Workers and tile improvements

[NigelC]

One thing that bugs me in Civ5 is that it takes just as long for workers to improve tiles later in the game as it does early on. I know that the game is not meant to reflect reality too closely, but I find it hard to suspend my disbelief on this.

While there are already policies and wonders that reduce the time for tile improvements, I have a couple of suggestions I'd like to throw out there for comment:

1. Researching Engineering speeds up all tile improvements by 25-50%

2. Researching Dynamite allows the building of a new unit to replace the worker (a constructor, perhaps?) which movers and builds improvements twice as fast. If possible, it would also be good if this unit could build roads and railroads on mountain tiles, thus making those tiles passable for other units.

These changes would make setting up a new city later in the game much quicker.

What do you all think?

 

[Funak]

One thing that bugs me in Civ5 is that it takes just as long for workers to improve tiles later in the game as it does early on. I know that the game is not meant to reflect reality too closely, but I find it hard to suspend my disbelief on this.

I think the current improvementtimes are fine, any reductions and the liberty policy would suffer for it, building improvements should be annoying imo. (time for removing jungle or building on jungle however could be cut in half if not more)

Also keep in mind that the later in the game the less time passes with every turn, so techincally you're building improvements faster =D

 

[mlac99]

2. Researching Dynamite allows the building of a new unit to replace the worker (a constructor, perhaps?) which movers and builds improvements twice as fast. If possible, it would also be good if this unit could build roads and railroads on mountain tiles, thus making those tiles passable for other units.
What do you all think?

This could be interesting.

 

[guto8797]

There is a mod that does just this. The first worker has a 25% penalty in speed and then with time you unlock new units that are increasingly better.

 

[NarrativeKnight]

I agree very much with the OP. I do actually use that mod which provides 4 different worker units so that it doesn't take so long late game to make improvements. This is probably more of a problem for players on slower game speeds. I always play on Epic. If you do not get the speed reductions from liberty and the Pyramids you are looking at 9 turns to make an improvement. This becomes a ridiculously long time in the late game. Technology being what it is, the amount of time required to cut forest and make a mine or far are just staggeringly stupid. Even at one year per turn, how do you justify 9 years to make a mine, farm, trading post, or clearing some forest? To me there is none. If we want to put this into the patch then I would suggest it be scaled based on type of game but I really believe it needs to be seriously considered, especially for marathon and epic game speeds.

Ingolenuru on Steam

 

[Dunkah]

Generally I build about 1 worker per city early on. This generally allows me the flexibility to swarm a new city to connect all of the resources and build roads or to spread them out to flush out the remaining areas needing improvements.

Late game all of my improvements have been flushed out and I generally have a swarm of workers. So when I either capture or create a new city I can have the swarm descend on it and finish off all tiles relatively quick.

Once I have built a railroad network generally I thin the herd and keep about half the workers I had at the peak. (Which will vary depending on if I am going tall or wide).

So I don't really think based on the above arguments a speeded up worker is needed.

 

[mystikx21]

What dunkah said. I don't see a need for this at all (and I often play on marathon or epic speeds).

There could be some industrial tech that provides a worker rate bonus, but it doesn't seem necessary and it reduces the value of the existing bonus in liberty/pyramids. One way to achieve this is to divorce these two so the Pyramids is more accessible and the liberty bonus is still valuable for everyone else.