Automatization - wishlist

[Lazy sweeper]

It looks like it is an underestimated feature, which it used to apply to workers actions up to civ V.
I felt I wish I could automate workers actions even in VI, but it was not possible.
Does it makes sense to wish for a worker - mainly feature, where workers might not even be present at all in Civ VII???
I don't know, but the basic idea could still make sense. Even just for Aesthetich beauty purposes it might make sense.
Plant woods everywhere is something I always loved to do on every map I played.
Normal automatization options for workers were of few kinds.
Civ III had by far the most automatization options for workers actions with the Advanced automatization options.
These included:
Automate - (it follows civ unique cultural traits by default, somthing I always like to be able to change, e.g.
Automate: focus on production (build more mines than pastures and irrigation)
Automate: focus on growth (build more pastures and irrigation than mines)
Automate: focus on commerce (build more towns, commercial centres, luxury resources)
Automate: build trade (connect all cities and resources)(resources instantly available that needs no roads have no use for this, but I'd love it back, with roads, as no roads was pretty bad to me in Civ VI)
Automate: irrigate to nearest city
Automate: clear forest
Automate: clear wetlands
Automate: clear damage
Automate: this city only
Automate: no altering
Automate: no altering, this city only
Automate: Explore
Plus other very useful features like
Build road to
Sentry
plant woods

I always wished for (especially in Civ VI):

Automate: plant woods
Automate: repair damage
Automate: build military resources network (similar to trade, but focused on iron, horses, ivory and camels- stone if it was a needed resource for building walls and old growth forests if it was calculated also as a resource- sail boats with timber necessity eg)
Automate: build trenches to (similar to build road to, but it would build trenches and/or fences, with towers every five hexes in ancient times- similar to a Great Wall or an Adrian wall)
Also other units could have some automatizations other than explore.
Automate: Hunt down barbars and bandits (modern time barbars, similar to spies?? These could steal money or resources, but are unhappy/poor citizens of your empire that turned against your government)(also similar to sentry but could give an area of inspection)
a similar mechanic is present in EU4 for naval units, to constantly monitor a sea route up and down)
Automate: Control the skies
Automate: Bombing - all units
Automate: Set continental rally point (all newly built units will gather at the rally point)
Automate: Set rally point (only for this city)
Automate: Always build previous built order (for cities)
A new automatization action could, for example, let the AI take control of all your empire orders
Automate: A.I. take control (only available after computer tech)
with a special 2001 Space Odissey HAL event where at one point, A.I would want to declare war to everyone, nuke everyone, and decide to go for a Domination victory, and literally block you out of control.
Now you have to jump into a special minigame, where you have a few rebel units available, whilst the majority of your army units do not understands what's going on, and hunt your rebel units down,
and you have to sneak into some special government building, and switch off the power grid from there, or, if it fails, you'd need to blow up every power station in your empire (water, wind, coal, etc).
Other automatizations could be, after advanced Ecology tech, focused on other natural environment tasks.
Automate: protect nature (in AOE every tribe had one or more Boars to boost up food in early turns, and one good tactic was to go around and kill other tribes Boars before them)(parks could work map-wise without need to establish one with borders)
Automate: clean skies ( maybe a Zeppelin, other than used for scouting, or Early WWI war bombarder or troop transporter, could spread some water vapour and forming clouds, increasing the albedo)
Automate: kill the rebels ( Similar to quench revolt, but it would actually kill some of your pop in evey city to mantain stability, useful to prevent city flips- available since ancient times)(only unique civ units also could do this- Roman legionaire, Aztec Jaguar warriors).
Automate: Make Desert (you are the exact opposite of a green peep, maybe a Desert civ...)
Automate: Make Ice Age (Again, maybe you are a snow/tundra civ)(example, spreading sulfur in the sky, throwing sulfur resource in an active volcano, maybe even sacrificing some tribes to some gods could do the job - they would still use sulfur or something, but if it's a sacrifice panthon-god civ, it could need no actual sulphur resource to darken the skies and start a mini-ice age)(techs could give then many more options for climate control actions- burn jungle, needs oil e.g)

Add yours:

 

[Quintillus]

I can definitely see the use for it, especially in the late game where I'm just trying to get to a cultural of space race victory.

