Killing the MANTRA (that killed the workers... and other little things...)

[Monene]

I voted yes. While they are annoying mid-game, I believe they were vital in the early stages of civilization; rather, they should have taken advantage of the changing eras and replaced them when technology was no longer an impediment to deciding whether to build or demolish, and instead assign their functions directly to the city.

 

[GeneralZift]

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.

What do you mean by Road spaghetti?

 

[Gorbles]

What do you mean by Road spaghetti?

Roads in VII are a lot more realistic / less convoluted. I think this was a problem in both VI and V.

 

[Patine]

No.

The workers are just a mean to an end (getting improvements on the map). They were never essential to the game, and never will be, so there is no reason to put them back on the map and require worrying about how to move them around.

I think, "essential," depends on iteration of the game and how it's meant to play by design, to be honest.

 

[Patine]

I voted yes. While they are annoying mid-game, I believe they were vital in the early stages of civilization; rather, they should have taken advantage of the changing eras and replaced them when technology was no longer an impediment to deciding whether to build or demolish, and instead assign their functions directly to the city.

Like Civ2 did, where Settlers (who were also Workers, until and if they founded a City) could upgrade to Engineers with the Tech Explosives.

 

[MrRadar]

What do you mean by Road spaghetti?

In Civ 1 to 4 roads eventually covered all the worked tiles and the map then looked like someone’s overturned a bowl of spaghetti on it

 

[GeneralZift]

In Civ 1 to 4 roads eventually covered all the worked tiles and the map then looked like someone’s overturned a bowl of spaghetti on it

I guess this is why Roads cost maintenance in Civ5?

I will say I am really adamant that I enjoy road building. It feels like I'm interacting with the map by deciding how and where to put roads.

The worst thing they did was make road building automated.

I realise the best way to make workers better is to make them more interesting and the tiles more interactive.

The less options and utility you have for a worker the less you need workers in the game.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Roads are painful topic. In Civs before 5 it was normal to cover all the ground with roads and it took a lot of actions in game. In Civ5 roads started cost maintenance, so we actually did road planning, which was quite fun, but actually creating those roads was tedious. Civ6-7 automate roads, which is not so bad, especially if they stop disappearing with age transition, but I miss road planning a bit.

 

[Gori the Grey]

What do you mean by Road spaghetti?

In Civ 3 (I guess 1-4, but I know it from 3) there was just a bonus for a road having a tile on it (1g, I think). So you built roads on every tile. It ended up looking like this:

 

[MrRadar]

I guess this is why Roads cost maintenance in Civ5?

And that was one of the most unfortunate features in Civ5 - roads went from being a universally good improvement to a feature to be used only in absolute necessity and with a good deal of gamey micro on top of that. Like pre-building road tiles to minus one turn to completion on the line connecting two cities, to avoid paying maintenance for as long as possible. Building a road to a CS for the quest and then immediately destroying it afterwards to save costs. Does a strategy game really need such player input?

I liked road building mechanics by traders in Civ 6 much more, except that nonsense of it costing a ME charge, when railroad, which was added later, only cost resources, and it remained like that.

In CivRev you just pay a one-off gold amount to make a road to somewhere, and now in 7 we get automatic roads between the closest settlements with the possibility to use merchants to form missing links. I think, after all the road trajectory, maybe that's quite all right to have it like this. I just wish I could easily see all the existing connections with the help of the game's native UI, without the need to download another UI mod.

 

[Leucarum]

Workers are horrible sources of micromanagement from previous games. Their removal is one of the best things to change in Civ7. So no I do not miss them. Let them retire in peace.

 

[GeneralZift]

And that was one of the most unfortunate features in Civ5 - roads went from being a universally good improvement to a feature to be used only in absolute necessity and with a good deal of gamey micro on top of that. Like pre-building road tiles to minus one turn to completion on the line connecting two cities, to avoid paying maintenance for as long as possible. Building a road to a CS for the quest and then immediately destroying it afterwards to save costs. Does a strategy game really need such player input?

I liked road building mechanics by traders in Civ 6 much more, except that nonsense of it costing a ME charge, when railroad, which was added later, only cost resources, and it remained like that.

In CivRev you just pay a one-off gold amount to make a road to somewhere, and now in 7 we get automatic roads between the closest settlements with the possibility to use merchants to form missing links. I think, after all the road trajectory, maybe that's quite all right to have it like this. I just wish I could easily see all the existing connections with the help of the game's native UI, without the need to download another UI mod.

I don't think it was only used in Civ5 for absolute necessity.
I built roads to opponents when I wanted to invade them but there was hills and rivers in the way.
Or I built roads to city states and allies when I was trading with them.

See the game could put more emphasis on the strategic road building but it doesn't. For example, make it clear a trade route with a road makes far more money.
Or a road to an ally improves diplomacy and diplomatic visibility.

It's these little things which makes the worker as a whole more interesting. Without interesting roads and interesting improvements, there is no interesting worker.

