I am curious to know the differing ideas on automating workers, work boats, scouts, and missionaries. Being new at this game, I wonder how long in real time it takes for players to make all of their moves in one turn. Do you take the time to manage each worker every time or do you use one of the automate buttons. "Normally" do you cycle through a lot of workers etc. every turn? My "newb" method is to automate workers because I don't trust myself to work on everything I should work on yet until I have more knowledge about what to do.
I cycle through everything else each turn except my workers. Just want to here some thoughts on this approach.
Thanks for your time in advance!
It is always far better to manage Workers yourself once you have even a marginal knowledge of the game. I would bet that close to 100% of moderate-level players and above
never automate their Workers, simply because automated Workers have far inferior intelligence to a human player. If you want to develop your civ-playing skills, one of the best ways is to make the switch and stop automating your Workers. There are plenty of threads around this site and in the
War Academy that deal with managing Workers and infrastructure. (I'm sure other people can give you some more direct links.)
As for time spent on each turn in a game, that depends vastly on the map type and size, the game speed, and a few other things - but mostly on the player themselves. There's a huge amount of variation amongst individual players, as some like to race through the turns to play as many as possible while others like to stop, think and strategize. So there's really no answer to your question, in a sense.
However, if you're looking for a (very) rough guide... for my own games, I tend to take only 10-20 seconds on the first 100 or so turns, then perhaps a minute on the next 100, and gradually longer from there. During the final turns of a game on a huge map on a slow game speed, I might take 20 or 30 minutes, or even up to an hour or more for a turn (though a lot of that is not spent moving units but thinking about situations). So that might give you a rough idea of times.
It should be noted though that I tend to play on Epic and Marathon speeds (so games progress more slowly, thus there's less to do for more of the early turns and more to do for the later turns), and that I tend to be quite a slow and thoughtful player and thus my turn times probably reside close to the longer end of the spectrum (lots of people probably play faster than me).