The catch with it in III, which would likely be the catch for it in VII, is the sub-optimal automation results. The only ones I use a lot in III are Clear Damage and Explore (mainly for ships). Sometimes "Build Road To" and "Sentry". The "No Altering" is a nice option, so my hand-built core can be left intact by late-game automated workers improving newly-added territories.

I suppose I also use "Always Build Previously Built Unit" a lot. Wind up in a war, have half my cities auto-build Cavalry, a quarter Infantry, and a quarter Artillery, or something like that. And rally points, which don't work very well conceptually with 1 UPT. But combined, those two sped up the unit overhead quite a bit - just update the Rally point every few turns if progress is being made, and the units wind up close to where they are needed with minimal overhead.

As for what I would like more of? Probably wouldn't make sense in VI where forts replace other improvements, but in the III model, forts were in addition to other improvements, and an auto-fortify-(defended)-borders option could have been nice. More often than not fully defending borders is prohibitively expensive due to maintenance costs, but being able to tell a worker "go fortify things where I do have units" (e.g. at a key chokepoint, defending the one source of iron that's right on the edge of our territory, etc.) would have been nice.

Edit: And part of why it doesn't work so well in VI is the limited number of worker charges. It's less benefit automating a worker that's going to be gone in 3 to 5 charges anyway, versus one that could perform scores of actions over the course of the game. I didn't outright disdain the limited-charge model, but I'm not really convinced it was an improvement, either.

 

[Xur]

People always wonder why I call civ6 a boardgame, and the lack of automation is certainly one of the reasons.

The fact that a build queue had to be patched in later didn’t help.

Builder charges is another problem that doesn’t work well together with automation.

It’s as if every design choice in civ6 is working against automation.

I hope we get workers back, build charges die and that automation is a design goal. Make a video game - not a board game.

 

[Moriboe]

My wishlist would be: every repetitive task. In Civ6 that's waaay too many. Over the course of the series they took out the most pointless min maxing (e.g. introducing overflow), and dumb "wack a mole"-style mechanics (e.g. automation for clearing pollution); only to put similar features (and more) back in Civ6 with a vengeance. As I am older now, I found the return on time spent in terms of interesting gameplay severely lacking. As the lead designer will stay on I suspect I won't be touching Civ7.

For me in the ideal game you could automate workers (better still, get rid of them), city governors, generals (get rid of 1UPT), unit movement (interconnected rally points like what Quintillus suggests), set trade routes and deals to never expire (and prevent the AI from spamming dumb offers). The AI should already be there for all those features anyway. It could even be a game mechanic to stop you from snowballing: you have to choose which tasks to hand over to the AI (with risks, e.g. revolting cities or generals) if your empire becomes too big. Min max early on, play "ChillCiv" when victory becomes inevitable (which is another issue!).

 

[UWHabs]

Full automation is very tough in a game like civ. The build queue gets you most of the way there for cities.

For builders, I think the answer would be to like combine map tacks with builders. So like if I could just tag every tile with what I wanted on it, and then "automating" my builder turns into "find the closest map tack with a builder action possible, and do it". I don't want the builders to have free reign, but I really wouldn't mind just setting up my map tacks I want. As long as it's combined with a slightly smart algorithm so that it only attempts those which it can reach within a few turns, that would be great. Combine that with Road-to or Railroad-to options, that would be great.

For cities, it could be a simple algorithm where it either builds the cheapest building available, or if there's a district slot available and a map tack of a district, it will lay that down and build it. Mid to late game is always annoying when you constantly have to pop districts, build buildings one by one, etc... because it doesn't know how to queue items that aren't available.

 

[AriochIV]

Games are about making interesting choices, so if you have to automate a choice, that's not optimal design. In general, if a choice is so trivial that it can safely be automated, that choice shouldn't even be something that's presented to the player.

A game that plays itself isn't very much fun.

Giving the Builders charges was a decent idea, turning a micromanagement task back into a choice... but I think there were some elements missing, such as the lack of ability to manually build roads before you get Engineers.

It will be interesting to see how they approach Workers/Builders this time around.

 

[Xur]

Games are about making interesting choices, so if you have to automate a choice, that's not optimal design. In general, if a choice is so trivial that it can safely be automated, that choice shouldn't even be something that's presented to the player.

A game that plays itself isn't very much fun.

Giving the Builders charges was a decent idea, turning a micromanagement task back into a choice... but I think there were some elements missing, such as the lack of ability to manually build roads before you get Engineers.

It will be interesting to see how they approach Workers/Builders this time around.

