05-05-2002 19:52									#1
	Too Many Workers Inflate your Upload Space

Friends, once the games are advanced the number of workers increase to several hundred expending a lot of money in maintaneance of them; It is necesary all this workers once roads are finished? After a time I cannot get them in the field working only into the city stand by. What happen is AI produced them without any instruction by myself. I must kill them? I appreciate any orientation about. Thanks Angel

	05-05-2002 20:23									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

Angel, it appears you're using Governors to automatically select build orders in your cities. The Governor "AI" does produce Workers unecessarily in the later stages of the game. Simply turn off the Governors, and you'll never get extraneous Workers again (unless you order them yourself of course).

Still, there is a lot you can do with "extra" Workers. First, make sure all your workable tiles have been improved. Check if you're producing too much food in some cities, and, if so, order your Workers to pull up irrigation and build mines instead. Second, wait until after you've got a railroads covering your entire empire before ever getting rid of any Workers; railroads are so powerful in Civ3 that you want them down ASAP. Third, keep some Workers around to clean up pollution later on in the game (especially if you've built Hospitals). You can't work tiles that have pollution in them, so it's best if it is cleaned up immediately. Finally, if you really have no jobs for a majority of your Workers, you can always join them to your cities to make your cities bigger, faster. Consider joining your own Workers before foreign (captured) ones, because foreign Workers require no upkeep.

And here's a dirty little trick: you can use spare Workers on your front lines to lure away enemy troops from important positions, or remove a couple of units for especially large stacks. The way the AI is coded, defenseless Workers are always the most appealing target for attack (other than defenseless Settlers, I suppose), so, with some extra Workers, you can engage in a little sub-game of chess!

Hope this helps.


Dominae

	05-05-2002 20:35									#3
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

Is it common procedure here to exploit the AI's programming weaknesses? I always thought one should play as realistically as possible.

	05-05-2002 20:56									#4
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

I imagine it's quite realistoic for particularly bloodthirst rulers to use civilians as bait, decoys or a human shield (Saddam Hussein, for example).

	05-05-2002 21:06									#5
	Browse Apolyton AD-FREE

That's a different issue altogether.

Let me get back my point: humans have the ability to realize a pattern and act upon it. If the AI is programmed badly enough that you can predict its behavior with perfect accuracy and lure it into a trap the same way, every time, and it's not catching on . . . then I'd avoid the exploit altogether.

	05-05-2002 21:07									#6
	Got spare money?

Well, I've never encounterd this before but, on Deity, you need every advantage you can get!

Besides, when I'm invading I try and capture enemy workers 'in the field'. The city'll always be there: the workers won't, and they're very useful.

	05-05-2002 21:13									#7
	Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

This is another worker question: Under what circumstances can you trade workers back to a civ? I have a bunch of workers from Japan. They're in my capital, but during peace negotiations, I can't offer them to Japan. Why not? I could do it with other civs...

	05-05-2002 21:15									#8
	Remove this text

I think workers only become available for trade if they're not doing anything.

	05-05-2002 21:24									#9
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

They're not, they're just sitting in my capital. No actions.

	05-05-2002 21:26									#10
	Get a bigger avatar today!

JohnMK, I understand your point, but I also think it is very difficult not to "exploit" some of the AIs more predictable behaviour.

For example, in the early stages of the game, you can pretty much guarantee that any enemy city (other than the capital) will have at least 1 and at most 2 good defenders (usually Spearmen). This means that you can always send an attack force of just the right size to conquer the city (6-8 Horsemen is a good bet). Realistically, you would have to conduct some espionage to determine the strength of the enemy forces. If the AI were slightly smarter, it would reinforce cities that are under imminent attack.

The same goes for tech priorities and diplomacy (to name only two). Personally, I find it very difficult to play realistically, for two reasons: 1) on the higher levels, you need any advantage you can get, and 2) the AI doesn't play "realistically" at all. This goes for non-exploitative issues as well, such as mining all grasslands (as if this were even remotely realistic).

As players learn what the Civ3 AI is like, they will get better and better, because it is easier to learn what the AI does repetitively (which is a bad idea), rather than strategies that work in the general case. This is why players are crying out of MP: eventually you get tired of guessing what the AI is going to do...you want another person to try and outthink you.


Dominae

	05-05-2002 21:30									#11
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

quote: Originally posted by Boris Godunov They're not, they're just sitting in my capital. No actions.

Boris, maybe Japan has also workers to offer and AFAIK trade can only take place if one civ has something the other civ doesn't.

	05-05-2002 21:32									#12
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Dominae is an asset to this forum.

	05-05-2002 22:17									#13
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

Give the workers back as gifts. At worst you'll be rid of them if you dont need them. At best it will improve your relations with the Japanese.

