Needed: Missionary Automation

[HardCoder]

Please, please, add an automate button for missionaries that sends them auto-magically to a reasonable place. I assume the algorithm would be something like, in order of preference:

* If it's a missionary of the player's religion, then send it to a player city that needs culture
* Otherwise, some player city (largest that can be reached? on the theory that it could use a(nother) temple)
* Otherwise, the closest non-player city

But I really don't care - anything that keeps me from having to scroll around looking for tiny yellow Buddhas against yellow plains, or invisible crosses, just anything at all. I don't know how many times I thought I've sent missionaries to every city that needs them only to find that I've missed one or two because the religion "failed to spread" and I didn't catch it.

Also, I don't know if the governor does this or not, but if it's auto-building for a holy city, it should place great emphasis on the income-increasing buildings. It might be nice if, when the player (human or AI) has a holy city, it put some additional emphasis on building banks in general so that Wall Street for the holy city could be available fairly quickly.

BTW I always dump my extra prophets into my best holy city. The AIs should probably do that too. It's reasonably common that I wind up putting National Epic and Wall Street in the same holy city (if I'm not playing Philosophical) because of the prophet- and thence money-generating potential.

 

[jray]

In the meantime, there are some mods that can make this easier. For example, the tweaked version of 12monkeys' modified special domestic advisor in my jrayUGH modpack shows on the main City screen which religions are in each of your cities and how much culture each is generating. You can just sort by each of those columns to quickly choose a city to send a given missionary to.

 

[Quagga]

Exploring was added to airplanes (really cool, IMHO), so maybe the explore button could be coded to do what the OP suggests for Missionaries. Apparently relevant code exists somewhere, since the AIs can do it.

 

[HardCoder]

Exploring was added to airplanes (really cool, IMHO), so maybe the explore button could be coded to do what the OP suggests for Missionaries. Apparently relevant code exists somewhere, since the AIs can do it.

Yeah I wish there was an auto-pillage button too, for those old chariots that aren't good for anything else anymore.

 

[Slade19]

Automated missionaries would be incredible.

That's the ONLY reason I don't use them as much as I probably should. It's simply a pain in the arse to manage all those missionaries by hand.

Make it simple... hit the button and simply have it look for the nearest city without that religion. Go there, convert. Make it do a check every turn to avoid doubling up.

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

I think a "Foreign" and "Domestic" button would be better then a general auto, Domestic grays out if all cities you control have the religion in question and Foreign grays out if all know foreign cities have the religion.

 

[OTAKUjbski]

/bump

I just played my first super-heavy religious game today, and it sucked.

This is only because I had to spend SO MUCH of my game telling the Missionaries where to go.

I really like the OP's idea.

I think a "Foreign" and "Domestic" button would be better then a general auto, Domestic grays out if all cities you control have the religion in question and Foreign grays out if all know foreign cities have the religion.

I also like this idea, except I would add a 3rd "Most Needed" automation button to have the Missionary go to either the closest no culture city or to the largest city.

 

[Iustus]

It would be quite easy to add an explore button for missionaries and to make it do exactly what an AI would do with that missionary. (Which might not be what a player would want, but it would be better than nothing).

I do not have time to make this change right now, but hopefully someone will step up.

To the person that wishes to take this on: look at the changes that were made for allowing airplanes to explore. You just need to add explore as a valid option for missionaries, then make sure you call the missionary explore routine from the automated section of UnitAI.cp.

-Iustus