Do you Automate Workers?

[Quineloe]

the worst part about automated workers is that they'll go anywhere. Capture a city across the sea? All your workers are on boats in three turns. If they were at least to stick to the city where they've been automated...

 

[xxblackdog]

Yeah, I've noticed. Eish.

 

[pinhead0079]

i once automated 5 workers and forgot about them so i could go to war on another continent and then around 50 turns later i went back and took a good look at my capitol i noticed that every single tile for an unbelievable amount of space was trading post's. i found through that there is a definite balance in automation. at least until atomic era after that i automate.
so if you automate check on them every now and then.

 

[redwings1340]

even if you automate your workers, check the box ingame options (automated workers improve tiles already improved) so that it's off.

once you've improved all your workable tiles, built railroads, autoworkers can spam trading posts pretty good and that's when i'll use auto workers

Basically this. If you're pretty comfortable that you've won or have a huge enough empire that you just don't want to take the physical time to micromanage stuff, it can work. Make sure to turn that improve tiles already improved option off though. Until that point in the game though, make sure you don't automate workers. You probably only want one (maybe 0.8ish) per city anyway, so it isn't that big a deal. Get luxuries first and farm lots of river tiles.

Also, be careful when you're building your space ship, because automated workers tend to be stuck in cities and stop your spaceship parts from coming in. When you're getting to your last spaceship part find your workers and de-automate them.

 

[xxblackdog]

Also, be careful when you're building your space ship, because automated workers tend to be stuck in cities and stop your spaceship parts from coming in. When you're getting to your last spaceship part find your workers and de-automate them.

Good tip.

 

[Carazycool]

Also, be careful when you're building your space ship, because automated workers tend to be stuck in cities and stop your spaceship parts from coming in. When you're getting to your last spaceship part find your workers and de-automate them.

This is also annoying when you spawn a Great Engineer and want to immediately rush build a wonder but an automated worker is already greyed out in that city. Why do they expend their movement points at the beginning of the turn...?

 

[klaskeren]

yeah, when the game is won, and im not playing for a fast finishtime, but otherwise, dont do it

 

[parachute4u]

I realized that I almost ALWAYS automate my workers (mostly because I've only passed 20[?] hours on the game so far, and wanted to keep micromanaging to a minimum.

I'm starting to feel that this is a bad choice (at least early game). Any thoughts?

It's best to delete workers when at peace. I keep one around for the capital and automate one or two. One or two workers are used as scouts to get line of sight. But mostly I delete them. It's a waste of time to develop anything but your first 3 cities.

 

[WideCoast]

I have a game a Iroquois atm. and I tried to line my cities up to a one forest "route" and because I had just readed this topic I thought I'd control them myself and I put TP for every jungletile and tried not to cut forests/jungle, but I had to for wine plantation or smthng lik that. I'v put mines on hills and pretty much the rest is gone as farm land. So I was wondering if there is something in there that's a huge mistake etc? I also cutted 2 jungle hills and made mines in a city radius that had nothing xept jungle+maybe 3grass tiles in the 3ring radius.

 

[SYKOJAK]

Like many folks have stated above I do not let my workers wander around aimlessly, (ie. put them on auto.)
So many things can go wrong when the workers go on autopilot. There is no bigger mistake they can make than trying to improve a tile that has the proper improvement for a resource, (any resource for that matter.)