Workers build forts on everything?

I was playing Civ 4 the other days as Greece and set my workers to automated to speed the game up. However I noticed a couple turns later they had proceeded to build forts on almost every available piece of ground, including over improved resources that already had buildings on them. Is this a reaction to something? Or just a glitch in the AI?

 

There's a setting in the Advanced Options to have automated workers leave existing improvements. This should save a few headaches.

 

Forts connect resources to your trade network, so the AI is justified in building them there if they're out of the city radius. I don't really see the AI build forts for no reason at all, unless there is nothing else to do with the worker.

 

Automating your workers may speed up gameplay, but will not necessarily speed up victory because even when set to "leave existing improvements" they will not always build the improvements most beneficial to your gameplan. You could, for example, find they've built farms where you wanted cottages, or vice versa. "Build trade network" can, however, be useful. Otherwise, DO NOT automate your workers.

 

I tried the automated workers in vanilla once. I used them manually in the ancient era to get my basic set-up right, but then switched to fully automated for the rest of the game. Other than resource-specific tiles, all they built were farms and windmills. They even farmed over some cottages that were maturing! Seems like a very poor feature.

But anyway, I have noticed in changing from vanilla to BTS, that they now put forts instead of the normal improvement for stuff outside a BFC. I can see the logic, but I'd sooner they just went with the quicker option, really.

 

I hear around the forums that using the city governors emphasis buttons will affect what automated workers build. Kind of like letting them know what your plans are for that city.
I don't automate personally, except after my empire is all worked, i set them to build roads until they're needed.

 

I only automate near the end game when I have 20+ cities and 20+ workers. Or if there is one late war that takes place in 1960 or so, I won't even bother checking what to improve in newly conquered cities, I just let the auto workers take care of it. Most of the key cities are already taken care of by this point.

 

I have tried it and it seems to work. I got near the end of the game and set the governor settings for conquered cities and automated conquered workers. My idea was that they would make sure my cities weren't working unimproved tiles, and I would follow up with my worker groups later to fix the cities. I found that the AI seemed to do a decent job, I didn't have to correct much. I was impressed, so I tried just automating my workers next game after I felt my start was going pretty well, and the results were not as good.

I am not sure what was up with it. My guess is that the auto workers may follow governer settings on cities that have decent pop and some buildings, in other words cities I just conquered. But for new cities they seemed to just build farms when I wanted cottages (I selected focus on commerce). I assume that if I allowed them to replace improvements, they would farm the city till it grew, then replace them with cottages, but I don'tr trust the AI to replace improvements.

Edit: I just may test this, set my self up with an automated start, set the governer settings and let them do replacements and see if they change the improvements as the cities grow. However, only after I install that betterAI mod I read about, they said something about fixing a bug that caused workers to bulldoze towns.

 

Game designers get a virtual cookie for this one.

Building forts on resources outside your BFCs is actually a good idea, because you can fortify defenders on them to prevent those annoying couple-unit pillage stacks the AI sends around in your country.

I usually automate half my workers with the trade networks thing and use the other half to improve new cities that I conquer.

 

By the time I have 20 cities, I probably have 30-40 workers. There is simply no way I am going to manually set each one, so sometime around when I get 5-6 cities I switch some to trade routes, and at about 15-20 workers I just put them all on auto.

I think the biggest aggravation with automated workers is that when they build forts, they don't go back and upgrade them later if a city starts near enough for it to be in the radius.

Setting the city manager thing helps some - but it is not perfect. As a general rule, by the time I get to where my workers are totally automated, I am much more interested in strategy than in micro managing, but sometimes I will manually go back and fix a few auto-worker glitches.

 

The worker automaton is far from perfect even with the emphazises, and you just can't do it right from the start. First you'll have to manually micro all tiles in your 4-6 core cities (4 is usually enough on noble, but I recommend 6 if you want to be sure). After that they can be set to auto (with leave old improvements). Just remember that they won't do anything to your newly conquered cities either that way if the AI has developed them already, and you will have to monitor when you get physics, combustion etc. to manually hook up oil and uranium.

 

Personally I find that the AI behind worker automation is completely unacceptable and should be avoided at all costs.
On the other hand I see this as just punishment for those that are to lazy to micro each and every worker like I do.

 

Punished for not playing the game the way you do? =/

I always play Automated workers, because there is no enjoyment micromanaging 50 workers every turn. I prefer faster games.

They really do suck at it, but using the city specialisation button does help.

I just wish there was a mod or something to make them a little smarter, (for example so they stop building farms over almost-towns!)

 

BetterAI should help a little there.

 

Or you could simply check "do not replace existing improvements" before you automate your workers. That's what I do when I get lazy in the late game and have to improve some freshly conquered lands.