Making Workers useful in the late game

[Xaviarlol]

Hey all, I was going to propose something for making Workers useful in the late game in VP congress, but I would love to hear some ideas first.

Workers in the late game are virtually useless once you've maxed out on tile improvements and railroads. Some ideas to make them more useful:
- Add late game "tier2" improvements, starting in the modern era. Eg. A tier2 farm that has slightly more yields, but takes really long to upgrade.
- Add a new tier 3 road type (after railroads) that further enhances city connections (Fiber network?)

Does any one have other ideas on how to make Worker units more useful in the late game?

 

[Tekamthi]

In the "supply-abstracted healing" modmod experiment I created recently, late game workers can still be used to carry "supply" promos for better healing of any nearby units -- so not directly a worker importance initiative but still serves this effect

 

[saamohod]

I agree that workers should remain useful (and not as cheap as they are now), but I don't think your propositions are good enough.

 

[CppMaster]

Hmm, for me it's fine to just disband them, so they don't cost maintenance and there is less clutter

 

[axatin]

I think it's okay if they become useless at some point. The late game is different from the early and mid game, the focus is on trying to win and no longer on expanding and building infrastructure. Adding more things for workers to do feels like an unnecessary distraction, and there are already more than enough units to take care of in the late game, no need to artificially increase the workload even more.

If you play with events on, improvements will be pillaged at random intervals, that's something workers will constantly be needed for. I liked the idea at first, but after playing with events on for some games it just became annoying.

 

[Tekamthi]

Could we not say that as time went on, having a sort of worker involved in combined arms became the norm, perhaps even a requirement for modern fortification

Perhaps they eventually unlock promos that allow them to buff nearby units, and AI is trained to use them this way... The latter issue is the real problem with any worker related idea

 

[hokath]

In older civ games the answer to this was terraforming. Being able to turn tundra into plains, plains into grassland, etc.

 

[Tekamthi]

In older civ games the answer to this was terraforming. Being able to turn tundra into plains, plains into grassland, etc.

I think this is limitation of civ 5 engine; cannot change any of the terrain tiles for graphical purposes -- you have to reload save game to get a terrain change to show up. Only forests and marshes afaik can load in and out, even the other features for the most part are somewhat static in their appearance. Adding a new feature/terrain inherits this static characteristic.

One workaround, kinda hacky but it works in limited situations, is to use the improvement graphics system on top of a new feature to give it a new appearance -- this is modmod territory only though, not suitable for main branch.

The database structure seems to partially exist for upgrading improvements. Like farm 1 can be built on top of for a farm 2. This would be one way to make more work, albeit with a whole slew of balance concerns and art asset needs

 

[Stalker0]

Workers do their job, I them layoff workers to like 3 or so to take care of pillaged tiles that pop up, or if I get nuked and have to handle fall out. Works for me, don't see a big need to change it.

 

[Borussia]

That would just add more boring/monotone micromanagement and no fun.
Early game workers are fine because you have a limited amount and you have to prioritize where they are most useful.
Late game it is just a tedious chore. If I could select what I want to have build on every plot I would fully automate every worker.
Also the AI is quite bad at worker management and this would also lead to them falling even more behind except on the highest difficulty rating where they get huge build speed cheats. Playing as Denmark I can see this especially. I pillage their lands and they need an eternity to repair everything and fall more and more behind. That it nice in the sense that it makes Viking playstyle rewarding but it also lowers difficulty.

 

[pineappledan]

I added a late industrial improvement called a National Park that allows you to gain for large swathes of instact forest/jungle/marsh

Aside from that there is always getting into a nuclear exchange with your neighbour so you can clean up fallout

 

[gwennog]

You can also use Reforestation.

