoexplore. It beelines back to the barbs in the far west and dies there.
 
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