So factorio is a bad game? It’s a failed point of view that automation is bad. It can actually add and deepen gameplay.

Civ has always had some sort of automation - civ6 dropped all automation and people cant even be bothered to finish games anymore. Giant maps have less interesting choices than small maps. The start have more interesting choices than late game.

I primarely play giant maps on marathon and that is NOT fun in civ6. Fun is subjective, but saying that automation is synomous with a game not being fun? That’s just objectively wrong. Period.

 

[UWHabs]

So factorio is a bad game? It’s a failed point of view that automation is bad. It can actually add and deepen gameplay.

Civ has always had some sort of automation - civ6 dropped all automation and people cant even be bothered to finish games anymore. Giant maps have less interesting choices than small maps. The start have more interesting choices than late game.

I primarely play giant maps on marathon and that is NOT fun in civ6. Fun is subjective, but saying that automation is synomous with a game not being fun? That’s just objectively wrong. Period.

Yeah, some level of automation is fine. Like tile use - that's a great case where it's "automated" by default, but if you want to override the default, you can.

But especially the point about early vs late game, like in the first 50 turns which tile you farm first could make a massive difference in your empire. If your civ has 15 cities and is making hundreds of science per turn, a tile not being improved for a couple turns, or a wasted builder charge here or there makes no difference.

 

[Nikolai II]

Some things need to be automated in the game, for sure. But some things should just be made more fun to do. Like, early game in Civ your main thing to do is to explore, right? So if it is automated, all you do is hit enter/end turn. No fun. So solution would be to make exploration more fun. Not make it possible to wholly automate.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I view it more that some decisions that are fun and meaningful early in the game become tedious busy-work later and should be dropped. Automation may be one way to do that, but there may be better ways. Blue-skying, perhaps Workers / Builders under direct control of the player are responsible for Era One improvements, then later on you can order improvements from the city build menu for gold/hammers, and later still they just happen automatically because by then anything that can be improved/upgraded will be improved/upgraded, so why waste player time on the topic.

 

[Nikolai II]

I view it more that some decisions that are fun and meaningful early in the game become tedious busy-work later and should be dropped. Automation may be one way to do that, but there may be better ways. Blue-skying, perhaps Workers / Builders under direct control of the player are responsible for Era One improvements, then later on you can order improvements from the city build menu for gold/hammers, and later still they just happen automatically because by then anything that can be improved/upgraded will be improved/upgraded, so why waste player time on the topic.

Interesting. So you think the game might be removing workers late game? Why then not go for CtP's Public Works model from the get go? Why have both systems?

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Interesting. So you think the game might be removing workers late game? Why then not go for CtP's Public Works model from the get go? Why have both systems?

I'm not predicting what Civ 7 will do, just suggesting things that I'd like to see.

The reason for multiple systems would be to keep on-map workers / builders when the decision about what to improve next is important and fun, then drop them when they become tedious busy-work. As an added bonus, it would add to the sense of progression over time.

 

[AriochIV]

So factorio is a bad game? It’s a failed point of view that automation is bad. It can actually add and deepen gameplay.

Civ has always had some sort of automation - civ6 dropped all automation and people cant even be bothered to finish games anymore. Giant maps have less interesting choices than small maps. The start have more interesting choices than late game.

I primarely play giant maps on marathon and that is NOT fun in civ6. Fun is subjective, but saying that automation is synomous with a game not being fun? That’s just objectively wrong. Period.

I'm talking specifically about automating player decisions. I haven't played Factorio, but I asume it's about building a factory... I would be surprised if the factory builds itself.

Late game bloat is problem in 4X games that has never yet been really solved... and so a game can be forgiven for inserting remedies that are not optimal. It may be that there is no ideal solution to this porticular design problem; I've done design work on a 4X game and I don't have a solution either. But I think it's still true that even if you have to use bad solutions, you want to use them as little as possible. So I don't think leaning even more heavily into automation is the right way to go.

(I do find it amusing when people declare that they will only play on the largest maps and the slowest speeds, and then complain that the game is not fun when played this way.)

 

[Xur]

I'm talking specifically about automating player decisions. I haven't played Factorio, but I asume it's about building a factory... I would be surprised if the factory builds itself.