 

[Fenwicked]

I had some ideas on this that I was about to post, but since you've beat me to it I'll share em here:

Idle workers positioned in cities could provide a very small boost to the city's production, possibly in the form of yields equivalent to a laborer. This would function to make them provide at least some value later in the game when you otherwise mostly keep them on standby for repairs and the eventual reveal of industrial era and later strategic resources. Some form of limit would most likely be necessary though, otherwise a player with high income could build several dozen to gain an excessive boost. The limit might be that they incur food cost similar to that of a laborer, or otherwise diminishing returns on stacked workers.

 

[KungCheops]

Adding a new road type after railroads would be an incredible headache because of how the code is written.

 

[Tekamthi]

Idle workers positioned in cities could provide a very small boost to the city's production, possibly in the form of yields equivalent to a laborer.

This style of stacking usage is very practical, and perhaps well-established mechanism, but kinda boring gameplay.

Since we're just theorycrafting anyway, and though it would be very non-trivial, would like to see a late-game worker quest system, ie event popup tells player to go to plot x and perform special build y, to achieve yield z. The builds themselves could be mostly dummies, not actually resulting in any new improvement, just tying up the worker according whatever story is woven into the quest

Getting the workers out and doing stuff on the map will be much more interesting when war comes along than if they're all just stacked in cities.

 

[CppMaster]

Since we're just theorycrafting anyway, and though it would be very non-trivial, would like to see a late-game worker quest system, ie event popup tells player to go to plot x and perform special build y, to achieve yield z. The builds themselves could be mostly dummies, not actually resulting in any new improvement, just tying up the worker according whatever story is woven into the quest

Getting the workers out and doing stuff on the map will be much more interesting when war comes along than if they're all just stacked in cities.

Imho it's not interesting at all, just tedium that you'll have to do in order to play optimally.

 

[Tekamthi]

Imho it's not interesting at all, just tedium that you'll have to do in order to play optimally.

My underlying point is to have workers performing roles outside of cities. Maybe they just do yields in specific plots, but keeping them out of cities and being useful as such makes them secondary targets for invader. If they just stack in city then there is no substantial gameplay difference, we just parking them much as we do now.

 

[CppMaster]

My underlying point is to have workers performing roles outside of cities. Maybe they just do yields in specific plots, but keeping them out of cities and being useful as such makes them secondary targets for invader. If they just stack in city then there is no substantial gameplay difference, we just parking them much as we do now.

Hmm, ok that makes sense. So if a worker "sleeps" on a farm it produces food and when on mine it produces hammers etc. That makes sense and I like it!

 

[ma_kuh]

The clear solution is to give workers only 3 charges to insta-build improvements, forcing you to continue to build them throughout the eras. Definitely fun gameplay. /s

I agree that trivial quests where you have to move a unit to a plot and tell it to build something specific every few~several turns doesn't sound all that fun, just like another element you "need" to do for optimization. For one, Civ doesn't have a shift-queue mechanism so you can't just say "Build this Lumber Mill here", you have to wait for them to move into position first.

However, I do kind of like the idea that a worker unit could "work" a tile, either by building a specific improvement over an existing one or just by existing in the cell with a special promotion that generates yields maybe. But it would be hard to sell that as more than just yield inflation.

What if there was a quest that CSs gave that requested a worker (or few), similar to the military unit request?

 

[Tekamthi]

What if there was a quest that CSs gave that requested a worker (or few)

This I rather like, just use the existing quest system, no need for entirely new quest systems as I suggested previously. Much better.

There may be a challenge with this idea, though, in that AI has a very hard time sitting still. ie if it were just about parking a worker in cs territory.
This was my motivation behind suggesting a dummy build, AI won't move units around as much while the build is underway, but if there's no way to queue this up for AI, then we're left with maybe attaching some kind of carrot to the build and this could be tricky if at all possible. It is common in games to see a unit that should not move at all for optimal play, being shuffled around unnecessarily. It's much better than vanilla but still common. So I'm not sure how well parking units would go either really. Maybe it would be enough that they just path to the location and tag up instantaneously. Enough of these objectives and the workers are constantly in transit going somewhere.

One idea I'd like to experiment with is giving the workers repair charges, like lesser version of the admiral ability but for unembarked land units