Irrigation changing to Farmland from Civ2- bring it back!

[Philips beard]

Yeah, Sirian is a wise old lad! Agree with his points!
One more thing, how should slavery be done without real traditional workers?

 

[rhialto]

As a reflection of slavery, workers aren't particularly good.

First, except when sold to new owners, most slaves never left the mine/ranch/farm site they worked at. In civ terms, that would make them city population points working a tile or somesuch.

Second, most slave based economies actually had a significant part of the slave population made up of people of the same culture as the nation itself. These were often people who sold themselves into slavery to pay a debt, or became slaves as a punishment for crimes. This again is not reflected in workers as slaves.

Not sure what the solution is, but I certainly admire the problem. Hopefully these two points should help direct the discussion.

 

[dh_epic]

The game of Civilization IS a game about details. The key is that the details matter more at the beginning, and less at the end.

For example, in the Civ franchise as it's always existed, there's nothing to stop a player from deciding each and every tile that their population heads work in the city-radius. But most players don't. And the players who do, they only do so at the beginning of the game, or to speed up an important wonder, and so forth. Why not all the time? Because there's no reason to -- at a certain point, automation works just as well. And if they DO micromanage those population heads, they're probably not the kind to complain about it ANYWAY.

NOW let's talk about workers and improving your tiles.

The only time you're especially concerned with the "global needs" of tile improvements is at the beginning of the game. Early in the game, you might be able to look at your 6 or 7 cities and determine that it's most important to build a road between two of them, instead of just letting the AI automatically go through its priorities.

The key is that after you're done with the basics, "where to go" becomes arbitrary -- and automation becomes roughly equivelent to doing it yourself. After scanning 100 tiles, players would quickly realize this, and move to a higher level of visionary work. If they don't absolutely automate, they might put 80% of their workers on auto-irrigation, and 20% on auto-roads. One thing they won't do is scan the entire landscape looking for the 5 perfect squares to work on, because there are no wrong answers. (And if they DO scan everything, then they must be having a good time, and why should we stop them?)

The problem with the current system is manifold compared to this more abstracted system. But one important deficit with the old system compared to the new one: you can't stop when you're not having a good time, because you lose too much by automating, and waste valuable time and energy on the actual movement of workers if you don't automate. It's a catch 22 with no way out.

 

[Kobra]

What abour slaves ?
* If traditional workers still exist, they could be special workers, more efficient but able to revolt against their master (transforming into barbarian unit for example).
* If traditional workers disapear, they could become specialists. They would be as efficient as your free citizens, but won't consume food (or 50% less). They could create unhappiness or riot or revolt and create a barbarian unit next to your city (and so the slave would dispear from your city). As they are specialist, you wouldn't be able to change their status, except if you want to free them.
What's your opinion about it ?

 

[Dida]

Regarding slavery, the person that has says worker unit is essential for slavery to be meaningful obviously has not played CTP. In CTP, s slave is added to the city population, they work on the tile, but do consume 50% less resource. However, after some discovery, they will be more likely to revolt, or your citizens will be unhappy about your oontinued used of slave labor. Which is much better model. In civ3, you can keep slaves for as long as you want, and all your educated citizens don't even care that you are mis-treating your slaves.

Building worker unit, and then sacriifice them to build the tile improvement is really stupid. You are going to sacrifice him anyways, why not just get rid of him completely and use PW to build the tile improve? Why do you want to build a worker, move him to a particular sqaure, tell him to build some improvement, only to have him consumed? ??? It will be just as easy to set aside some shield from your city into the PW pool, and then use that shield directly to build improvement. The effect is all the same, only that you don't need to move worker unit.

The current worker system is bad in the way that improvements are free. The cost of building everything is the cost of building and owning the worker unit. This introduced the problem with infinite RR sprawl, road everywhere. Tile improvements has no value, because they are free. With PW, you will have to pay for every improvement, forcing the player to be more selective.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Its kinda funny, Dida, but in spite of the number of disagreements you and I have had over other aspects of Civ, we have actually found something we DO agree on-and that is the fact that CTP I and II DID have a number of very positive elements to it-and ones I am sure Civ could get away with poaching !
Oh, and you make a good point regarding all tile improvements being FREE!
Fact is, this is just ONE of the things which makes the Snowball effect in Civ such a HUGE problem. The more cities you have, the more land you have, the more land you have, the more tile improvements you can build, the more tile improvements you build, the more productive and wealthy your cities are....and so it goes on. Infinite city sprawl and land grabs become the ultimate road to victory. Making players pay for tile improvements-with both gold and shields-and then making them pay the ongoing costs of maintainance and upgrades, then suddenly having lots of cities and land is NOT the automatic road to victory it once was. Now you need the economy within the city (which is a factor of its population, its city improvements and its base resources) in order to successfuly improve the surrounding terrain, and a decent national economy to pay for the improvements you build-something you will never be able to achieve if you are building settlers every other turn in order to grab more land!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[dh_epic]

I found this in the archives.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/archive/index.php/t-93679.html

Surprisingly, one of the most frequented threads. A lot of people with strong feelings on both sides of the coin.

I can't say my feelings are that strong about how to change workers, or even if workers should be changed... but my feelings are strong about finding SOMETHING to simplify drastically.

That's how you make room for new features.