"Builders" as the new Workers... now with charges.

[Westwall]

Eh... I'm not really sure how I feel about this.

Part of making my empire feel alive and thriving was seeing all those workers running around making improvements and reshaping the landscape.

Now they're on 4 charges each and get auto-deleted after they're spent.

This seems like a step backwards for me. I mean where exactly did they go? Did they die from being overworked? Am I literally working these people to death?

You could say it didn't make much sense for them to carry on living through the ages, but I just assumed that they, like military units, were representative of entire groups whose members gradually got replaced over the years.

Now what happens to them? Do they just lose their jobs and melt back into the population? Obviously not since I don't think a city's population will receive a boost as a result of them disbanding.

The only logical answer then is that they just die off and new ones have to be trained from scratch. Even from a pure gameplay standpoint, this just seems unnecessarily tedious. It was fine for things like missionaries and great people because they drew from other resources unrelated to buildings and military units, and either way they weren't really that necessary. More like bonus units.

Do I seriously need to hold off now on whatever else I was planning every few turns just to churn out more builders?

 

[AriochIV]

This is like asking what happened to the Missionaries after their second mission. Did they preach themselves to death? Did the Great Engineer work himself to death to create my Wonder?

I think this is a case where gameplay is important and the "realistic" explanation is irrelevant, but if you need an explanation: perhaps the cost of the Builders represents the resources they use, and once used up the unit is disbanded.

 

[Westwall]

A great engineer is just one guy, and I'm willing to accept those missionaries had to be disbanded for the purposes of gameplay balance, but I'm not quite getting why this had to be the case with builders.

As I said, even from a gameplay perspective some of these mechanics just seem kind of wonky. Builders don't even build roads, those will be the responsibility of traders.

So what if I need a road going somewhere close to a battle line to move troops faster?

 

[stealth_nsk]

Builders don't even build roads, those will be the responsibility of traders.

So what if I need a road going somewhere close to a battle line to move troops faster?

It was mentioned early roads are built by traders. We could have more complex mechanic later and I'm quite sure railroads will have really different approach.

 

[AriochIV]

We don't know much about how Traders work, so it's hard to say whether roads will be a problem that may require some other solution, but I'm okay with making workers limited-use and therefore something you need to think about using.

I've saying it for a very long time: any feature that you can completely automate is probably not a very good feature.

 

[Thormodr]

I like the new builders. I hated the steal a worker cheese in Civilization 5 and this will likely ensure that it rarely happens. Plus, there will be less traffic jams with the 1UPT as you likely won't have scads of builders.

People have been talking about getting rid of workers for a long time. I remember Call to Power had public works and they worked fairly well, IMHO. So, this is a good development.

 

[Thormodr]

We don't know much about how Traders work, so it's hard to say whether roads will be a problem that may require some other solution, but I'm okay with making workers limited-use and therefore something you need to think about using.

I've saying it for a very long time: any feature that you can completely automate is probably not a very good feature.

Agree with that. If there are no interesting decisions to be made and you just hand it over to the computer, it might as well not be there.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

This seems like a step backwards for me. I mean where exactly did they go? Did they die from being overworked? Am I literally working these people to death?

Maybe. Or maybe their contracts are just up.
It will feel very weird and take a lot of time getting used to, but I get why they did it. Worker stealing was always such a cheap trick, and you always reach points when there's nothing useful to build and your workers are idle, and when the city grows you have to look for them again, or you just have them spam improvements that you might need in a hundred. We're all so used to the old system, but there's a lot of avoidable micromanagement involved.

 

[Ryika]

I think it's a good thing. Not because of their reasoning that it "feels strange" to have a unit around from start to finish, but because it actually makes it so workers are now an investment that doesn't create almost infinite value anymore.

It may even be the case that we will now value other things over workers although there's still stuff to improve and the timing for when we build new workers will, assuming stuff is tuned right, have a lot of potential for important decisions.

 

[player1 fanatic]

As old school player, new Builders mechanic definitively feels like Public Works system from Call to Power series.

