11-12-2001 00:26									#1
	Automated Workers, the good and the bad Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

Hats off to Soren Johnson on the vast improvement of automated workers in Civ3 to their SMAC counterparts.

For those of you who think otherwise here's some tips for workers, and later on some tips for Soren on further improvements.

A for automate, bad, very bad. Never use this.

Shift-A is your friend, use it. This is global automation without changing existing terraforming. If a city doesn't have water access, the workers will irrigate to the city. They will mine/road all hills and mountains. They irrigate all desert(IIRC). And grasslands and plains they will alternate irrigate/mine. Once EVERY square in your empire the worker has access to is improved, it goes to ready. It will road/railroad all squares outside of city radius, but not mine/irrigate them.

Shift-I is the same as regular automate (not Shift-A) but localized to the current city. When all improvements are done, it goes to a ready state.

Ctrl-R is to build a road from where a worker is now to someplace you choose. Keep in mind that the worker will choose the path of least resistance, going around mountains and such, but will also go around other civs units if they are in the way.

Ctrl-Shift-R is to build a railroad to a certain point. This is great when you have that vast sprawling empire with roads everywhere, but you need connectivity quick. Simply un-automate various workers, and have them build railroads to the opposite side of your empire. Otherwise automated workers begin railroading when possible, just not very effectively.

Sift-F and Shift-J are to remove forest and jungle. Jungle is useless, so by the middle ages you should have some spare workers removing it. At some point forest becomes less useful than mining or irrigating that square, grab a few spare workers and get to chopping. As they clear the forest/junlge your automated workers will improve the terrain.

I use automated workers almost all the time. Early game I manually control each one until I have a small empire established, then I use ctrl-A on all but a few. Those few are roadbuilding to resources, future city spots, or neighboring civs.
A few criticisms though. The computer insists on wierd behavior, which I have seen in every game I have played. Some examples:

The need to send 50 workers to work one square.

The need to use roads instead of railroads to use up movement points, thus ending their turn when they arrive at the square of destination. ie if I manually sent the worker to the square they could do it with 1/3 movement point, instead the computer forces the worker to walk thru two other road squares first, then walk onto the destination square ending its turn.

Not building a road or railroad on a square it passes thru.

Some things I'd like to see:

Computer won't send more than 4 workers to any given square. Sure, some things might take more than one turn to complete, but that's ok.

If a worker is in a square and it doesn't have a road/railroad it builds one before moving on.

Ctrl-Shift-I would work like Shift-A but for the local city.

Standby mode. When a worker is in standby mode it is idle, but when pollution appears or borders expand or improvements destroyed, it works, and when finished, returns to standby mode.

Automated workers are great, you just have to know how to use them. Sure they have some faults, but hopefully with a patch or two that'll be resolved. Not only will this make your automated workers more efficient, just think how much better the computer will do. }

	11-12-2001 01:23									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

They're great, excepting their absurd focus on food production. The automated workers will irrigate the heck out of the land, which slows down the AI's production for two reasons:

1) Under depotism, it doesn't do anything for them.
2) For the long period between Aquaducts and Hospitals, size 12 cities producing 8 extra food a turn doesn't do squat. I've occasionally doubled shield production by "fixing" a city terraformed by automation.

	11-12-2001 02:00									#3
	Inflate your Upload Space

A slightly better algorithm than "irrigate/mine in a checkerboard pattern" would be irrigate all irrigatable except grasslands without a shield or cattle. That's what I do half the time on manual, since that makes every terrain produce at least one shield, maximizing my Golden Age (which gives +1 shield production, but only if there's at least 1 already), along with as much food as possible. I sometimes mine instead of irrigate a plains or grassland with a shield tile here and there if there are no/few "extra" shield producers for the nearby city (e.g. hills, mountains, forests, special resources).

