Automating workers! (help needed)

[Turner]

I don't mind automating my workers, and I usually do this after I get my 'big' tiles worked the way I like them.

That being said, the one thing I don't automate is pollution. I have found that if I do that, only two workers go to each pollution tile until all pollution tiles are worked. So what I generally do is a rolling wave of workers that go from one point to the next cleaning pollution. In my mind, it's better to have four workers clearning one pollution tile in one turn for two turns, then to have two teams of two workers working on two pollution tiles and getting them cleaned in two turns. Especially if a city is about to loose pop because of the pollution.

So while I'll be the first to encourage someone to automate (albeit with some guidelines and not just going hog wild) I'd be the first to encourage someone to manually use their workers to clear pollution. Ironic, isn't it?

 

[zurichuk]

Been thinking about this, and there is alot of talk about exploiting the AI by doing things that the AI has not yet been programmed to do or deal with. Automating workers just puts you on a level playing field with the AI, your workers become as inefficient as the computers, any manual assignments then give an advantage if the human is more intelligent than the programming. You could actually argue that manual assignment only really becomes necessary on Monarch and above in order to catch up the advantage given to the computer at these levels.

Secondly why do we call the computer the AI, there's no AI involved just programming.

 

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by stevenx
unfortunately, if i don't automate workers... sometime, i cannot find the pollution square cause i always play huge pangea map... very difficult to look through every squares...

Use Ctrl-Shift-M (Clean Up Map) in zoom out mode to locate pollution. To do this, use Ctrl-M (Clean map preferences) to show borders, pollution, and (optionally) roads & rails.

I fortify stacks of 3 or 6 workers which I place next to my capital as a marshalling point so I don't have to look all over to find my workers. When my pollution crews are inactive, I return them to the mashalling yards.

The problem with Shift-P (auto pollution duty) is, of course, that if there is one turn with no pollution to clean up, they are all at a loss for what to do; if they would just wait for the next pollution turn on their own, I would use it.

 

[stevenx]

Jaybe,
i try clean map before, but the map surface that i played on is simply too big...

u will get back the control of workers on Shift-P (auto pollution duty) when there is no more pollution to be clean... so u can reassign that to do other things...

this is how i play my game regarding pollution:
normally i have more workers than pollution to be clean up... at the beginning of a turn, before those workers that are automated to clean pollution start, i will find those workers that are idling for auto-pollution duty(ps. there is no need for me to look though the whole map for pollution)... until all the pollution have been clean-up... when its time for the previously pollution-automated workers to start work, there is now no more pollution left... i can now reassign them to do other tasks...

 

[Jaybe]

No, no, no .... Don't you see, Steven? there IS nothing else to do!
Also, my civ was divided into different parts, inviting auto'd workers to spend a dozen turns going through another civ I no longer had a RoP with.

My use of clean map was on large continents, and scrolling with the mouse on the minimap worked rather well.

 

[stevenx]

Jaybe,
when there is no work for my workers, that probably means i am not working... time for another war and undeveloped territory for my industrial workers...

 

[Tholish]

The worst thing about automating workers is that they will start irrigating and mining every other vertical line. I usually manually control my workers until I get railroads, then I use the advanced unit action buttons to put them on automation, no modifying. That way they build railroads all over, keep pollution cleaned up, improve terrain that I overlloked when they aren't busy doing that, and don't cause much trouble, in that order. Especially if you have right of passage agreements with all your neighbors or want to fight them.