What the Heck is Micromanagement anyway? And what can be done about it?

[dh_epic]

I'm not too concerned about realism, particularly in a game where nobody's sure who the player is. Are you a God? No, you don't have godlike power. Are you every leader in history? No, because you control many things that a leader doesn't. Because you can throw yourself out of office and replace yourself. Are you the entire essence of your civilization? No, because some of your citizens are mad at you -- you obviously don't control them all the way.

This is a whole other discussion, but until they settle it, it's best not to use "governments don't do X" as a reason not to include X. Because nobody can even agree that you're the government.

Be that as it may, I'm not sure what PW stands for, or if it even describes the changes that we desire... but I'm definitely for overhauling workers altogether. Jiggling around little units to chase after pollution just isn't worth it for the thrill of moving a unit towards a cow. I'm for Aussie's idea, but truthfully, I'm not against Dida's idea either.

 

[Dida]

read my post, while I did use realism as a critizism for worker unit, it is however not the only reason why it is bad. In fact, it is not even the primary reason that attributes to problems with worker unit.
When rebuking a point, your arguement will be more effective if you address the main point rather than some minor defects.

 

[dh_epic]

I'm not sure what your justifications are other than realism. That it's not the job of government to build workers, even though it's uncertain if the player is in fact the government. That there's enough people to build stuff no matter what, so why require a player to build up a worker pool. That's not really good enough for me...

What you do gain from having worker units around, even as an abstract pool, is the ability to capture workers. And some of the strategic elements that come from diverting your valuable production towards building up your pool -- is it worth it? These are things that some players like, and Aussie's model preserves.

But yes, be that as it may, I'd easily give up capturing workers and strategic building choices. They're small things, but not things I'm passionate about. But I'm just one person.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

OK, just to show how easy my system is:

1) You can build worker units ANY time you wish. They cost population and, when built, are thereafter only accessible via the trade screen.

2) When you right click on a square, a pop-up appears showing ALL the available 'terrain enhancements' which are available for that square-in the following format:

Name of Improvement PW Cost Maintainance Cost # of Turns Pollution


3) When you click on the improvement you want, a second pop-up appears showing the icon for the terrain improvement, with more details about it (the above info, PLUS how many food, shields etc it provides).

4) In this screen, underneath the info, will be two icons, with 2 slider bars and a number box under each. The first indicates workers, the second indicates slaves.

5) The first slider is adjusted to change the # of workers on the job (or you can just enter a number directly). The second slider lets you adjust the work rate (or, again, you can enter a number directly).

6) When done, you click OK and both pop-ups disappear and the terrain improvement is begun. Terrain improvements do not REQUIRE workers, the workers are just their to make the work go faster (think of workers as a large engineering/public service corps).

7) To discourage MM of workers and work rates, frequent changes to current settings will cause a penalty to the time needed to complete the job.

8) Workers/Slaves have other tasks they can do. Namely, they can be 'Joined' to a city (i.e, they become part of the general population); 'attached' to the city (they become 'worker gangs' who generate extra shields each turn towards improvements and units); or 'sacrificed' to a city, to generate a lot of shields at once towards an improvement or unit (think of them as being worked to death).

9) If you have the appropriate improvements and religion type in your city, you can also 'sacrifice' slaves and/or workers for happiness bonuses and/or culture boosts.

10) Appropriate improvements and wonders can also generate extra income, food and shields, for cities, based on the number of slaves you currently have.

11) Slaves and workers can be traded, sold or given away in normal trade deals.

See, so very very simple, IMHO!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[sir_schwick]

2) When you right click on a square, a pop-up appears showing ALL the available 'terrain enhancements' which are available for that square-in the following format:

Name of Improvement PW Cost Maintainance Cost # of Turns Pollution


3) When you click on the improvement you want, a second pop-up appears showing the icon for the terrain improvement, with more details about it (the above info, PLUS how many food, shields etc it provides).

Instead of having to do it per square, you should be able to click on a view panel. Then you click improvement type. Squares with Black overlay have been improved. Green can be improved. Yellow have some extra work/trouble. Red cannot be improved. Also, the output after improvement would be shown on the square.

To assign worker projects, you simply paint a 'improvement x' flag(think of as a paint tool) on the squares you want with that improvement. There would also be a 'no improvement x' flag to eliminate that order.

Right clicking to modify individual squares would be avaliable, but htis would allow you to do this clickly on a large scale.

 

[dh_epic]

I see it rather a lot like MS Paint. You paint down the improvements you want with your various "brushes", and your workers lock them down one by one, turn by turn.

 

[sir_schwick]

I see it rather a lot like MS Paint. You paint down the improvements you want with your various "brushes", and your workers lock them down one by one, turn by turn.

Exactly, like MS Paint. I was only proposing adding that aspect to surveying improvement strategy as well.

 

[Hamshore]

I like Aussie_Lurkers ideas - I guess what I want to get rid of is the having to do one thing at a time - the city 'build rack' is great, lets have that for improvements as well.

But how about getting even more radical? No distinction between city population and workers doing improvements? A population 'unit' still needs food etc to support it, but you can divert any 'extra's' who aren't require to improvements on city tiles. The improvements would also require shields as well. This removes the ability to 'build' population with resources (aha I'll take that forest, chop it down and build people with it - huh?)

One problem I'd see with the PW idea is that in the early game you'd be assigning 'ability' built up from large core cities to the distant ones - especially odd if you pop a free city from a hut on the other side of the world! Perhaps this could be overcome by some form of corruption (taking longer to do something?) on PW ability the further away from the palace/FP you get? Would remove an oddity of Civ - i.e. city population gets corruption, worker population doesn't?

One problem I'd see with the PW idea is that in the early game you'd be assigning 'ability' built up from large core cities to the distant ones - especially odd if you pop a free city from a hut on the other side of the year. Perhaps this could be overcome by some form of corruption (longer to do something) on PWS ability the further away from the palace/FP you get? Would remove an oddity of Civ - i.e. city population gets corruption, worker population doesn't?


One problem I'd see with the PW idea is that in the early game you'd be asigning 'ability' built up from large core cities to the distant ones - especialy odd if you pop a free city from a hut on the other side of the year. Prehaps this could be overcome by some form of corruption (longer to do something) on PWS ability the further away from the palace/FP you get? Would remove an oddity of Civ - i.e. city population gets corruption, worker population doesn't?