General 'Worker' Concepts

[Ryth]

I just wanted to start a thread to see how people use the workers in the game. Do you automate them automatically, manually put them through each action, or use the single-action automations (e.g. just clear damage )?

Personally I build two per city as part of the set up, and automate them for that city only, then once the city is all roaded and irragated I set them on trade routes. Once all my land has railroads I have about 100 redundant guys who get used up in radar towers around my borders.

From the middle ages though, I spend about as much time watching workers do their thing as I do waiting for the AI to have their turn. A great chance to catch up on CivFanatics , but otherwise a lot of wasted time to me, even with those actions being essential.

Anybody else?

 

[dh_epic]

I'm pretty much perpetually micromanaging my workers to get an advantage, squeeze out and economize on turns. By the middle ages, I might auto-road or auto-irrigate, but still micromanage workers that are on my frontier if need be, just to be protective. By the time the industrial age rolls around, then I might start to think about automating.

Truthfully, I think that workers are the most boring and painful strategy in the game... yet I can't help myself, because I want to be the best.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2017537&postcount=87

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Almost always fully automated. I might take couple of workers in the beginning to connect cities or road to luxury or recources, and later on if there's any need for fortresses.

An option that I miss is to prevent workers to work certain cities. I just had four workers wandering off to an isolated city that I had no interest in and there was nothing I could do if I didn't want to set all workers to manual control.

 

[Theoden]

First, shouldn't this be in genral discussions rather than civ4 ideas

second, i almost always manually control all worers. Only when all my terrain is developed and i get railroads i set them on automate/no replacing existing so they simply have no choice of making stupid mistakes, they can only railroad.

A solution to your waiting problem would be to hold down shift while the workers are moving, that speeds things up quite a lot

Theoden

 

[Ryth]

My hope is that once we've figured out how people use workers then perhaps some suggestions on how they might be improved could happen. Workers for me are a vital part, especially in war - I have quite a few 'set aside' so that when I capture a city I can railroad to it straight away, bringing in defensive units, and allowing my attacking units a new staging point.

However a problem I have is when, due to lack of access they start mining deserts and plains. Also, they always concentrate on damage first, even if it's not within a city's used squares, and then they send everybody to clean that one square, when it'd only need 6 to do it in one turn.

Does anyone else find this? And any suggestions for how this might be corrected in cIV?