Drawbacks of automated workers? Mods to fix?

[panzer_gruppen]

I keep reading that it is a bad thing to automate workers, but I haven't seen a lot of concrete reasons as to why. Is it because tiles need to be given specific improvements in order to keep cities specialized?

Are there any mods that improve the automated worker AI? I find it very tedious to have to micro my workers when it seems like they should be able to do things by themselves. It seems like simple things like counting the number of farms needed to feed a city and not exceeding that would be easy to fix.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

There's more to worker actions than just counting the amount of food required to grow a city to size 20 and then cottage/mine etc. the rest of the tiles.

I often want a large food surplus in a city so that I can build a library/run caste system to run scientist specialists for extra research pre-liberalism.

Some tiles might never get worked, tundra for example.

Farms need to be placed strategically so you can chain irrigation to other cities after civil service.

City specialisation is another issue. I don't want any cottages in my military production city - just farms (unless adding another farm would give me an odd number food surplus - then I build a workshop). This is to stop alternate growth/starve when it reaches it's max workable population. I just want to work as many mines (early on, watermills and workshops later perhaps) as I can.

Commerce and science cities I probably want as many cottages worked as possible (although I'm more of a specialist economy sort of guy). But I probably want mines instead of windmills so that if I want to build a big building like a bank, I can do it by stopping working cottages for a while instead of whipping.

Getting a computer to do all this is hard, believe me. Even the manual says that the computer isn't psychic and doesn't know your game plan, it says this repeatedly when commenting about the blue circles and automation.

 

[dozenlong]

Automated workers work on formulas you don't control. If ikne could explicitly script the actions of workers on a per-city basis it could save time, but the assumptions and compromises made are sub-optimal in the current implementation.