	05-05-2002 23:30									#14
	TOO MANY WORKERS Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

Thanks, Dominae, your explanation was very complete only as newbie I am not sure as turn off the Governor AI. Only read in the game manual ways to customize his behaviour, really not very well obtained. Angel

	05-05-2002 23:46									#15
	Enter the AD-FREE zone

I set the governors to NOT build

Great Wonders
Small Wonders
Settlers
Workers

Sometimes I turn off building military units as well. What happens in this case is that the governors are down to producing improvements and wealth, and its easy to spot cities producing wealth and change that to what you want at the moment.

	05-05-2002 23:50									#16
	Got spare money?

quote: Originally posted by Ethelred I set the governors to NOT build Great Wonders Small Wonders Settlers Workers Sometimes I turn off building military units as well. What happens in this case is that the governors are down to producing improvements and wealth, and its easy to spot cities producing wealth and change that to what you want at the moment.

That's exactly what I do. The last thing I want to see is a city with high corruption trying to build a wonder. I turn off everything but buildings, since I decide what units to build and when. It seems to me, that they do a halfway decent job at building what buildings I would want, when.

	06-05-2002 09:45									#17
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

Too many workers? This is a contradiction in terms!

If you're playing with the governor on, the best advice I can give is to turn the governors off. They don't know what they're doing.

If your problem is that you have a lot of workers sitting around doing nothing, this isn't necessarily a problem:

-If you don't have an incredibly huge army, don't rejoin workers to cities. The AI will be much less aggressive towards you if you have a high unit count, and workers are included in this assessment.

-If you don't have every single tile improved, roaded, and railroaded, you might as well do this now. I like to plant forests and erect fortresses on every unused tile, just to help me visualize what tiles are available to be worked.

-If there are tiles that haven't had forests on them before, you can lumberjack each forestable square once for the ten shields, then rebuild whatever improvement was there before.

-Pollution control. Just gather all the workers on a given continent in one spot (preferably not inside a city) and fortify them (I like to build a fortress to mark this spot). When pollution pops up, wake up and Shift-P workers from this stack until it's gone. When pollution is cleaned up, return them to the stack and fortify them.

-Combat engineer duty. Having a lot of workers on hand can enable you to take HUGE swaths of enemy civs in 1 turn by building rails in newly-captured territory, if not enabling you to conquer them outright without them being able to retaliate. Just be sure to have enough units on hand to cover these workers so you don't lose them all (though it's probably no biggie at this point to lose 5 or 6 here or there).

Maitenance, schmaitenance. By the point in the game where you start to have a lot of workers doing nothing, you are (or should be) raking in HUGE piles of money every turn. If you find yourself low, run 0% science for a turn or two to raise your treasury back up in the 1000s. If there are too many of them, just fortify them, don't join them back.

	06-05-2002 17:42									#18
	Lazy Workers Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

Whenever I play the French or the Zulus..the workers are lazy. They always hide out and it takes them forever just to do routine tasks. American workers are very good....and loyal.

	06-05-2002 22:40									#19
	Put an end to popups!

quote: Originally posted by Carbon Copy -If you don't have an incredibly huge army, don't rejoin workers to cities. The AI will be much less aggressive towards you if you have a high unit count, and workers are included in this assessment.

This is no longer true. They fixed it in 1.16f.

I like the combat engineers idea, but I find in general that you only need 1 worker per city (native anyway) by the time you've railroaded everything to take care of pollution. That assumes you haven't gone on a razing rampage, in which case you certainly will have plenty of captured workers, which end up on Shift-A for me once I've railroaded everything. Of course, I keep about five on manual for the occasional correction of errors in improvements ("wait a sec, I mean't to put irrigation there, not mines), and take those captured ones off to auto to fix the pisspoor job the AI does of improving when I capture a new city as opposed to raze it.

	06-05-2002 23:13									#20
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

quote: Originally posted by JohnMK Is it common procedure here to exploit the AI's programming weaknesses? I always thought one should play as realistically as possible.

If there´s an exploit available I use it. It´s stupid not to IMO

	07-05-2002 02:53									#21
	Suffering from ads?

I used to use them as bait like empty cities, but I have since reformed and now usually offer them to other civs for sums of gold or some gpt.

	07-05-2002 09:14									#22
	Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

Another reason why to offer them to the AI is that they are often used to build up cities, and can help with cultural reversion and wonder razing later in the game. I did this to a large English city this morning. I didn't want the wonder destroyed.

	07-05-2002 17:26									#23
	Increase the size of your Attachments

quote: Originally posted by Boris Godunov This is another worker question: Under what circumstances can you trade workers back to a civ? I have a bunch of workers from Japan. They're in my capital, but during peace negotiations, I can't offer them to Japan. Why not? I could do it with other civs...

Not sure if you've sorted this yet. But if not:

I don't think you can trade workers as part of peace negotiations. Wait until after you are back at peace with them, and then trade as much of 'em as you want

	08-05-2002 02:22									#24
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

You can't trade workers in peace negotiations.

	08-05-2002 04:06									#25
	Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

As Ethelred already pointed out, you can customize your governor to do or not do anything you want. You don't need to turn them completely off, just change what they can or cannot build. Also make sure "Automatically built previous unit" is off.