Late game bloat is problem in 4X games that has never yet been really solved... and so a game can be forgiven for inserting remedies that are not optimal. It may be that there is no ideal solution to this porticular design problem; I've done design work on a 4X game and I don't have a solution either. But I think it's still true that even if you have to use bad solutions, you want to use them as little as possible. So I don't think leaning even more heavily into automation is the right way to go.

(I do find it amusing when people declare that they will only play on the largest maps and the slowest speeds, and then complain that the game is not fun when played this way.)

It is a decision to automate. It is a more interesting decision than micromanaging builders in civ6.

Late game bloat was particularly bad in civ6 - a game with no automation. I wonder if there's a connection.

You somehow fail to see that old civ games had automation solved and had less bloat as a result. Those older civs were a joy to play on the largest maps and slowest speed. I finished old civ games because it was not tedious and I wanted the replay map. In civ6 I can't be bothered managing cities, units and builders. It doesn't have any more to manage than civ5, but civ5 helped you manage things.

Workers give you choice early and they can be automated late game - the perfect solution. Why re-invent the wheel? Cities could be puppeted/automated. These two things alone makes late game much more viable. Late game in civ6 is trash because you have to do everything yourself and have no help from the game.

I don't particularly care if you've done 4x work, if you can't even see the obvious within the civ franchise. They had a solution to late game bloat and made it worse.

 

[AriochIV]

It is a decision to automate. It is a more interesting decision than micromanaging builders in civ6.

In an ideal situation, the best design is one in which automation is not required. In real games, situations are rarely ideal, but at this point right now we're talking about Civ7, which to us is a blank slate. We don't know if they'll have workers or builders or something else entirely. So this is a hypothetical design discussion.

Automation with workers worked to a degree in Civ5 and earlier, but it was hardly a "perfect" solution -- the choice of improvements still mattered even if you had a lot of cities, and not everyone was content to give up that choice to the AI. So I understand what they were trying to do with Builders in Civ6, even if (as I said) that was not a perfect solution either. Whether Workers or Builders was better is open to debate, and I expect that is just down to personal preference.

My only point is that, as Sid himself says, games are about interesting decisions, and a game mechanic that doesn't involve making an interesting decision probably shouldn't be in the game. And, in my opinion, choosing whether or not to let the game play itself is not a particularly interesting decision.

 

[Arcaian]

In an ideal situation, the best design is one in which automation is not required. In real games, situations are rarely ideal, but at this point right now we're talking about Civ7, which to us is a blank slate. We don't know if they'll have workers or builders or something else entirely. So this is a hypothetical design discussion.

Automation with workers worked to a degree in Civ5 and earlier, but it was hardly a "perfect" solution -- the choice of improvements still mattered even if you had a lot of cities, and not everyone was content to give up that choice to the AI. So I understand what they were trying to do with Builders in Civ6, even if (as I said) that was not a perfect solution either. Whether Workers or Builders was better is open to debate, and I expect that is just down to personal preference.

My only point is that, as Sid himself says, games are about interesting decisions, and a game mechanic that doesn't involve making an interesting decision probably shouldn't be in the game. And, in my opinion, choosing whether or not to let the game play itself is not a particularly interesting decision.

What about a game mechanic that involves making an interesting decision at the start of the game, but the decisions become less relevant over time? I feel that's a problem with many 4X systems - microing your citizen placement or improvement choices (and in Civ6, even something as important as district adjacency is increasingly less important by the end of the game for most districts) is an impactful decision and interesting at turn 30, and at turn 300 it's boring tedium. I don't think there are many 4X mechanics that never give interesting decisions, but there are many that lose their impact as the game goes on - and in those cases, design that ends in the automation of these decisions seems a reasonable compromise to me - I wouldn't want to lose those early-game decisions because the late-game decisions get boring.

 

[UWHabs]

In an ideal situation, the best design is one in which automation is not required. In real games, situations are rarely ideal, but at this point right now we're talking about Civ7, which to us is a blank slate. We don't know if they'll have workers or builders or something else entirely. So this is a hypothetical design discussion.

Automation with workers worked to a degree in Civ5 and earlier, but it was hardly a "perfect" solution -- the choice of improvements still mattered even if you had a lot of cities, and not everyone was content to give up that choice to the AI. So I understand what they were trying to do with Builders in Civ6, even if (as I said) that was not a perfect solution either. Whether Workers or Builders was better is open to debate, and I expect that is just down to personal preference.

