Reinventing the Workers system

[TheMarshmallowBear]

About the question of how to make long roads, you could introduce a "Trade Caravan" unit, which, would allow you to build roads further than 3 tiles away.

Truth be told, right now, building roads further than 3 tiles is pointless, it's expensive, and other than connecting your cities there's nothing more useful for the roads, that could be fixed by introducing roads in order to be able to trade with both City States AND civilizations.

 

[Browd]

About the question of how to make long roads, you could introduce a "Trade Caravan" unit, which, would allow you to build roads further than 3 tiles away.

Truth be told, right now, building roads further than 3 tiles is pointless, it's expensive, and other than connecting your cities there's nothing more useful for the roads, that could be fixed by introducing roads in order to be able to trade with both City States AND civilizations.

Um, what about swiftly moving military units? Currently building a road network to take down Spain. I'll destroy many of the road segments after she's history, but this campaign doesn't work without roads.

 

[arkguy]

I like the worker system though some improvements could be made. The public works system in CtP worked very well too. Allowing workers & settler to join a city as
in Civ III would both prevent an army of worker with nothing to do and control maintenance cost in a less wasteful manor than disbanding them or add the worker value to the city they are disbanded in. A system like Dida proposed would also work. One thing that does need changed is worker automatically building forts over improvements. Instead when the worker runs out of tile to improve they are either sent to the nearest city and put to sleep until a tile needs improved or a window pops up informing you they are idle and ask for instruction on what to do next.
Combining the two systems could also reduce the time spent waiting for the turn to end. Creating a system where you have both public work improvement like roads, railroads, canals, maglevs that are built on public works type system and worker built improvements like farms, mines, windmills and lumber mills.
Another suggestion that would add flavor and variety would be to add specialist worker that can do certain thing more efficiently and quicker. Examples taken from this site are: terriformers that can change terrain types, androids which are more expensive to make but work faster, chain gang worker which would cost less and get a bonus (-1 to turns needed to build 6 instead of 7 turns for example) for certain types of projects they were typically used for like building roads and railroads and a penalty for others such as working for or build structure like watermill or lumber mills due to lack of motivation. Constructor who is a worker/setter combo that can function as either with a unique order to construct a road to a city (like the build a colony order for worker in Civ III) that would cost more than a normal settler. Or a cowboy which if ordered to work a cattle resource would create +2 food to the square in addition to the improvement for the square with the ability to defend it self against attack.
Worker can be kept from becoming boring by increasing the number of improvements they can build. That also would increased your flexibility in being able to build to meet changing needs.

 

[kirbdog]

Absolutely agree with removing the worker units, they are an unnecessary feature at this point. Whatever benefit they add (protecting them, stealing them, considering when they should go where...) is imo more than weighted up by the convenience gained by removing them. ...
Btw, I'm also in favor of having no other "fiddly units", such as spies, missionaries or executives. I'd rather have these handled by some sort of "assign mission"-screen,and have the map reserved for military units.

This. An average game played to the information age takes 5 to 8 hours on Standard settings, for me. Taking away the workers would take away at least an hour without taking away 2% of the fun.

This is partly because it's practically mandatory to steal workers, other than your first one, if you are going to be efficient, which isn't an interesting guns or butter decision... The only really interesting questions are when to get the first worker if not going Liberty and where to build the roads. The choice of mine, farm, or trading post could be decided on the city screen or through global default preferences, like "put a farm next to fresh water." The choice of "how do I move my worker around this town efficiently and avoid barbarians" could be thankfully forgotten.

I also would like a religion screen to go along with the espionage screen we have. Surrounding a capital with units is a cheesy way to protect the faith.