"5 people answered with valid reasons to not like builders, nobody answered with valid reasons to keep builders. So when you add it up, 7 YES votes + 16 NO votes without a good reason = 23 > 5 NO votes with a reason, so they should bring back builders because that's what the community wants!!!"
Killing the MANTRA (that killed the workers... and other little things...)
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"5 people answered with valid reasons to not like builders, nobody answered with valid reasons to keep builders. So when you add it up, 7 YES votes + 16 NO votes without a good reason = 23 > 5 NO votes with a reason, so they should bring back builders because that's what the community wants!!!"
MutilationWave
IDDQD
Workers were really fun for me for the first few settlements, then they largely sucked. I do miss being able to choose where to build roads, but since they don't grant extra movement anymore, they're less important.
I disagree with the comment saying that scouts are annoying to manage. There is an art to scouting and, to me, it feels good when done well.
If workers could remove forest and rough from urban districts I would take them back, but this should be fixed another way. It's incredibly annoying and makes no sense, especially forests in the middle of a city.
I disagree with the comment saying that scouts are annoying to manage. There is an art to scouting and, to me, it feels good when done well.
If workers could remove forest and rough from urban districts I would take them back, but this should be fixed another way. It's incredibly annoying and makes no sense, especially forests in the middle of a city.
Keeping the tiles for appeal to adjacent tiles is good. However, friendly land urban districts should never stop movement and enemy land urban districts should always stop movement.
This is probably the one thing that I liked about them from the previous game. Not necessarily building the improvements but harvesting resources or removing features for a one-time boost on tiles you know you are going to build something on.
That's why I voted yes.
Sagax
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OP should start a church.
I voted No, because in every Civ game I've played, the annoyance of Worker micromanagement eventually outweighs whatever benefits they bring to the table. I never created workers for any sentimental or role-playing purpose, instead it was always to get X done on the tile. The satisfaction comes from having the improvement present on the map, not from moving a unit around at a glacial pace. Writing the last sentence also made me realize how grating it was to have Workers follow the standard movement and terrain rules - I'd go for Monumentality in Civ 6 just for that, even if they removed every other perk of that bonus.
To be fair, I do think there are a few dynamics that are missing in Civ 7, but were present in previous games via Workers:
- Ability to improve any tile within your borders, instead of having to spread out from the city center.
- Resource harvesting to clear up the tile.
- Transfer production from your developed cities to the new settlement and jumpstart its development. Technically, this is what Town specialization does by converting production into gold, but it doesn't feel as satisfying or efficient. I like the idea of a loop where big cities help new towns get up and running, and later these developed towns support the cities in return. Civ 7 seems to only model the latter, or at least that's how it feels to me.
None of these, however, require Workers to be in the game, I can see these being achievable without the need to have a unit that you must babysit across the map.
Finally, just like how any No votes without written justification are counted as Yes, any Yes votes without written justification in this thread should be counted as No.
I voted No, because in every Civ game I've played, the annoyance of Worker micromanagement eventually outweighs whatever benefits they bring to the table. I never created workers for any sentimental or role-playing purpose, instead it was always to get X done on the tile. The satisfaction comes from having the improvement present on the map, not from moving a unit around at a glacial pace. Writing the last sentence also made me realize how grating it was to have Workers follow the standard movement and terrain rules - I'd go for Monumentality in Civ 6 just for that, even if they removed every other perk of that bonus.
To be fair, I do think there are a few dynamics that are missing in Civ 7, but were present in previous games via Workers:
- Ability to improve any tile within your borders, instead of having to spread out from the city center.
- Resource harvesting to clear up the tile.
- Transfer production from your developed cities to the new settlement and jumpstart its development. Technically, this is what Town specialization does by converting production into gold, but it doesn't feel as satisfying or efficient. I like the idea of a loop where big cities help new towns get up and running, and later these developed towns support the cities in return. Civ 7 seems to only model the latter, or at least that's how it feels to me.
None of these, however, require Workers to be in the game, I can see these being achievable without the need to have a unit that you must babysit across the map.
Finally, just like how any No votes without written justification are counted as Yes, any Yes votes without written justification in this thread should be counted as No.
