"colouring in" the squares

[scottymalad]

I've played Civ3 a while, only picked up the game after a lengthy absence of about a year.

Without frequenting a forum like this, where it's obvious there are experts I think I'm *fairly savvy in playing the game, one thing I agree with is that workers shouldn't be automated.

Now, those of you who are "super expanding", or enjoy the Pangaea map, do you get bored "colouring in" the map with your workers? I can find this a bit tedious...I like to war in the later stages of the game with a mediocre attempt of a tech rush, but the map/workers seem to take up most of hte game playing time.

Thoughts / older threads?

 

[Admiral_Tarton]

i don't automate my workers, even if i have hundreds of them, they do stupid stuff sometimes.
The only time i ever automate any workers is during the late industrial age when pollution is very frequent and thats only if i have railroads everywhere

 

[scottymalad]

>stupid stuff

Agreed. The most annoying thing they do is build mines on your freshly irrigated squares, build concentric circles of road and the like! Same goes for the railroads, first priority for me is to connect every city from a direct railroute, rather than cover the planet with rail square by square like they do

Does feel a bit time consuming at times though...

 

[warpstorm]

You can set them to automate, but not change stuff that you built, you know.

You can also tell them where to Road and Railroad to.

 

[SesnOfWthr]

I tend to manually use them until the advent of railroads. I'll put a skeletal rail system in place, but after that I use the shift-a command to automate w/o altering.

 

[superslug]

Scotty, the non-change automation is Shift+A although there's also a button. Anyway, there's two times I automate (without altering) workers. The first time is at the advent of Steam Power. Automated workers want to rail every tile, just like I do, so I let them, although I do keep a few on manual to build direct rails I want ASAP for military units. The second time is late in the game when I leave a few on pollution duty.

 

[RagingBarbarian]

the only time I automate workers is after all the squares have already been worked on, this is during the late industrial age. the automated workers then automaticlly clean up any pollution that appears. I use the Shift-A so they don't change my already worked squares.

 

[Ahab]

I usually let slaves automate and keep control of 'my boys'. It's too depressing to put a slave on a mountain and see that it will take 700 years for him to road it.

 

[sabo]

later on in the game when I've improved the land I want to I do shift-A to automate them, then they won't un-do what you've already done, by then all they have to do is clean pollution anyway and they're good at that.

 

[80k]

i would like to see a mod or update to the game that would allow you to keep workers grouped together. kind of like an army of workers except you don't need to have a leader or anything to build. basically the same as having a stack of workers, except that they stay together no matter what... just easier to keep track of.

 

[Brewster]

In the latter part of the game I tend to group my workers together in stacks of 4 or 8 and fortify them at various points around my empire. I never automate them.

 

[Shabbaman]

Originally posted by scottymalad
do you get bored "colouring in" the map with your workers?

Yes.

Sometimes I don't finish games when it's pretty obvious that I'll win. That prevents a whole lot of boredom.