In that game you would convert production to Public Works, currency spent to build improvements on the terrain.

In Civ6, you spend production to get Builders with 4 charges for building improvements on terrain. So X amount of production gives 4 improvements.

.

Anyway, to me it makes completely sense that building stuff costs charges. After all, building anything requires resources.

 

[Tatran]

The new builder unit is a huge improvement. No more (large) stacks of workers (civ3 + civ4) to speed up build time
and I really hated the worker times in civ5 (20 turns at epic speed to build a trading post on a jungle tile.)

 

[Mr. Shadows]

Well, this should completely nullify the pillage-repair exploit in Civ V. That alone is a good thing. I guess we'll see how it works. I will miss worker steals though; I thought it was a good way to represent a very real part of history. Rome had plenty of slave labor supplied by defeated enemies.

 

[anandus]

As I said, even from a gameplay perspective some of these mechanics just seem kind of wonky. Builders don't even build roads, those will be the responsibility of traders.

So what if I need a road going somewhere close to a battle line to move troops faster?

Quill said in one of his playthroughs he made a road towards the enemy to move his troops faster towards him.
We don't know how traders work, but I'm guessing you first sent a trader towards your enemy to get a trade route/road and then sent your army? Something like that.

 

[Janskey]

If we are able to purchase builders as workers in Civ V, this means that we can practically purchase improvements with cash. And at least in the case of China, cash-rush wonders too.

 

[Felis Renidens]

I think it can be explained by part of the builders stay to work on the improvement, or at least maintain it. If a population unit is working the tile the builders will be added to them, but it's not enough for a population increase.

I think I will get used to it quickly. especially save time giving workers what to do, making them sleep or automate.

Wonder rushing seems a bit too powerful, but maybe now that they take a tile and can't be built anywhere in some cases there will be some limits to abusing it.

 

[player1 fanatic]

The wonder rushing largely resebmles caravan ability from Civ1/Civ2, which was really powerful, since it enabled collabiration of multiple cities to get wonder.

 

[bison21]

I've saying it for a very long time: any feature that you can completely automate is probably not a very good feature.

Eh? The entire point of managing workers is tile prioritisation, not "getting everything done". And the automated feature does a really bad job prioritising. I always saw that as a toggle for casual players.

You can automate 4-use-builders the same way.

 

[Felis Renidens]

I usually turn to automate when I either have too many workers to manage and done with high-priority tasks anyway or when there are other things that require attention (like a war) and managing workers becomes a distraction (and I also get puppets for the workers to play with).

In this case it will combine with needing tiles for districts and wonders and you don't want workers doing stupid stuff. Actually good reason not to give casual players this toggle but also making it unnecessary for them. No army of workers to keep busy.

 

[Cyon]

Automation is gone, Ed have said that im a interview, he felt that it was a sign of bad game design to have a mechanism so booring that people let the Air do it. Now we will improve fewer tiles but don't have to wait so it won't be as tedious.

Also remember that a lot of the tiles around a city will be used for districts, so two builders will probably be enough for most medium sized cities.

Do you think that the builders will be a lot cheaper compared to workers?

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[rastak]

A great engineer is just one guy, and I'm willing to accept those missionaries had to be disbanded for the purposes of gameplay balance, but I'm not quite getting why this had to be the case with builders.

As I said, even from a gameplay perspective some of these mechanics just seem kind of wonky. Builders don't even build roads, those will be the responsibility of traders.

So what if I need a road going somewhere close to a battle line to move troops faster?

You'll have to accept builders as game play balance exactly as you did missionaries. In addition, one of the articles indicated it's 3 charges. China gets 4 as part of it's ability. Either RPS or IGN said that I believe.

Another of those articles mentioned road building as coming with engineering mid game which works for me. Ancient roads resulting from trade routes sounds interesting. If One nees to move troops and there is no road perhaps one should factor that ahead of time, eh?


I will admit it's gonna be odd without worker units after all these years. I think I will like the change.