Automated workers chop last forest on city edge

[hoevenpe]

I use automated workers most of the time. But those morons also chop the last remaining forest next to a city, thus losing 2 health points

Is there a way to automate without chopping down the forests? Or at least leave one forest next to a city?

[Bogdanovist]

You can set your workers to not alter improvements (it's in the options menu somewhere) though I'm not sure if this stops them chopping forests or not since I'd rather let a baboon with Parkinsons disease cut my hair than let automated workers loose on my precious Civ....

Seriously forget about automating workers, most decent strategies revolve around choosing what to improve where and when so you miss most of the game for the sake of not controlling a handful of units. What else are you doing in the early game if all your workers are automated??

[Just_Matt]

Automated Workers PAH!

Hello,

Yes. Even with the "Automated workers leave previously built improvements" checked there's no way to set a preference for certain types of works. Half of the time I see them building a cottage or windmill on top of a rice paddy. Argh. I've given up on automating until the late game when I just let them build railroads.

I'll add this because it was a pleasant surprise for me>

I was trying out Vel's Pop and Chop (tm) strategy last night with the Chinese general (the one that gives you Co-Ku-Ra???? units) and realized that I could chop forests which are outside of my city radius and still get the production bonus. I sent a couple of workers far far away and kept them busy.

I also like to build roads to prospective town sites and resources.

You have to turn off roaming barbarians for this to be effective.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Bogdanovist
I'd rather let a baboon with Parkinsons disease cut my hair than let automated workers loose on my precious Civ....

[Quillan]

As far as I know, the only way to stop workers from chopping forests is to have the "leave previous improvements alone" option checked, and a lumbermill built in the forests you want to keep. I never automate my workers, though, so I haven't looked into it that much.

[Spaced Cowboy]

Is there anyway to give an order queue to a worker? I swore I've done it beofre wit hthe shift key, but my MP buddies told me today that they could not.

[ghen]

Once I have all the lumbermills I want completed in the late game, then I -might- think about automating.. even then, its usually just to a couple workers and only the 'connect trade' automation.

[Aeson]

If you hold the shift key while giving the orders you can build a queue.

[snafuc4]

Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy
Is there anyway to give an order queue to a worker? I swore I've done it beofre wit hthe shift key, but my MP buddies told me today that they could not.

It seems to be tempermental here too. I guess it's related to the responsiveness of the m/c (a bit like some of the popups): a less powerful m/c will show up this sort of thing more

FWIW Athlon 3200+ (32bit)
1Gb RAM
Loadsa drive space, but swapfile is limited to <1Gb on its own partition
W2KSP4 + all known patches
Radeon 9600 256Mb AGP 8x running Catalyst 5.12 (release)

[joncnunn]

I would highly sugest not automating your workers, use the Sid help for workers as a rough guide, but don't be too bound by it.