Tweet
I have just reached these for the first time in my first properly played Epic game, and thought I would post my thoughts, hopefully starting a discussion, since I have not seen one yet. If there is another thread for this I would appreciate it if someone could direct me, as I find it difficult keeping up with everything posted here.
To give a quick rundown, these are another specialist that you can turn workers into (like Entertainers, Taxmen and Scientists) if you take them off working the map squares. They turn up with Replaceable Parts and give your city two useable shields for every citizen turned into a Civil Engineer. Needless to say they are not very useful for cities with low waste near your Palace or FP (even with the additional corruption changes/bug in C3C), as you tend to be losing several food and useful trade for those two shields. However they become rather more interesting for cities that experience high waste/corruption.
In the case of especially large maps or distant cities, often you can find you have so much waste you end up with many 1spt cities no matter what you do. In some cases you can gain back another shield or two with Courthouses, Police Stations and WLT*D, but these take either money or pop to rush, or a very long time if you build them from scratch (or I suppose an IMO badly used MGL!). But now with Civil Engineers you can triple your totally corrupt cities' useable production by taking just one citizen off the map. By now you have the ability to irrigate even those squares with no freshwater access and have RRs increasing the food and shield production from irrigation and mines respectively (if you have Coal, that is).
Thus, when I found out what these Engineers did, I immediately started changing all mines that I could into irrigation in all the parts of my empire a large distance from the FP and Palace. With each irrigated, RRed grassland netting me 4 food (from any Government but Despotism), I can still maintain a good growth rate in these cities if I want and still have several Civil Engineers. I found, that if I did this, I could increase the shield production of formerly useless size 7 or 8 cities from 1spt to as much as 9spt! This drops the time to build a Courthouse from scratch from 80 turns to 9 - much more acceptable. Thus it seems that Replaceable Parts in C3C ushers in a new age of production civ-wide, not just in two areas around the Palace and FP.
But there is a catch - these 2 useable shields per Engineer only apply for buildings. Not units. Thus you cannot bolster your military efforts with them. This is where I realised that, although seemingly awesome, Civil Engineers are of limited real use to your civilisation. If you use them to build up infrastructure in hopelessly corrupt cities, you had better be sure that infrastructure is going to do something for you! Not even Courthouses can help some cities recover anything, in which case using Engineers at these places is just adding to your gold-per-turn cost for no return. Nevertheless I can think of a few cases where Civil Engineers would be useful
The first point will be of value to very few cities, unless you very carefully plan your city layouts. The third could well be an excellent tactic at wartime, especially since you would be starving the population down at the same time as making them prodcutive - both counteracting culture flips. But in the case of a builder game, or just the parts of a game you are building rather than warring, the second is the only case where Civil Engineers are of much use.
Further, this second use for Engineers led me to conclude I would use them to build Granaries, Aqueducts, temples, Markets and maybe Hospitals in hopelessly corrupt cities for the purpose of getting the populations high. Then I could fill the food box and turn every citizen into a scientist or taxman to help my economy for a few turns, before storing up food again. This is a weaker version of the "Xinning" strategy from Civ2. Especially with large numbers of useless cities, this tactic could net you a hundred gold or more per turn for several turns at a time, if you were prepared to do the micromanagement so your cities didn't starve.
Is this enough for the Civil Engineers however? Has anyone really found these uses to be important enough to them in the game? Or should Civil Engineers' shield bonuses apply to units too?
To give a quick rundown, these are another specialist that you can turn workers into (like Entertainers, Taxmen and Scientists) if you take them off working the map squares. They turn up with Replaceable Parts and give your city two useable shields for every citizen turned into a Civil Engineer. Needless to say they are not very useful for cities with low waste near your Palace or FP (even with the additional corruption changes/bug in C3C), as you tend to be losing several food and useful trade for those two shields. However they become rather more interesting for cities that experience high waste/corruption.
In the case of especially large maps or distant cities, often you can find you have so much waste you end up with many 1spt cities no matter what you do. In some cases you can gain back another shield or two with Courthouses, Police Stations and WLT*D, but these take either money or pop to rush, or a very long time if you build them from scratch (or I suppose an IMO badly used MGL!). But now with Civil Engineers you can triple your totally corrupt cities' useable production by taking just one citizen off the map. By now you have the ability to irrigate even those squares with no freshwater access and have RRs increasing the food and shield production from irrigation and mines respectively (if you have Coal, that is).
Thus, when I found out what these Engineers did, I immediately started changing all mines that I could into irrigation in all the parts of my empire a large distance from the FP and Palace. With each irrigated, RRed grassland netting me 4 food (from any Government but Despotism), I can still maintain a good growth rate in these cities if I want and still have several Civil Engineers. I found, that if I did this, I could increase the shield production of formerly useless size 7 or 8 cities from 1spt to as much as 9spt! This drops the time to build a Courthouse from scratch from 80 turns to 9 - much more acceptable. Thus it seems that Replaceable Parts in C3C ushers in a new age of production civ-wide, not just in two areas around the Palace and FP.
But there is a catch - these 2 useable shields per Engineer only apply for buildings. Not units. Thus you cannot bolster your military efforts with them. This is where I realised that, although seemingly awesome, Civil Engineers are of limited real use to your civilisation. If you use them to build up infrastructure in hopelessly corrupt cities, you had better be sure that infrastructure is going to do something for you! Not even Courthouses can help some cities recover anything, in which case using Engineers at these places is just adding to your gold-per-turn cost for no return. Nevertheless I can think of a few cases where Civil Engineers would be useful
- with cities close enough to your FP/Palace that Courthouses, Police Stations and WLT*D will actually give you a noticeable return on values before them
- to build temples, markets and maybe Cathedrals to keep these cities happy enough to reach populations where you can turn their population into taxmen or scientists to aid your gold reserves/tech rate.
- to give you a culture building or two in captured cities to help stave off the risk of culture flipping and to help claim the land around your captured cities
The first point will be of value to very few cities, unless you very carefully plan your city layouts. The third could well be an excellent tactic at wartime, especially since you would be starving the population down at the same time as making them prodcutive - both counteracting culture flips. But in the case of a builder game, or just the parts of a game you are building rather than warring, the second is the only case where Civil Engineers are of much use.
Further, this second use for Engineers led me to conclude I would use them to build Granaries, Aqueducts, temples, Markets and maybe Hospitals in hopelessly corrupt cities for the purpose of getting the populations high. Then I could fill the food box and turn every citizen into a scientist or taxman to help my economy for a few turns, before storing up food again. This is a weaker version of the "Xinning" strategy from Civ2. Especially with large numbers of useless cities, this tactic could net you a hundred gold or more per turn for several turns at a time, if you were prepared to do the micromanagement so your cities didn't starve.
Is this enough for the Civil Engineers however? Has anyone really found these uses to be important enough to them in the game? Or should Civil Engineers' shield bonuses apply to units too?
I know what you mean.... except with terrain improvements, where I was mining as usual until I got Replaceable Parts and my workers started to connect up cities with RRs faster due to the speed bonus, and suddenly when changing a scientist to an entertainer I found this weird new specialist. Then I realised what it was, and by looking at the estimated build time I figured out what it did. Then I finished the RRs and went back to irrigate over everything I had mined just a few centuries before. 
Comment