05-11-2001 04:48									#1
	Automated Workers Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Overall it's an awesome game, but my experience is being sullied by 2 problems with automated workers.

First, there should be a way to disable showing automated workers' movement. Right now I have an army of about 200 automated workers running around, and it literally takes 5+ minutes to show all that movement. My current game turn goes something like this: 2 minutes of watching other civ unit movements. Not so bad, but again mostly workers and irrelevant. 1-3 minutes of maintaining cities and manual movements. 5-6 minutes of automated movement. Maybe another minute or two doing various things before ending the turn. Most of my time is spend watching automated workers. (Note: i've got all animated movements turned off in preferences). Is there a way to have the game just calculate these movements and do them without having to waste the time actually displaying them?

Second problem is automated worker AI. I've got a fairly large civ, and there's lots of work to be done. However, I'm commonly finding that workers seem to congregate, then sort of flock from spot to spot. It's like when a job comes up, all free workers are sent to that spot. I'm no AI programmer, so maybe this is just How Things Are, but it seems to me the automated workers should be smart enough to figure out when there are more workers on a spot than potential jobs.

-Wolfie

	05-11-2001 08:26									#2
	Dont rely on the automation totally Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

you can disable the friendly automatic move animations in preferences, it helps speed it up. Also if you need to get something done asap you are going to have to do it manually... the workers seem to congregate because its more efficient that way... they get the job done quicker... i manually had 20 workers building railroad all in the same spot when i got the tech for it... its super fast when you pool resources to clean pollution/lay track/improve, ect. . .

	05-11-2001 14:11									#3
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

I have all the animations turned off. But it still shows each individual unit movement. It only takes 1-2 seconds per unit, but multiply that by a couple hundred and it adds up fast. What I'd like is a way to not show them *at all*. Entire other civs movements are calculated in the span of a few seconds, since none of those movements are visible to me... so I know it's not a computer speed issue. It's a specific matter of the game engine showing the movements. I want the game to just calculate the movements and move them, I dont want it to show each and every individual worker moving.

As for having multiple workersspeeding things up, I understand the concept, but thats not whats happening. I can manually build a road/railroad in one turn. I can sit and watch 20 workers move to a spot. One starts building a road/railroad. Next turn, 19 of them move to another spot and one starts work while the others just waste yet another turn moving somewhere else where only one worker is needed. The AI should be smart enough to know when workers are being wasted, is all I'm saying. But in all honesty this is a minor annoyance. The unit movement is aggrivating tho, since it makes the turns last 5-10 times as long as they would without it, and showing worker movement has no real benefit. Some people might like to see what they're doing, but I dont need to see them, and seeing them holds zero strategic value to me.

-Wolfie

	07-11-2001 13:34									#4
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

I have this problem too... everything's turned off but my workers take forever.

It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard an option to implement, and I think it'd be very beneficial to many people...