 

[Lebo44]

Workers are horrible sources of micromanagement from previous games. Their removal is one of the best things to change in Civ7. So no I do not miss them. Let them retire in peace.

100% agree with one exception - they added some life to the otherwise static map, particularly before Civ 6, when numerous workers were constantly busy with improvements.

 

[kaspergm]

In Civ5 roads started cost maintenance, so we actually did road planning, which was quite fun, but actually creating those roads was tedious. Civ6-7 automate roads, which is not so bad, especially if they stop disappearing with age transition, but I miss road planning a bit.

Road planning was great, it's realistic and adds decision making to the game. I acknowledge automatic roads have some advantages, but I hate the fact that I can't decide where they go. Like sometimes we will have to roads run on parallel tiles because they are created between different cities, roads will by-go cities between start and finish by 1 tile, and don't get me started on how you can't force the trader to go over land instead of by sea, so you can't get them to build a road between two cities on the same coastline.


Anyway, to return to OT, I did vote "Yes" for workers to return, but it's not my biggest grip with Civ7. As @Boris Gudenuf excellently summarized above, many features of the old worker system that is currently missing could be re-introduced without the worker re-appearing.

With that said, I don't think workers were just pointless micro-management. Yes, they were management, certainly, perhaps sometimes also micro-management, but the fact that something is (micro-)management does not make it inherently bad. If there's nothing left to manage, what's left for the player to do, really?

What I liked about workers/the old improvement system:

• Decision making: Should I produce a worker or produce something else?
• Decision making 2: Should I improve this tile or that tile first?
• Decision making 3: Should I make this or that improvement/harvest on the tile?
• Defending and capturing: Needing to defend your workers added a strategic layer. Ability to catch enemy workers similarly.

What I disliked:

• Yes it was tedious when managing a big empire.
• It was annoying when your workers had nothing to do - should you leave them hanging around waiting for something to come up, or should you disband them and build/buy new ones later (mostly a pre-civ6 issue).

 

[Gorbles]

Road planning was great, it's realistic and adds decision making to the game.

It's frequently gamified though. In real-life, roads strike a balance between things like planning permission, the terrain, and whatnot. In Civilisation games where you can build them, you build them wherever you can so long as the positives outweigh the negatives. This isn't actually realistic. This is min-maxing gameplay value.

Which I don't think is necessarily a negative, but I'm also not fussed about seeing that kind of optimisation not return. It's not really demonstrative of any kind of skill, and the decisionmaking is very shallow. You need it even less in VII because the main aim of connecting resources in older games has been replaced by the (imo better) resource assignments.

 

[Naokaukodem]

I voted yes because I missed them in my relatively long (oh wait, was that short ?) unfortunate play of Civ7. I love using them in Civ5 vanilla, but not so much when they get interrupted every turn because a barbarian was 2 tiles away 30 turns ago...

Anyway, I think that some mix of workers and builders could be done, a kind of Civ4 slavery civic deported to workers : You can brutalize them with a high chance to die or lose health, and if they do not die they work on the basis of their remaining health : if 30/30% health left, they complete things at 30% of their full health speed. Then you could with slavery (while it's still something, in modern you would be seen as a monster and denounced by everybody) brutalize your workers that would have no cost or 1 or 2 food per unit (to your choice : 1 food the health goes down 20% every turn, 2 food it does go down only if brutalized) for the urgent improvements and keep the survivors as slow builders for future improvements. Furthermore, some improvements would be of high cost, like canals, and you would prefer to brutalize some workers so to be completed in reasonable time.

Later in the game, states would be classified as emergent, power or superpower (can be only 2 superpowers at a time), and if you under-pay your workers while you are an emergent power or a superpower that produces for the whole planet (whereas every production or nearly is replaced by gold in "developed" countries), or is a super-trader like the oil producing states, and "encourage" them to work a lot for a few (maintenance cost : 1 gold per turn per worker or even less), meaning you use your poor population to make the dirty, dangerous work. Or even without this classification, if you have a lot of poor people in your country (mostly because your country is, well, poor), you can do as so in modern times and being tolerated by other powers, "brutalize" becoming "encourage" but with the same effects. Note that you don't even have to feed them as they get paid a misery to feed their family, so in a sense it's even better than slavery.

I basically created Civ8 around the idea of workers.

 

[Leucarum]

100% agree with one exception - they added some life to the otherwise static map, particularly before Civ 6, when numerous workers were constantly busy with improvements.

You could always add in some animated workers on the map

 

[Patine]

It's frequently gamified though. In real-life, roads strike a balance between things like planning permission, the terrain, and whatnot.

Yes, in a smaller scale it is. But if you could see roads in the most settle areas from space - or the stratosphere - which is the scope of may zooms of civ game maps, it would be different - not as consistent as, "spaghetti," but about as ubiquitous. But some areas would have very, if any, roads. Though, given the state of many highways, even in many parts of First World countries, exorbitant maintenance are questionable, too. From a real-life, perspective.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

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.

Does it matter???

 

[Patine]

Does it matter???

Yes, it does.