MrRadar
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Absence of a worker unit is not new in the Civ series, it was pioneered by the revolutionary CivRev (if we don't mention CtP). Back then I thought 'what a neat idea'. The tile improvement idea is basically the same: a newly born citizen gets assigned to a tile to collect it's resources and the collected amount depends on the level of current technology. Only CivRev had the flexibility in allowing free reassignment of employed citizens to a different tile, but then the territory control had a different mechanic.
I almost wanted that other mainstream Civs took another page from CivRev book and showed all the resources from the start, but those tiles functioned like ordinary tiles until the discovery of the respective tech that finally allowed getting the full benefit of the resource. Because those resources popping out gradually on previously empty tiles had their own inconvenience. And well, now Civ 7 kinda does something similar to what CivRev did, at least for an age.
So it was a reason why the first thing to compare Civ7 to after I got it in my hands was CivRev. But I don't think that as disparaging comparison in any way, but as an example of a clever idea how to keep strategic decisions but shed the busywork. And next to this, it is just jarring to see how they have left the religious units as they are now and even made them worse in comparison to the previous game, where they already were nightmare level.
When you look at it, a worker unit on the map is just an intermediary between resource consumption and then an output of an improved tile. First it takes time to gather enough of food and/or production to produce a unit, then it takes physical effort to move it somewhere and then it takes time to improve until the final result.
If you look into it, physical movement and improvement time can be included into the resource gathering phase for the production of the unit, cutting out the need to push around all those workers who, after a while, do run out of tasks and just sit someplace forgotten. While at the start of the game they can be interesting to play with, after some time the weight of their actions diminishes and they can be left to automation, and automation equals player's indifference. So I can forgo that little fun with them at the beginning of the game, if that saves me from tiresome actions for the larger part of the game.
I find Civ7's absence of workers preferable, as in "here's a momentous tile improvement decision, done, dusted and forgotten".
What is lost, however, is the flexibility of switching the citizens to other tiles. While that is pretty much impossible due to how territorial expansion works for rural tiles, they could at least allow shuffling of specialists, but again, that is not something absolutely necessary, I can accept the current system. Although it does also prevent the tile swapping between my own settlements, and sometimes this can be a real bummer. I feel the loss of tile swapping much more sharply than the loss of the worker.
As for voting I simply won't, because the vote and its setup is so loaded that I'm not even sure what answer the OP was going for: the kinda obvious 'yes' one or ragebaited 'no', and as the votes can be reattributed at OP's discretion, it makes no sense anyway.
I almost wanted that other mainstream Civs took another page from CivRev book and showed all the resources from the start, but those tiles functioned like ordinary tiles until the discovery of the respective tech that finally allowed getting the full benefit of the resource. Because those resources popping out gradually on previously empty tiles had their own inconvenience. And well, now Civ 7 kinda does something similar to what CivRev did, at least for an age.
So it was a reason why the first thing to compare Civ7 to after I got it in my hands was CivRev. But I don't think that as disparaging comparison in any way, but as an example of a clever idea how to keep strategic decisions but shed the busywork. And next to this, it is just jarring to see how they have left the religious units as they are now and even made them worse in comparison to the previous game, where they already were nightmare level.
When you look at it, a worker unit on the map is just an intermediary between resource consumption and then an output of an improved tile. First it takes time to gather enough of food and/or production to produce a unit, then it takes physical effort to move it somewhere and then it takes time to improve until the final result.
If you look into it, physical movement and improvement time can be included into the resource gathering phase for the production of the unit, cutting out the need to push around all those workers who, after a while, do run out of tasks and just sit someplace forgotten. While at the start of the game they can be interesting to play with, after some time the weight of their actions diminishes and they can be left to automation, and automation equals player's indifference. So I can forgo that little fun with them at the beginning of the game, if that saves me from tiresome actions for the larger part of the game.
I find Civ7's absence of workers preferable, as in "here's a momentous tile improvement decision, done, dusted and forgotten".
