How did Civ 4 turn out? How much time is spent controlling workers?

[nato]

I was a big fan of Civs 1 to 3. However, I had one major problem: controlling workers. It seemed to me I was not spending much time making fun, challenging strategy decisions. Instead, I was constantly moving workers and building roads, irrigation, or mines. Over and over again. Almost all my time was spent on boring micro decisions about a horde of workers.

When Civ 4 was being made, I made a hard decision for me, and chose not to play it. I just did not want to spend so much of my time robotically moving workers around, hoping to occasionally get to make a strategy decision.

Now I'm considering trying Civ 4 out again. So, I'd like to ask: how did Civ 4 turn out? And how much of the time do you have to spend repetitively controlling workers, instead of doing fun leader-of-an-empire stuff? Has worker AI improved to an acceptable level?

Thank you for any responses... I love Civ, and I remember this as a great game forum!

[Wiglaf]

It's worse since there's a lot more improvements to build than before. The fascists on the forum will make the claim that the worker decisions are more strategic and less straightforward than in Civ3. This is true but it's still kind of obnoxious.

[Theben]

The automation of workers is better than in CivIII- as long as you set the right options and give the right orders. "Don't upgrade already improved tiles" (or whatever it's called) is a must, and give them limited duties, "connect cities" or "improve around this city only".

[Wiglaf]

Didn't BTS make it so the workers take into account whether you are emphasizing production, money research etc? I think that's true.

[egavactip]

The bottom line is that you still have to do a lot of micromanagement of workers.

[wodan11]

Not nearly as much as civ3 though. And, there are a couple of things that help: you can queue actions for each worker, workers move 2, there is a "road to" button, you can group workers, and there's the "leave existing improvements" option so that you can force improvements you really want and let them automate the rest.

Wodan

[TriMiro]

Until couple of days ago, I managed workers in Civ IV the same way I did in Civ III, one at a time, or at most couple in a group. Civ IV however, gives the option of queuing orders for workers. For example, you can get two workers and then give them in a queue how to improve every single tile around a given city. Then they will do it in however many turns it takes. You can make the decision on every city tile at once, then just let the workers do them without the need to babysit.

This really speeds the game and lets you pay more attention on the important decisions.

Micromanaging each citizen's working tile is kind of still there unfortunately. There is no option to have a city ask where to put the new citizen when it grow. I really could use such option.

[Seedle]

Worker management is vastly improved in Civ4. It is no longer a matter of mine hills, farm flats, and road everything. Hills can be mined, windmilled, or cottaged, flats can be watermilled, farmed, or cottaged. Each of the options may be appropriate depending on the strategy you are using for your civ and for your cities, so tile improvement isn't just make work, it actually matters. And the cottages produce commerce, not roads, so you don't need to build roads on EVERY tile. As has already been said, the workers double movement helps tremendously, and the "road to" option is a godsend. Also, no terraforming, no reforesting, and best of all, NO POLLUTION, so using your workers to clean polluted squares is no longer exists. In addition to worker use being better in Civ4, everything else is too. Civ4 is what Civ3 tried, and in my opinion failed, to be.

As far as citizen managent, there are a number of options you can use to fairly effectively automize citizen placement. It may not always be perfect, but I win easily on Noble and very, very rarely touch my citizens. The AI does an adequate job, imo.

[Colonâ„¢]

I'm not sure more types of improvements is really a good thing. I often look back fondly to the days you only could build one type of improvement for every terrain. It'd also make automation far less likely to disappoint.

It's a good thing you no longer can mine flat lands though. The double movement is also great although I don't understand why Firaxis didn't simply scrap the rule it takes a movement point to start building an improvement.

[jbp26]

worker managment isn't a problem. its easy to group them, automate, or just put them to sleep until you need them again.

the only micromanagement that really annoys me is managing specialists. the computer is obsessed with making your cities run spies, often as many as possible. i hate always having to go into eveyr city to unselect them all.

[snoopy369]

Worker management is generally less than Civ3. You have much greater ability to automate them (including, as said before, the ability to control what sort of improvement they tend to make by controling the city focus, in Beyond the Sword). You also have fewer cities, generally, unless you are a massive conqueror type - more specifically, you can do very well and even win the game with a quite small number of cities (as # of city maintenance is very expensive), and less cities = less worker effort, so ...

You certainly are always better off manually controlling your workers, but AI automation is good enough that you can have some success by just having a few manual workers and the rest automated (especially as you go later in the game).

[eris]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
It's worse since there's a lot more improvements to build than before. The fascists on the forum will make the claim that the worker decisions are more strategic and less straightforward than in Civ3. This is true but it's still kind of obnoxious.

Hi there. I must be one of the fascists Wiglaf is talking about. Since that person already knows everything I might have to say, then you can look forward to explanations from that source as to why my points would be reasonable.

[wodan11]

Originally posted by jbp26
the only micromanagement that really annoys me is managing specialists. the computer is obsessed with making your cities run spies, often as many as possible. i hate always having to go into eveyr city to unselect them all.

Are you aware with the BtS update all you have to do is force one or more types of specialists, and then the city will add those types ONLY. All you have to do is go into the city and click the plus sign on the type(s) you want that city to run.

Wodan

[Ming]

While worker automation has been improved a lot.
I still wish they would add "repair damage" to the connect resourses option. While they will always hook up your specials again if they are pillaged, non special squares do not get repaired.

[jbp26]

Originally posted by wodan11

Are you aware with the BtS update all you have to do is force one or more types of specialists, and then the city will add those types ONLY. All you have to do is go into the city and click the plus sign on the type(s) you want that city to run.

Wodan

the bhruic update, or official patch? the real problem is that the changes in specialist, even the way you described,dont 'stick' under certain situations, especially anything that changes specialiist assignment or population. so, i'll assign what iwant, then whip the town, and its back to all spies. or buil dstatue of liberty, etc.