My only point is that, as Sid himself says, games are about interesting decisions, and a game mechanic that doesn't involve making an interesting decision probably shouldn't be in the game. And, in my opinion, choosing whether or not to let the game play itself is not a particularly interesting decision.

Yeah, other than automated pollution cleanup, I don't think I used automated worked all that much in earlier games. It was slightly less tedious, since you didn't have to build/buy new workers to develop new cities, you could just move your stacks of them around to where they were needed.

The "weird" part about civ 6 and decisions is that actually for a large amount of tiles, there's not actually any decisions about what to do with them until the late game, barring some civs with unique improvements and city-state uniques. Like if you have a flat tile, you can really only farm it until you get to the era when you can plant a forest, or build a solar panel. Sure, there's some choice about whether to chop/harvest in some spots. That's about the only redeeming factor about not having builder automation - by the time the task becomes slightly tedious, that's actually the time in the game where you might actually have some choices to make around tiles.

 

[OzzyKP]

Interesting. So you think the game might be removing workers late game? Why then not go for CtP's Public Works model from the get go? Why have both systems?

I view it more that some decisions that are fun and meaningful early in the game become tedious busy-work later and should be dropped. Automation may be one way to do that, but there may be better ways. Blue-skying, perhaps Workers / Builders under direct control of the player are responsible for Era One improvements, then later on you can order improvements from the city build menu for gold/hammers, and later still they just happen automatically because by then anything that can be improved/upgraded will be improved/upgraded, so why waste player time on the topic.

I still think that democratic governments or free economies should come with some loss of control for the player. Your Congress or the market will decide some things. That works very well with Canuck's idea that things become more automated as the game progresses. The loss of control from having advanced government/economic systems is actually a benefit for the player to not have to worry about manually placing each farm and road, etc.

It would fit both a desire for more realism and for game play reasons. The player gets to automate less fun parts of the game with the understanding that the modern era comes with increased complexity so the unfun chores are replaced with new categories of decisions that emerge later in the game so the player isn't just hitting enter as they snowball and wait for victory. Unless, of course, you are a control freak and enjoy min-maxing your empire, then you go with a fascist or communist government.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Ideally, the game should be designed so that automation is not needed. That's because the only reason to automate a task is because that task is too repetitive and the player does not want to be bothered by it. Good game design should not have tedious or repetitive tasks that make the player want to automate the tasks. Also, strategy games like civ are all about the player making choices. That is what strategy is all about. You remove that strategy if those choices are automated by the AI. Imagine if you automated a chess game. It would not be you playing the game anymore. What would be the point of a chess game if the player is having the AI play the game for them? Similarly, what is the point of a civ game if the AI plays most of the game for you?

I like tools that help the player without just turning over the decisions to the AI. For example, build queues are great since the player is still making the decision of what to build but in a way that helps the player plan ahead and not have so many interruptions when a build is finished. I also like the city focus buttons where players can choose which tiles to emphasize for food, production, gold, culture, science. That way the player does not have to micromanage what tiles are worked every turn but they are still making decisions about what resource is important for that city. I would support getting rid of worker units because they add unnecessary micro IMO. I would prefer the call to power system of spending points to improve a tile. It is more direct, there is no micromanagement of units, and still involves a cost. Another option would be to use the existing tile management screen and citizens that produce yields from a tile could be switched to improving a tile. While the citizen is improving a tile, you would lose the yields from that tile. When the tile is improved, the citizen would automatically switch back to producing the yields of that tile. This system would make sense since there is already a tile management screen and you already have "workers" producing yields. It only makes sense that those workers could also improve the tiles that they are working. IMO, there is no need to invent a separate worker/builder unit.

Trade routes are another system that often creates unnecessary micromanagement that players want to automate. I never understood why civ6 makes you manually renew trade routes. Why not let trade routes auto renew by default unless the routes is not possible anymore?

 

[lobosan]

Ideally, the game should be designed so that automation is not needed. That's because the only reason to automate a task is because that task is too repetitive and the player does not want to be bothered by it.

I like automation as part of most game loops. Late game, I can concentrate on strategic decision on bigger and more complex worlds while reducing micro management. I like seeing all those busy beavers going around building roads, patrolling territories, building specific improvements, pirating enemies, etc.
If automation is too hard, how can we have good opponent AIs? Perhaps, the real automation challenge is the wargaming inspired single units per tile rule. I really hope CIV 7 does away with it - maybe automation mods will be easier then.