What is lost, however, is the flexibility of switching the citizens to other tiles. While that is pretty much impossible due to how territorial expansion works for rural tiles, they could at least allow shuffling of specialists, but again, that is not something absolutely necessary, I can accept the current system. Although it does also prevent the tile swapping between my own settlements, and sometimes this can be a real bummer. I feel the loss of tile swapping much more sharply than the loss of the worker.
As for voting I simply won't, because the vote and its setup is so loaded that I'm not even sure what answer the OP was going for: the kinda obvious 'yes' one or ragebaited 'no', and as the votes can be reattributed at OP's discretion, it makes no sense anyway.
GeneralZift
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I think I would be more happy with Workers and other Civilian units if moving them around the map was more interesting.
I feel like a Civ game without civilian units would feel empty.
I don't know why people are insistent on deleting them all.
I get the micro is boring. So why don't we focus on that instead of basically cutting the whole leg off? Surely that could be an interesting path to try at least once
I feel like a Civ game without civilian units would feel empty.
I don't know why people are insistent on deleting them all.
I get the micro is boring. So why don't we focus on that instead of basically cutting the whole leg off? Surely that could be an interesting path to try at least once
First, a story, followed by my reasons.
In Civ3, the human player starts with a settler and a worker; if the player picked an Expansionist civ, they also got a scout (civilian in Civ3). The player is allowed to rename any unit, at any time, so I would rename my initial worker to be "Zero", as it was born on turn zero. As a measure of my skill, I would try to keep Zero alive and working Every. Single. Turn. Until I reached the victory screen. I made sure that Zero stayed away from any battles to avoid the risk of being captured.
Whether workers or builders come back is (for me) all about gameplay. In Civ3 and BERT, I nearly always have tiles to improve. It's possible to have all of the tiles around a little town improved before it has grown enough to use all of them. Over in the Civ3 and Civ4 forums, stronger players encourage the newbies to improve all of the tiles that will be worked by a city, for gameplay reasons. I expect a similar practice in Civ5, but I've stopped playing it for a while now. One of my few complaints with Civ6 was that workers became builders, with a limited lifespan. Just like the other games, I nearly always have Civ6 tiles to improve, but I can't improve them all. The ratchet-up cost of successive builders means that -- even if I bought them with faith -- the return on investment for improving *all* the tiles isn't sufficient.
Civ7, on the other hand, answers the question of "how do I improve all of the important tiles?" in a different way. Each tile is improved, exactly once, when a settlement begins using it. The gameplay reasons from Civ4 for re-improving a tile (farm -> workshop) just don't exist in Civ7. Like @Sagax , I don't have a sentimental reason for building workers in Civ3/Civ4/BERT; even less sentiment with the short-lived builders in Civ6. For those games that offer workers, the management of workers is an opportunity to exercise more skill / better decisions than the AI does. Is it fun? Sometimes, but not often.
How do I vote? A conditional yes. If the game needs them, they should be there. So far, Civ7 doesn't really need them. I think that Civ6 would be better with workers rather than builders. I don't yet know if Civ8 will need them.
In Civ3, the human player starts with a settler and a worker; if the player picked an Expansionist civ, they also got a scout (civilian in Civ3). The player is allowed to rename any unit, at any time, so I would rename my initial worker to be "Zero", as it was born on turn zero. As a measure of my skill, I would try to keep Zero alive and working Every. Single. Turn. Until I reached the victory screen. I made sure that Zero stayed away from any battles to avoid the risk of being captured.
Whether workers or builders come back is (for me) all about gameplay. In Civ3 and BERT, I nearly always have tiles to improve. It's possible to have all of the tiles around a little town improved before it has grown enough to use all of them. Over in the Civ3 and Civ4 forums, stronger players encourage the newbies to improve all of the tiles that will be worked by a city, for gameplay reasons. I expect a similar practice in Civ5, but I've stopped playing it for a while now. One of my few complaints with Civ6 was that workers became builders, with a limited lifespan. Just like the other games, I nearly always have Civ6 tiles to improve, but I can't improve them all. The ratchet-up cost of successive builders means that -- even if I bought them with faith -- the return on investment for improving *all* the tiles isn't sufficient.
