New worker automation options

[MightyTiny]

I've thought of a few annoyances that could be fixed probably pretty easily with a few additional options in what to restrict/allow your automated workers to do.

I usually automate my workers once I've had most or all of my city squares built on, and what I find annoying is the habbit of automated workers to build farms on every non-city square that doesn't have forest or some other improvement on.

I find this annoying for two reasons - if they do this on empty squares near forests, then they remove the chance of a forest growing there, which would give me a chance to chop it for hammers. And I get no benefit out of the farm whatsoever.

The second reason is that a resource may appear on a non-city square with a farm on it, and because it has a farm on it, and I don't allow my automated workers to replace existing improvements, I will then manually have to locate that resource, and direct a worker to go to that square and build the necessary improvent over the farm to get the benefit of that new resource.

So what I'd like to see is a checkable option:

"Automated workers are not allowed to build farms on non-city squares"

Or, alternatively/aditionally, these two options:

"Automated workers are not allowed to replace old improvements EXCEPT when the improvement is not in a city square"

and

"Automated workers are not allowed to build farms on squares outside the city radius, if there's a chance of a forest growing in the square."

Also, I've noticed that automated workers don't remove the ruins of razed or disbanded cities - could there be a bug there that makes the automated workers consider these ruins to be an improvement?

[kotaro24]

I'd be happy with just "Sleep 10 turns" as an option. This way I could park the workers in a city when they have nothing to do (like just before lumbermill or just before railroad), but I wouldn't forget about them and find a freeloading worker 400 years later.

[MightyTiny]

Forgot one major annoyance:

If you are at a stage where you're mostly running automated workers, and then conquer a new city that has a lot of undeveloped land, obviously the automated workers will rush in to build their favourite improvement - those damn farms!

Obviously nothing can be done about this, and it really doesn't bother me that much, but what does bother me is that when you then take some of those automated workers, cancel their automation, and direct them to build workshops/cottages/watermills on the undeveloped squares, ANOTHER automated worker will rush in and start building a farm on the same square where a non-automated worker is already building something else! And this is with the "automated workers not allowed ot replace existing improvements" option on!

VERY annoying. What is needed is a simple check when an automated worker arrives at the square it plans to improve: a check to see if there already is another worker there, working on something else, and if so, DON'T START BUILDING THAT DAMN FARM THERE!

Oh, and the "sleep for X turns" option is a good idea too!

[Willem]

Re: New worker automation options

Originally posted by MightyTiny
So what I'd like to see is a checkable option:

"Automated workers are not allowed to build farms on non-city squares"

Or, alternatively/aditionally, these two options:

"Automated workers are not allowed to replace old improvements EXCEPT when the improvement is not in a city square"

and

"Automated workers are not allowed to build farms on squares outside the city radius, if there's a chance of a forest growing in the square."

What would be better is if automated workers would only work tiles that were actually being used at the time, and only build the improvement that corresponds to what's being done, depending on whether it was a resource tile or not of course.

Also, I've noticed that automated workers don't remove the ruins of razed or disbanded cities - could there be a bug there that makes the automated workers consider these ruins to be an improvement?

Yes, for some reason the game considers ruins improvements so automated workers won't touch them.

One thing I'd certainly like to see is an automation option that tells a Worker to clear all Jungle. Building a city in a Jungle gives you a pretty good healthiness hit, and it's a bit of a pain having to remove it all manually.

[MightyTiny]

Re: Re: New worker automation options

Originally posted by Willem


What would be better is if automated workers would only work tiles that were actually being used at the time, and only build the improvement that corresponds to what's being done, depending on whether it was a resource tile or not of course.

Do you mean that automated workers would only work on a tile once the tile was worked (meaning a 1 population was assigned in a city to work on the tile) ?

If this is what you mean, then I'd say that that would not be very good, I don't think. For those that use more automation, they'd have workers sitting around doing nothing when a city's population was about to grow, and only spring into action once the growth had happened, and a population was automatically assigned on a tile. That's a lot of wasted turns when a cottage could be developing, a farm adding to growth or whatever else the ready-made improvement would be doing.

Also, the governer would often assign the newly available population to work on a different tile than what it would use if all tiles were developed, and an automated worker may even not be able to develop that tile (if it is a forest, and you don't allow automated workers to chop).

So that is why I personally would prefer the sorts of options I suggested.

[Willem]

Re: Re: Re: New worker automation options

Originally posted by MightyTiny

Also, the governer would often assign the newly available population to work on a different tile than what it would use if all tiles were developed...

Yes, good point. Never mind then.