Managing workers the ADD way. Don't automate!

[Chipacabra]

One of my biggest weaknesses in all of the Civ family of games is in managing all the workers. They're just all the time asking for new jobs, distracting me away from my military forces and city management. That, and I can never seem to keep my big-picture goal in mind from turn to turn. Worker automation is a terrible idea, because Firaxis forget to code the AI to read your mind, so they never manage to build according your master plan. (Nothing like getting tired of your workers, setting them to automated, and watching them beeline to your commercial cities with pickaxes to tear down your windmills.)

What's helped me is FINALLY noticing in one of the loading screen tips that you can queue up worker commands. I have seriously been playing this game, off and on, since release, and never knew you could do that! I figure there has to be at least one or two other poor, easily distractable fools out there that could use this.

Basically, just select your worker, then hold down shift while you start giving it commands. All sorts of commands work here, including moving, and I don't know what the limit on how many commands you can give is, because I haven't hit it yet.

My typical method now is to deal with my first one or two workers manually from turn to turn for a while, because of those oh-so-important early chops. But after the first improvement or two of a city, I can usually know what I want the entire fat cross to look like. So I just grab a nearby worker, and queue up a list of commands for the entire fat cross. This is a lifesaver when planning out watermills, especially, because you can snag two or three workers, and give them each the same orders to make mills in the correct order. This keeps me from building a mill on the wrong side of a bend because I wasn't paying attention.

Expert players, which do you prefer? Giving workers one job at a time, or queueing up batches of jobs?

Also: I'm not sure if it's Civ or Windows, but sometimes the interface gets a bit fiddly. Sometimes mouse-over popup windows stop working, and sometimes when I queue a move order for a worker, the order buttons don't update for the new tile he'll be at. I just queue the same move again, and that usually fixes it. Anyone else have the same quirk? It's not exactly game breaking, but it might be bad on my mouse button...

 

[swimrr]

Wow. That is great to know. Wow. Wow. Wow. You have saved me sooo much trouble. Thanks my friend.

 

[orgonebox]

The main problem I have with queueing or pathing any worker OR unit in the early game is the occasional barb that pops up right near the fog o' war edge where my worker just went, and if I didn't quicksave, it's bye-bye worker. Nothing makes me angrier than losing a unit that I could have taken the time to move manually. I wish it could save me time, but mostly I just have stacks of workers that can finish an improvement in a small amount of time, allowing me to assign them routing functions or, most useful improvements having been built, station them in my capital or something. In a recent Monarch game playing as the JC, I only built three or four workers total, and ended up disbanding a few stacks of seven captured workers just because I didn't need them. By the time I was pathing railroads, I had achieved a 1670-ish conquest victory, and still had workers sentryed in cities that I had forgotten about. Still, cool that the queue function works.

 

[Chipacabra]

In my experience, queued actions are no worse for this. When an enemy unit comes near a worker, it clears the queue and stops what it's doing anyway, so it's exactly the same as if the barbarian wandered up while you're making a farm.

 

[voek]

I knew that, but usualy give one order at a time, since workorder may change in time. Maybe some other resources need to be connected first. I tend to forget if they are improving and I don't pay attention. Later in the game when it becomes somewhat less important and you have a lot more workers I pack them together (group option) and let them improve. In fact, I also pack sometimes 2 workers early on to improve tiles. Normally I use my workers finish 1 tile first together and then move to the next instead of improving multiple tiles seperatly.

 

[Chipacabra]

That's a good point that I forgot to mention, don't be afraid to snag a worker from his appointed rounds and change him to a more important job. Fortunately, since he's doing exactly what you told him to do, it should be easy to find a worker when you need him! That's the other major downside to automated workers, they're never around when you need them.

 

[scherbchen]

Also: I'm not sure if it's Civ or Windows, but sometimes the interface gets a bit fiddly. Sometimes mouse-over popup windows stop working

same here, hitting ESC once and going back to the game fixes this for me. not sure you wanna do that while you do your worker thang though

 

[walkingfigment]

The best way to fix that problem if you want to use worker automation is to go into your game options. There are two boxes you can check that may be helpful. One is "Workers leave forests", the other is "Workers leave old improvements". I have had the same problem you have. It is useful if you capture some cities in the late game and don't want to micromanage but want to keep your windmills. Just set it and the workers will run off to some unfinished land and work away.

 

[Welnic]

...
Also: I'm not sure if it's Civ or Windows, but sometimes the interface gets a bit fiddly. Sometimes mouse-over popup windows stop working, and sometimes when I queue a move order for a worker, the order buttons don't update for the new tile he'll be at. I just queue the same move again, and that usually fixes it. Anyone else have the same quirk? It's not exactly game breaking, but it might be bad on my mouse button...

It's not Windows, cause it happens in the Mac version also. A tip that I got from somewhere is to move your mouse over your flag next to the strategic map. That has always worked for me.

Thanks for the tip for queuing workers, I'll have to try that.

 

[gdgrimm]

My worker usage...

Never automate.
From about the time I build the 2nd city on, I team workers in pairs (BTW, I always play Marathon).
While I'm aware of the order queueing mechanism, I never use it. I'd always be changing my mind about what a worker should do next, and have to rebuild the queue every couple of turns anyway.

 

[br_casino]

The easiest way that I have found to manage my workers is to keep a written list of each of my cities. When I build or capture each city I notate how many farms I need to build to get my end food count to 2 food per each workable square. Each time I improve the food value of a tile I mark it down next to the appropiate city.

Once all my farms, pastures, windmills, etc are built, I improve the remaining tiles based on the type of city (production, commerce, etc.). Its a whole lot easier to keep my improvement plans straight if its all written down. When I cycle back to a city to give my workers new orders, I just look at notations to know how many more food improvements I need.

 

[OceansEleven]

I used to automate in Noble. Then I stopped once I started going on Prince. Big difference. But, I've never queued the workers. They do start getting at my nerve sometimes.

Ong big mistake I made. I did all the workers by myself, and would automate. But I never checked the 'Workers Leave Old Improvements'. So then they'd just screw everything up, building farms upon farms upon farms everywhere. I finally realized it, shut it off, and been getting better.