Civ7, on the other hand, answers the question of "how do I improve all of the important tiles?" in a different way. Each tile is improved, exactly once, when a settlement begins using it. The gameplay reasons from Civ4 for re-improving a tile (farm -> workshop) just don't exist in Civ7. Like @Sagax , I don't have a sentimental reason for building workers in Civ3/Civ4/BERT; even less sentiment with the short-lived builders in Civ6. For those games that offer workers, the management of workers is an opportunity to exercise more skill / better decisions than the AI does. Is it fun? Sometimes, but not often.
How do I vote? A conditional yes. If the game needs them, they should be there. So far, Civ7 doesn't really need them. I think that Civ6 would be better with workers rather than builders. I don't yet know if Civ8 will need them.
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
You might as well have titled the poll, "Have you stopped beating your workers?" because it appears designed to get the answer/total the OP wants regardless of any opinions actually indicated by the audience.
For that reason, I won't vote in the silly poll.
But I will comment on 'workers' as separate units. This, is, from first to last and always, a Game Mechanic to simulate all the various construction and upkeep roles of the general population, and so they were always artificial units representing a wildly variable set of circumstances and capabilities in each Civ, as different as the forced unskilled/semi-skilled labor required of Chinese peasants by most of the Dynasties to the individual actions of professional road-building/construction companies in Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Consequently, ANY OTHER system that simulates the same construction/reconstruction/maintenance work within the Civ and does not require the gamer to unnecessarily micromanage every construction project is superior to worker units.
The catch is that each one of us has a different definition of 'unnecessary micromanagement'.
The other 'catch' is that the current game, Civ VII, drastically curtails what the 'worker system' (abstracted as it is in this rendition of the game) is allowed to do. As posted, you cannot remove forests (even though deforestation was almost universal among urban civilizations) or change wetlands into drylands or vice-versa (draining marshes, irrigating, etc) or create canals around river obstacles (extending Navigable Rivers, a process started in Egypt around 2400 BCE) or any of the other myriad 'engineering' projects that marked virtually every Empire in history - including building roads exactly where you wanted them, a characteristic of the Roman, Persian, Chinese Empires and even non-Imperial groups like the Gaulic Celts, whose roads were taken over practically without any changes by the Romans right up to the end of the western Roman empire.
So the current 'implicit' construction system in the game, simulating without Worker units, is also grossly inadequate to properly model everything an Empire wants (or is able) to do, but the problems with it would not be corrected by reverting to separate Worker units: those problems require a re-thinking of the relationship between the gamer and the map throughout the game's Ages.
For that reason, I won't vote in the silly poll.
But I will comment on 'workers' as separate units. This, is, from first to last and always, a Game Mechanic to simulate all the various construction and upkeep roles of the general population, and so they were always artificial units representing a wildly variable set of circumstances and capabilities in each Civ, as different as the forced unskilled/semi-skilled labor required of Chinese peasants by most of the Dynasties to the individual actions of professional road-building/construction companies in Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Consequently, ANY OTHER system that simulates the same construction/reconstruction/maintenance work within the Civ and does not require the gamer to unnecessarily micromanage every construction project is superior to worker units.
The catch is that each one of us has a different definition of 'unnecessary micromanagement'.
The other 'catch' is that the current game, Civ VII, drastically curtails what the 'worker system' (abstracted as it is in this rendition of the game) is allowed to do. As posted, you cannot remove forests (even though deforestation was almost universal among urban civilizations) or change wetlands into drylands or vice-versa (draining marshes, irrigating, etc) or create canals around river obstacles (extending Navigable Rivers, a process started in Egypt around 2400 BCE) or any of the other myriad 'engineering' projects that marked virtually every Empire in history - including building roads exactly where you wanted them, a characteristic of the Roman, Persian, Chinese Empires and even non-Imperial groups like the Gaulic Celts, whose roads were taken over practically without any changes by the Romans right up to the end of the western Roman empire.
So the current 'implicit' construction system in the game, simulating without Worker units, is also grossly inadequate to properly model everything an Empire wants (or is able) to do, but the problems with it would not be corrected by reverting to separate Worker units: those problems require a re-thinking of the relationship between the gamer and the map throughout the game's Ages.
