Thundercracker
Chieftain
I know, automated pioneers/workers have been poor throughout Civ4 and going back to Civ3, and I don't expect it to be made useful in a Col2 patch, but an adjustment could help a specific stupid thing they do.
Having finished up building improvements around my city, I had a couple of pioneers left over with nothing major to do. Having a few unused tiles I hadn't bothered with, I automated them figuring they'd go after those tiles with whatever.
Instead, they decide to chop down a forest. One that already has a lodge on it. One that was being actively logged by a lumberjack.
Being as it was the only forest tile around that city, and that my other cities had already been specifically made to have no wood to spare, I was none to pleased by them. I demonstrated my displeasure by executing the now useless lumberjack and carpenter in that city, and gave them instructions to build a road from the southern tip of the continent to the northern tip.
Anyway, this could be avoided if one of two things were done.
1) Automated pioneers don't chop forests where there's already a lodge.
2) Automated pioneers do a check before they improve a tile to see if its already being worked. If it is, they don't do any 'improvements' to the tile that reduce the output of the current worker there. For example, these pioneers would have checked the tile, seen a lumberjack making wood, recognized that chopping the forest down would lower his output, and not chopped the forest down.
Having finished up building improvements around my city, I had a couple of pioneers left over with nothing major to do. Having a few unused tiles I hadn't bothered with, I automated them figuring they'd go after those tiles with whatever.
Instead, they decide to chop down a forest. One that already has a lodge on it. One that was being actively logged by a lumberjack.
Being as it was the only forest tile around that city, and that my other cities had already been specifically made to have no wood to spare, I was none to pleased by them. I demonstrated my displeasure by executing the now useless lumberjack and carpenter in that city, and gave them instructions to build a road from the southern tip of the continent to the northern tip.
Anyway, this could be avoided if one of two things were done.
1) Automated pioneers don't chop forests where there's already a lodge.
2) Automated pioneers do a check before they improve a tile to see if its already being worked. If it is, they don't do any 'improvements' to the tile that reduce the output of the current worker there. For example, these pioneers would have checked the tile, seen a lumberjack making wood, recognized that chopping the forest down would lower his output, and not chopped the forest down.