I can see where the checkboard was easy to program, since it minimizes situations where the worker automation AI can't get irrigation to a given square it wants to irrigate thanks to making a "mine wall", but with minimal extra programming work, the previous paragraph could be implemented and make the automation good enough that I might actually use it sometimes. I also like the "no more than 4 per square" and "if you're in a square without a road somehow on your way to where you were going, go ahead and build one before continuing" changes.

For now, I never, ever use A. Shift-J sometimes, Ctrl-Shift-R and Ctrl-R somewhat frequently, but never A, or even Shift-A, since to use Shift-A I've been doing things manually for long enough I may as well continue. I actually KINDA enjoy manually handling my workers, but the enjoyment is less and less every game, and by the time I play my 50th game, I'm going to want better automation.

	11-12-2001 05:04									#4
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

I tried handling all my workers game 1, but when it got to 50+ workers I couldn't take it anymore. Now its almost all automation.

I'd also like options similar to the city governors, but for workers. Like automated workers will/won't do the following: and list the various worker actions.

	11-12-2001 05:21									#5
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

'Standby mode. When a worker is in standby mode it is idle, but when pollution appears or borders expand or improvements destroyed, it works, and when finished, returns to standby mode.'

Shift-A does this with the new patch.

	11-12-2001 08:24									#6
	Put an end to popups!

I might be wrong, but it seems the time needed to clean up pollltion has been increased. That's OK, but now Ctrl-P won't send more than 2 workers to any polluted square and that's driving me nuts! I much prefer to make an exception to this rule for cleaning up pollution as it should be a top priority.

	11-12-2001 08:47									#7
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

Yeah, I have 200 workers and could no longer have both 200 workers and a functional will to live, so I automated them...

Yes Jing, I've noticed they don't attack pollution like they should as well...very troublesome...

Venger

	11-12-2001 21:35									#8
	Remove this text

I'm hoping you two have a glitch, lol. I just started a new game with the patch so it'll be a day before I'm that far.

	11-12-2001 23:22									#9
	Get a bigger avatar today!

10 workers to help build one mine is insane, especially when there are railroads to be built, but i do like it when my workers automatically run into a city when an enemy invader is in range of them.l

	12-12-2001 00:01									#10
	Increase Your PM Length

IMO, one of the most imporant "anti-player" elements of civ games are the mid-late game micromanagement. I feel that along with some other parts of the game, this aspect should have been tackled on a priority basis. Because as one said, controling 50+ workers is tiresome at best and irritating at worst. For me gameplay gets affected because when I have 60-80 workers, I do not want to spend 20 mins on a turn so I just end up disbanding/joining them back into populations and not care about the terrain.

I think the best way Firaxis should have dealt with the worker is to make it so that the player can give them a "build queqe." For instance if I could tell my worker to build irrigation "here, here, here, and here", roads "here, here, here, and here", mines "here, here, here, and here." all in one turn and then not worry about the worker again till it finishes the tasks or something is preventing it from finishing its task. I think that would be much more useful than just the current generic automation that leaves the player with no control.

	12-12-2001 02:26									#11
	Suffering from ads?

I think that, if you press a button while a worker is moving, when it gets to its destination, it'll start doing whatever button you pressed... so, for instance, if you press I it'll start to irrigate... hope this helps someone, since it seems totally worthless to me .

-- adaMada

	12-12-2001 03:18									#12
	Tired of ads?

One peeve I have with the Workers is when they Irrigate squares when a city is size 12 before Sanitation is discovered. For this reason, I tend to take my workers off automation after Ancient Era, and then automate them again after Sanitation has been discovered. I leave them all automated when building road networks and railroads, which is something I found to be ridiculously boring in Civ2.

	12-12-2001 04:44									#13
	Browse Apolyton AD-FREE

For me, it's a matter of playing the sorry hand I'm dealt. If sending 50 workers to a single tile is "your friend", then I'd hate to see your enemy. I need the fine tuning capability of individual worker manipulation — HOWEVER — much of the tedium in worker management would be alleviated by stack movement.

Brigades of workers, created for specific tasks, could be dispatched with relative ease.