If / when should I automate workers / cities?

[Rast]

My worker strategy in Civ 3 was thus:

1) Build some workers when practical
2) Build a few initial improvements that I really needed
3) Connect all my cities with roads
4) Automate till I got railroads
5) Connect all my cities with railroads
6) Automate again

With the additional improvement options in Civ 4 and the workers' affinity for Cottages (which are great if you have the right civics but often times I'd rather have a workshop or some mills of various types) I think it would likely work better if I didn't automate them. Are there any tips / strats anyone can offer regarding managing a lot of workers? My main problem is if they're not automated I tend to forget about them and they get captured by a warring civ or smashed by barbarians.

Also, at what point do various people automate citizen moods in their cities? It seems that specialists seem to be much more important to the game than in Civ 3 (especially with Great People), but again, it's a huge hassle to cycle through all my cities every turn to check up on everything, especially since the controls are so laggy in the city screen for me for some reason.

Tips are appreciated! Thanks!

 

[MrCynical]

Workers should never be automated unless there's nothing for them to build except roads and railroads. The AI isn't that good at improvements, and you can certainly do a better job once you get the hang of it. There's also the point that you never will get the hang of it if you just automate them.

Cities I would also never automate. Any human player is smarter than the AI, and you throw that advantage away when you automate something.

 

[benjai]

Ditto ditto

 

[Zombie69]

Never, ever automate anything in Civ. The AI is too dumb to be trusted to run anything.

 

[Fragment]

Hi,

the only worker automation worth considering is "build trade network". It will build necessary improvements over resources you may have forgotten, roads to your cities and neighbours, railroads over improvements worth railroading and to your cities, and last, (rail-)roads all over your country. If an enemy is near, they automatically withdraw to the nearest city. I have at least one worker doing that, later more as I run out of things to manually improve.

Other worker automations generally do a much worse job than you - tactics like improve to farm first (for quick growth) and to village/watermill/whatever after growth is completely beyond the AI. For demonstration, confine yourself to manually improving things for some time, (save!) then switch to automation and watch your empire go to hell. Seriously, try it.

I never build automate, and sometimes let the governor allocate people, at least to check if I overlooked a better configuration of tiles. The governor DOES make mistakes though, and selects worse configurations, producing here a hammer and there a food less than possible.

Regards.

 

[VirtualM]

switch to automation and watch your empire go to hell

Been there, done that!

Maybe we could gift our workers to the AI and let him kill himself?

 

[Aleksadr]

I don't think its a great idea to automate a trade network either. I have caught a worker removing a town from a resource tile in order to build a mine. I did not want him to do it and he was appropriatly fired and then beaten for insolence.

 

[Cheeze]

You can turn on the "leave existing improvements" option, which is useful when you have your towns and all set up and you just automated to finish your railroad system.

 

[demetrious]

There is also a box for "Leave existing forest" or something in the 1.52 patch. If you check this box and the leave existing improvement they can't harm that much.

I probably do the unthinkable and automate 2 guys mid game because every once in a while I miss a resource or a border change or I am focused on war and forget about something. These couple of automated guys work pretty well at catching my mistakes in managing a large empire.

I've actually gone away from the network automation because it makes the empire sooo ugly. Secondly I'm starting to not road forests that I will keep long term because it seems like they grow faster without any improvements than if you road them.

 

[Fragment]

I don't think its a great idea to automate a trade network either. I have caught a worker removing a town from a resource tile in order to build a mine. I did not want him to do it and he was appropriatly fired and then beaten for insolence.

I'm prone to overlook resources, especially when they've just become available (calendar tech and happiness resources coming to mind).

The problem that the AI is building resource improvements over resource tiles with better improvements, is a price I'm consiously paying. This can be partially offset by trading the resource away for some gold, favours, or another resource.

Regards.

 

[Willem]

I don't think its a great idea to automate a trade network either. I have caught a worker removing a town from a resource tile in order to build a mine. I did not want him to do it and he was appropriatly fired and then beaten for insolence.

That wasn't the trade network automation, all it does is hook up special resources and build roads everywhere. A Worker on that automation setting will never do anything else.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Well the game will give you an edge in terms of better comtetitiveness if you automate nothing (AND know what you are doing)

However, the question is how much tedium are you going through for how little gain.

The way I would see it,
Automate production.... NEVER (if the governor could stick to just buildings, I'd be fine with it, but when it starts spewing out units.... a queue is good enough)
Automate citizens, good enough for most purposes, if you remember to check on it, and change the priorities, I focus it for important cities only (GP producers, when making a Wonder, getting a production poor spot started)

Automate Workers:
1. build a few key improvements around first few cities
2. automate Workers with 'leave existing improvements' and sometimes 'leave Forests'
3. grab workers as needed to replace undesirable improvements with ones I need.

The key is the transition point between 1+2 (usually just enough to set up production and commerce cities)
3 is for balancing food/production and commerce as needed, as well as chaining farms and replacing improvements on new resources.

Essentially its all a question of how much tedium for how much gain, usually you can automate most things without too much of a loss.

 

[StrideCollosus]

I've always manually managed workers in Civ4.

However I rarely MM cities once my empire is up and running. Initially of course you need to MM, at least on higher levels, and throughout the game I always MM specialists. But I personally believe the AI does a decent job of managing your citizens, with a little help from the govenor panel (i.e. emphasise food, production, etc).

 

[Kurbads]

well, going for conquest, at final stage, I do automate them a lot - all I need is some extra tanks and correct SOD movemenmt. the rest is done, so I automate them to go on faster. I have noticed however that it gives some extra pressure to CPU at the end of game.

I also figured, that I cannot teach governor to build just buildings. or it can be done? if it would be possible, it would be huge playability boost when those 20 citys build stuff fast. is there such button combination or not?

 

[Zombie69]

That wasn't the trade network automation, all it does is hook up special resources and build roads everywhere. A Worker on that automation setting will never do anything else.

What part of "build a mine on a resource tile" didn't you understand? You do know that some resources are accessed with mines, right?

 

[Willem]

What part of "build a mine on a resource tile" didn't you understand? You do know that some resources are accessed with mines, right?

Right, I missed that part. Now why wouldn't you want him to build a Mine excatly? It seems to me that you would have been better off. You probably could have traded it off for more than you get from a Town, and still get all the bonuses from having the Mine.

Anyway, just go into Options and select the "Don't remove old improvements" selection, or something to that effect. You'll never have to worry about happening again.

 

[Nials]

You can turn on the "leave existing improvements" option, which is useful when you have your towns and all set up and you just automated to finish your railroad system.

Does this not prevent workers from replacing roads with railroads?

 

[Willem]

Does this not prevent workers from replacing roads with railroads?

No since they're not really replacing Roads, they're just building Railroads over top of them.

 

[neriana]

Right, I missed that part. Now why wouldn't you want him to build a Mine excatly? It seems to me that you would have been better off. You probably could have traded it off for more than you get from a Town, and still get all the bonuses from having the Mine.

He might have a really nice town on that tile, and plenty of copies of the same resource. That happened to me once with, of all things, oil. I had like 4 oils, and didn't bother destroying a town on an oil resource because there was no way I was going to trade oil to any of my rivals anyway, and none of my friends wanted it. It's not likely to happen very often, of course.

I automate workers to build railroads, not before, and only after everything at that point is developed to my satisfaction. With connect trade routes they'll also automatically go into action when aluminum and such pop.

 

[BrutalusMaximus]

In a MP game with a turn timer. Then you can automate if you find you do not have the time to complete your turns otherwise. That is the only time. If you find microing workers is horrible and boring then give them massive long order ques and let them run for several turns.