Bonyduck Campersang
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I don't think OP can reassign votes, that's just his way of getting No-voters to defend their stance
MutilationWave
IDDQD
Agreed. Even more infuriating for me is that you can't fire through urban tiles that used to be a forest, whether in your territory or an opponent's. This leads to having to mouse over every enemy urban tile when planning an invasion to see if it used to be a forest.
Ranged units before artillery firing through urban tiles may not be realistic, but any range over one tile for these units is not realistic either. However, having range on ranged units is needed for enjoying combat. I wouldn't mind if they made all enemy urban tiles unable to be fired through, but this would be a major shift in the usefulness of ranged units.
Ultimately, it's a game, and having tiles retain their vegetated status after becoming urban is not fun. Sometimes people tell me that changes are difficult to implement because of localization or other additional work, but this is not the case here. Sorry to derail the discussion, this minor thing is honestly one of the worst things in the game to me.
Unless you vote Yes, in which case no justification is needed. This makes the poll inherently, instantly useless.
Skojardu
Warlord
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Yeah, I voted Yes because I want the powers of the worker to return. If Civ 7 is hell-bent on abstracting away nearly everything, at least provide us with an abstracted "worker" that can choose to terraform. Growing a city now feels like I am doing so in a straitjacket.
The seeds of weakening workers started in 6. You can't settle on a luxury. Tell that to Nara, who clearly settled on a deer tile (featured in a Civ 7 promo).
Watching Civ 6 multiplayer I already miss the strategy of chopping to rush a wonder before an opponent can complete it. I also disliked in 6 the seeds of worker inefficiency when I was unable to "chop" luxuries or strategics. It was a moment of unhappiness when I scouted a perfect spot for a district and then a resource (iron) popped up blocked it.
I want super-workers to build something I believe in!
It isn't.
I get not liking the removal of workers, but basing your desire for an "abstracted worker" (which was incorporated into tile growth mechanics, revamped resources and specialist unit actions - though to be fair that last one has been around a while) on a false premise is a bit of a non-starter.
King Flevance
Deity
I voted no because I don't even see a positive to workers. I would rather have improvements cost gold or be put in the build queue than bring back workers to walk around and spend X turns making the improvement. The idea of walking workers around does not even have nostalgia helping its case. You can implement the same idea in multiple ways without the tedious marching and managing of a bunch of little units. I don't even care for the population = tile improvement mechanic, but I do prefer even it to workers. I would prefer cultural borders come back and gold buys rural improvements.
Gori the Grey
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I myself do like workers. (I don't mind micro-managing.) I moved from Civ 3 to Civ 5, and one thing I missed was having a worker right from the beginning of the game. Back in Civ 3, that's how I started feeling invested in my civ, by what my workers started doing. I remember that you could mine or irrigate. That partly meant that you could even out the food and production you got from plains and grasslands. If you mined a grassland, it became 2-1; if you irrigated a plains, it became 2-1. I remember you had to have a starting water source, and then irrigated tiles had to be contiguous to that. That gave a tangible feeling that the city was growing, as a result of your efforts. The fact that you can even things out probably went a little too far, but once I got to 5, I felt limited. There was one way to improve every kind of tile and pretty much a clear best order in which to develop them. So it didn't feel too much like you were choosing. A little later in the game, you had to decide when you were better served by building roads than by building tile improvements; that added a little bit of strategic decision-making.
So if they were to bring them back, they should try to set up circumstances a little like (what I remember from) Civ 3, where they have some choice as to what they can do with at least some of the tiles (but not so much that it effectively makes your terrain inconsequential).
I was happy to see road spaghetti disappear.
So if they were to bring them back, they should try to set up circumstances a little like (what I remember from) Civ 3, where they have some choice as to what they can do with at least some of the tiles (but not so much that it effectively makes your terrain inconsequential).
I was happy to see road spaghetti disappear.
Patine
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I've been known to do that with empty downvotes on the MSN message boards (where some of the most odious posters I have seen are), as down voting, especially when piled on, is used as a tactic shut down people's opinions without having to make rebuttals or arguments, or their own views. That being said, I don't make many friends that way, I doubt you will either. A friendly bit of advice.
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