Experience for Workers?

[Barghaest]

I added in a line of civilian promotions in my mod-in-progress a while back. Basically Libraries/Universities/Research labs act like Barracks for Workers - newly trained units start with some XP. I haven't figured out how to add earned XP to worker actions yet so the only way to get an experienced worker is to replace them when you get the buildings.

I didn't improve build speeds with Promotions. Basically the promotions give increased sight rage or increased movement based on terrain - Woodsman, Altitude Training - and a few gated by technology (Defensive Embarkation and Paradrop, for example) mainly to allow workers stationed in a particular city to be trained specifically for that city or settlers to be trained for reaching a destination quicker/safer.

There's two major issues with it - the AI doesn't replace workers as frequently as a human player might (they almost never disband them after they're built) nor do they station them at a particular city where these promotions might benefit most.

And secondly, all XP is lost on capture, if a barbarian or opponent captures a worker, even if you capture it back it will revert to level 1 with 0 XP.

 

[Camikaze]

Can you develop please ? If you think that we would be needed to click on things, yes (more than now where nothing is planed for workers), but what I was more thinking about is that as the game actually plays, it would be a nightmare to find the good unit among all others, and put it on place, not to mention the absurd calculations about "what is the fastest : using this upgraded worker to this location, but moving it quite extensively, or use this less or no experienced worker which is only one hex away ?" )

Finding the right unit and shuffling them to the correct tile would indeed be a bit of a pain, especially seeing as, with Civ5 as it is, you can't identify promotions without clicking on the unit. The system would virtually force you to individually control all of your workers and think about the placement of each of them. Requiring more control over workers and more thought in the improvement-building process is not a bad thing in itself, and could work well in a future iteration, but when building improvements is all about clicking a button on a tile, it'd quickly become quite tedious.

All upgrades wouldn't have to be tied with build time exclusively, it could be workers that can defend themselves, workers with increase move speed, stealth as said in the OP, and separating build times by categories, mines, farms, trading posts, plantations, quarries, etc. + possibility to make each of them better, as to tie their output with workers upgrades instead of technology, and with more variations, etc.

Those would all be possibilities, but I think the main difference between promoted workers and non-promoted workers would be build speed. Of course, this is all assuming a modification to Civ5, rather than an idea for a future iteration. In Civ5 there's really not much benefit in a bit of increased movement speed or stealth. Having one worker that specialises in building mines and another that specialises in farms would also probably be about build speed.

 

[CaptainPatch]

Just generally reflecting, it seems that the arguments against experience for workers are conditions that already apply to military units. How do you quickly grab the most effective unit for the situation that you are about to deal with? How do you know which ones move fastest? How do you know which ones are most effective against barbarians?

Just generally speaking, ALL units are listed in the Military Overview. If those units were split between Combat and non-Combat (as they are now), but within their own category ranked by how much experience each has (listed), it would at least give the player a _general_ idea of which units are most likely to be most proficient. Because of the wide variety of promotions, it still wouldn't be possible to quickly ascertain which unit would be best for a given task. (Unless the Military Overview started also show each unit's list of promotions.)

 

[Camikaze]

The military game is quite tactical, and this is more excusable given it's about capturing specific points on the map (i.e. cities). It still is fairly annoying to try and figure out which units are good for open terrain and which for rough terrain, and this might be a UI issue rather than an issue with the promotions themselves.

 

[kaspergm]

I'm not really keen on the idea for experience on Workers. I do think Workers should improve over the duration of the game, but I'm not sure experience is the way to do it. Since many workers will indeed be active over most of the game and often alive over most of the game, giving them XP for something they do anyway and which is basically both no-cost and no-risk, we might as well have automatically upgrading Workers.

Automatically upgrading units came with BnW in form of the Caravans/Trade Ships, and I don't think that works very well for the game. Caravans gain increased range at certain tech points which is obviously fine, but the fact that they gain this new movement automatically instead of requiring a rebuild/upgrade (similar to how you need to rebuild/upgrade your military units to get the increased combat strength) is not a good idea imo. Problem is that the since the Caravan is the same unit entire game - in contrary to the "melee offence" unit which changes from Warrior through Swordsman to Infantry etc. - means that the flat-build cost is the same the entire game. This means that hard-buidling a Caravan is very costly (in terms of the number of turns spend doing it) in early game while it's practically free in late game. Now one can argue that this adds to the strategic element of the game - which is true - but I think the balance with regard to this is poor at the moment. Losing your only Caravan (or Cargo Ship) in early game is very devastating both in terms of lost production and lost income, while in late game this will be pretty insignificant, and this puts an unhealthy damper on things like early-game warfare. Imagine how game would turn out if hard-building a Warrior was the same as hard-building an Infantry - this would mean that either building a Warrior is extremely costly or building an Infantry is ridiculously cheap, or something in the middle between these with balance around Medieval/Renaissance, and that's how I think it currently is for Caravans (and Workers).

Instead of having what would essentially be automatically-upgrading Workers, I would rather see actual Worker upgrades coming through the game - similar to the Engineer from Civ2. These could have faster production times and be capable of producing additional improvements. This would also allow for decreasing the Worker cost from game start - which imo. is overly high - while increasing it in later game (where you can easily 2-turn or 1-turn build a Worker).

 

[Naokaukodem]

Camikaze, I thought you were saying that it would be some MM with my system of general upgrading tree. It wouldn't, since all your workers would have the same upgrades.

 

[CaptainPatch]

Since many workers will indeed be active over most of the game and often alive over most of the game, giving them XP for something they do anyway and which is basically both no-cost and no-risk, we might as well have automatically upgrading Workers.

But the same could be said about combat units: Many of them will indeed be active most of the game and often alive over most of the game, giving them XP for something they do anyway (combat) and which is basically no-cost -- though I grant that there is a risk involved. But then again, Workers are at risk whenever there's an enemy unit nearby. But given the longevity of the Military units -- and who lives for 4000 years besides the civ's Fearless Leader? -- we might as well have them automatically upgrading. Why should they get promotions on top of that?