Worker and other automation

[TheMeInTeam]

There will be problems either way.

In Beyond Earth, you're terraforming an alien world; there are many different choices of improvements that you can place depending on how you choose to play, and those choices are meaningful. It's not like Civ V where there's usually one best answer for every tile. Worker improvements are now an important part of gameplay that really shouldn't be automated.

Worker turns have been important in every main-line title of Civ. Civ V underemphasized them a little compared to previous titles (and YMMV on whether that was good or bad...I never did like the excel-sheet level details of micro), but micro choices there were still important and made a difference in your tech and production rate.

The danger of automation should be efficiency. Having automated workers lost routinely is a problem that effectively removes the viability of a feature included in the game. It goes from being "inefficient" to "pathetically bad to the point where this feature might as well not exist", with no reason for it whatsoever (at that point, why even spend developer time on automation?). It's not like the AI is losing workers at the same rate as human auto workers.

The lowest hassle way in the late stage of development is probably just to wake the workers often when they're near a threat. Losing them is so spectacularly bad that making an already newbie-trap feature even more horrid isn't exactly a reasonable way to implement a feature.

 

[MasterDinadan]

One thing I'd like to see (and I wanted this in civ 5 too) is a notification instead of an onscreen message to inform you that unit(s) have taken damage. Clicking the notification should then provide you a summary of who was damaged by what, and how much health they have left.

It would be a constant reminder that some of your units are being damaged by miasma, and it would also be a useful tool during wartime when you have units fighting in multiple places, so that you don't overlook an enemy unit simply because you didn't notice that you were taking damage.

The idea of presenting information to a user (that they took damage) but only letting them access that information for a short period of time (until the message goes away) goes against the idea of turn based strategy. It is frankly bizarre to me that they could implement this nice notifications system and then fail to report some of the most valuable information to it (while something trivial like "we see you are friends with X!" is a full screen pop up...). It's like they had completely different teams doing UI design for war stuff, diplomacy stuff, and everything else, and none of them agreed on a standard. I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually true.

 

[Lucius_]

The idea of presenting information to a user (that they took damage) but only letting them access that information for a short period of time (until the message goes away) goes against the idea of turn based strategy. It is frankly bizarre to me that they could implement this nice notifications system and then fail to report some of the most valuable information to it (while something trivial like "we see you are friends with X!" is a full screen pop up...). It's like they had completely different teams doing UI design for war stuff, diplomacy stuff, and everything else, and none of them agreed on a standard. I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually true.

I don't necessarily think we need a notification for every damaging attack. A log would be nice though, where all the on screen text items would be logged and can be accessed anytime. You are right on that it's weird to have a turn based game where some information is temporary. Often, I walk away from my PC after my turn is done knowing I'm going to miss those details. It's really a shame this stuff isn't logged. It's definitely an oversight.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Ideally the message system should be fully customizable.

Giving Pdox credit here: You can adjust almost alll messages in their games. Do you want no notification at all? Just an info icon? A popup message? Popup and pause? You can even set some countries/characters as "important" to designate special alert rules for them. "No, I don't bother me if an enemy general is dead. Unless it is the evil, evil devil France."

I will certainly miss a "Your worker is sitting in Miasma and is about to die, dummy!" warning in BE. :x

 

[Illianor123]

For some of the people saying calculate if you have enough health before building, some things take long enough to build that a full health worker would die before completing the improvement so it isnt that simple.