In my 15-odd years of playing different incarnations of civ I have only automated a worker on one occasion (vanilla civ4). It lasted one turn. I will never do so again.
When, if ever, do you put workers on auto?
- Thread starter slobberinbear
- Start date
Orion071
Home School Tutor
I agree with this and here's another situation where you can save a lot of Worker turns:
Say you have a city with 3 mines. You want to put a road on each mine for faster movement and the eventual railroad. Since I play Epic, a road takes 3 turns. So you move your 3 Workers onto hill #1 and build a road. Repeat for hills 2 and 3. This has taken you 6 turns. Instead, you should move each of your 3 Workers onto a separate hill. Then they all build roads on their hill. Now all 3 roads are done in only 4 turns!
This is especially useful for clear-cutting those jungle cities. Move 1 individual Worker into each jungle and clear them all at the same time.
Oh, and I never automate Workers. If you want it done right, do it yourself.
Arnesson
Warlord
That is where I expected to find it! It might be in your Warlords version but, for some reason, it is not present on mine (and I do have the latest patch installed).
I automate them when i have improved every square of all my cities that im going to work, then they still do the little jobs that need to be done without me having to bother, im sure they still do things wrong and it costs me points, but meh.
I do tell them to leave old improvements and forests though, i once automated them without that and they turned all my capital's towns into farms... sad times.
I do tell them to leave old improvements and forests though, i once automated them without that and they turned all my capital's towns into farms... sad times.
Build trade network is useful after I have manually placed railways on everything i want them on, i let the workers have fun building countless railroads that would take me forever to do myself, I auto all of them with leave improvements turned on in the end game, as repair crews to espionage. But beyond that they are just stupid on their own. Why would I ever want a windmill.
KMadCandy
giggling permanoob
never. i did once by accident last week, with horrifying results, related to this:
the other day apparently i clicked a wrong key and a worker thought i'd told him to "auto trade route", since a sudden a forest preserve at my national park city turned into a farm
! i flipped out, since even tho i never automate them i do have preserve forests and preserve old improvements checked. he should not have done that even if i had told him to auto-improve things, which i hadn't, i'd only told him (accidentally) to auto-trade-route things. what was he thinking???
i found the offender, and did the alt-backspace to cancel order on all unit types, so that if anybody else thought i'd told them to do that they'd quit too. i mean seriously, i don't even know what key to push if i DO want them to do that *giggle*.
my gosh i was upset. a freaking free specialist gone due to a misclick and then buggy AI worker logic. i didn't have LMA so i went into WB and gave myself back the forest and the preserve, that fixed that. it made me wonder tho, does the game not consider "forest preserve" an existing improvement that should be kept? i swear i had that checkbox marked. then again, it was a forest in the first place and i also had leave existing forests marked. i think the better AI messed up automated worker logic in new and freaky ways.
and don't even get me started on how it changes the tiles being worked in your cities when you adjust the slider. even when you're not using the governor. if i hand-assign the tiles, i want them to stay that way, no matter what happens afterwards. slider rearrangements, nuclear disasters, city growth, whatever, if i fired my city governor then i'm in charge and you ignore him ok? geez!!!!! oops i got myself started, clearly i need to eat lunch.
the other day apparently i clicked a wrong key and a worker thought i'd told him to "auto trade route", since a sudden a forest preserve at my national park city turned into a farm
! i flipped out, since even tho i never automate them i do have preserve forests and preserve old improvements checked. he should not have done that even if i had told him to auto-improve things, which i hadn't, i'd only told him (accidentally) to auto-trade-route things. what was he thinking???i found the offender, and did the alt-backspace to cancel order on all unit types, so that if anybody else thought i'd told them to do that they'd quit too. i mean seriously, i don't even know what key to push if i DO want them to do that *giggle*.
my gosh i was upset. a freaking free specialist gone due to a misclick and then buggy AI worker logic. i didn't have LMA so i went into WB and gave myself back the forest and the preserve, that fixed that. it made me wonder tho, does the game not consider "forest preserve" an existing improvement that should be kept? i swear i had that checkbox marked. then again, it was a forest in the first place and i also had leave existing forests marked. i think the better AI messed up automated worker logic in new and freaky ways.
and don't even get me started on how it changes the tiles being worked in your cities when you adjust the slider. even when you're not using the governor. if i hand-assign the tiles, i want them to stay that way, no matter what happens afterwards. slider rearrangements, nuclear disasters, city growth, whatever, if i fired my city governor then i'm in charge and you ignore him ok? geez!!!!! oops i got myself started, clearly i need to eat lunch.
Murky
Deity
I usually don't use auto workers in single player. It can save a lot of time in Multi-player where you need focus more on the combat than worker actions. On auto they may not do the best things but at least they're not just standing around.
ChicagoCubs
Prince
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2006
- Messages
- 361
When I capture new territory, but I really don't care about it (i.e. I only need to hold it for the pop and land count in domination), I will have the worker automated to the nearest city.
cheffster
Deity
once i hit the mid-game around 1300AD +, and I get too lazy to handle all the micro management, I usually put a few workers on auto, most often 2 on "build trade route" and 2 on "build automated improvements", I know the automated worker ai is basically ******** and they will build workshops over your towns if you have "automated workers leave old improvements" checked, and make other dumb moves like chopping forests in low health cities if you have "automated workers leave forests checked", but I ALWAYS make sure theses are both checked before I put them on auto. It does save time/hassle having 2/3rds of them on auto and then build the "important" improvements/and railroading mines with manual workers.
CHE_GUEVARA
Chieftain
i use auto workers when i improve all my tiles and dont have any importan improvement to make..
Arnesson
Warlord
You drinky-drinky when you play, don't you
Nope! Actually I do not. If there was some way to take a screen shot of the Options portion of the startup screen, I would post it here for you.
Matty R
Veteran Newbie
The only automation my workers use is networking my territory. Building roads/railroads on every tile in my borders.
Big Boss Man
Chieftain
Playing on lower levels under noble after you just don't care to guide them anymore . Have them auto work new citys you captured that you just dont care about . But it's nice to manage the workers in city spots you do care about . Since auto workers ain't really smart about your goals !
