A couple of recent posts about workers just led me to think about some sort of dichotomy that is present in the idea behind Civilization, in my opinion.
While the game is grand in scope, making you the leader of an empire to rule the earth, you still have to micromanage individual worker units on building improvements in a way that reminds me of smaller scale games, like warcraft or age of empires for instance, where it is understood that you are building a city in a small region somewhere in the world.
Of course, that seems obvious... But it lead me to think to ideas about the future. For me, I don't quite see the point of the worker. I would like to have more "world simulation" (à la "SimXYZ" (SimCity for instance)) in the game. If I build New York and Boston on a continent, I don't see why I, the emperor, should have to tell an individual bunch of workers to build a road. It seems that roads would happen by themselves as a result of having built cities near each other. Roads to other nations would develop after opening borders with them. Maybe later you would get the option of making these roads more "official" and more efficient. I don't know... Same goes for tile improvement. For me, it should be the cities' citizens job to do that. In the city screen, I could tell them to work a tile according to what I want it to be, i.e. "work tile X as a farm", "work tile Y as a mine", eventually, with passing years of working a tile as something, it would become better at what I meant it to be (depending on the type of land of course...). Come to think of it, cottages work like that too, but somehow you have to have a worker build it, and then if you change it to something else, it's pretty much lost.
Just ideas in the air, but for me, managing my empire at a larger scale is more fun than the small task of telling strange individual worker units what to do. Diplomacy and large scale managing is where I get my fun I suppose. Warfare too, and that we all agree needs a revamp in a similar way. Build "divisions" and "battalions" instead of individual units to micromanage... I haven't thought of that in detail really.
I was always the kind of person who liked to see my empire develop by itself due to broad decisions I made. For instance, when playing SMAC, I enjoyed the option of choosing what general path science should take, and the actual technologies that came out of my research were not those I specifically chose, but those related to the subject I told them to study.
I enjoy Civ IV a lot of course, I'm just putting food for thought here. I thought of these things in the past 10 minutes.
