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A few friends of mine and I came up with an interesting idea while playing a marathon game and waiting a million turns for our workers to build improvements around our cities. The idea is basically to create improvements for workers that mirror the unit upgrades. However, instead of being based on battles, the upgrades would be based on worker actions performed.
Example:
Worker1 is built and begins making a farm for the city (15 turns)
Farm is completed and Worker1 gains 1 exp in farms
At 2, 5, 10, 17, etc. Worker1 would receive 'Farmer' promotions, allowing him to build farms at a faster rate (original thoughts are 90%, 80%, 65%, 50%)
After these promotions, Worker1 can now produce farms in 7-8 turns (depends on how the rounding goes in the game)
Worker2 is built many turns later and the player needs to decide what to do with him.
There is a cottage to be built and a farm to be made. It is now actually strategic to move Worker2 out to the cottage site and use Worker1 with his Farmer promotions to build the farm faster.
Separate variables and promotions would be made for 'Farmer', 'Miner', 'Fortification', 'Roadworker', 'Herder', and 'Hunter.' Most likely the roadworker would require larger numbers of tiles to upgrade, as roads are quicker to produce and used in great numbers.
This opens up a new strategy layer, as it becomes important to decide if an area near a hostile neighbor or barbarian activity should be worked by a rookie worker to minimize possible losses, or by a veteran worker in order to get the improvements up as soon as possible. Also, it adds the ability to target specific traits when attempting to capture enemy workers.
Finally, in order to now imbalance the game mechanics for workers, the base improvement times would have to be increased by approximately 25-30% so that serfdom + fully upgraded workers cannot make all improvements immediately.
As an extra item, a building could now be added into the game that allows all workers one upgrade of the players choice upon creation (a la Barracks). Possibly make this available with guilds (unions) and allow a high-food city to become a worker production site with this building (including possible -25% worker build times.)
If anyone has any suggestions on this topic or is willing to attempt a start on it, I'd love the feedback. I have absolutely no knowledge of Python, but I would like to eventually work on this myself. Please let me know if it seems possible, or if the idea has some balance issue I'm not seeing.
-Jamison
P.S. - If you can't tell, I'm really big into micromanagement of my empire... I'd never consider the automate button on my workers.
Example:
Worker1 is built and begins making a farm for the city (15 turns)
Farm is completed and Worker1 gains 1 exp in farms
At 2, 5, 10, 17, etc. Worker1 would receive 'Farmer' promotions, allowing him to build farms at a faster rate (original thoughts are 90%, 80%, 65%, 50%)
After these promotions, Worker1 can now produce farms in 7-8 turns (depends on how the rounding goes in the game)
Worker2 is built many turns later and the player needs to decide what to do with him.
There is a cottage to be built and a farm to be made. It is now actually strategic to move Worker2 out to the cottage site and use Worker1 with his Farmer promotions to build the farm faster.
Separate variables and promotions would be made for 'Farmer', 'Miner', 'Fortification', 'Roadworker', 'Herder', and 'Hunter.' Most likely the roadworker would require larger numbers of tiles to upgrade, as roads are quicker to produce and used in great numbers.
This opens up a new strategy layer, as it becomes important to decide if an area near a hostile neighbor or barbarian activity should be worked by a rookie worker to minimize possible losses, or by a veteran worker in order to get the improvements up as soon as possible. Also, it adds the ability to target specific traits when attempting to capture enemy workers.
Finally, in order to now imbalance the game mechanics for workers, the base improvement times would have to be increased by approximately 25-30% so that serfdom + fully upgraded workers cannot make all improvements immediately.
As an extra item, a building could now be added into the game that allows all workers one upgrade of the players choice upon creation (a la Barracks). Possibly make this available with guilds (unions) and allow a high-food city to become a worker production site with this building (including possible -25% worker build times.)
If anyone has any suggestions on this topic or is willing to attempt a start on it, I'd love the feedback. I have absolutely no knowledge of Python, but I would like to eventually work on this myself. Please let me know if it seems possible, or if the idea has some balance issue I'm not seeing.
-Jamison
P.S. - If you can't tell, I'm really big into micromanagement of my empire... I'd never consider the automate button on my workers.
. *Thumbsup*
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