Automating Workers

[maxcavsm]

Good idea or bad idea? It seems to speed things up in the game and keeps you from micromanaging every move they make. Meanwhile, it seems like they criss-cross back and forth across your territories to make improvements, wasting valuable time that they could be improving the land they're standing on.

Suggestions?

[Harovan]

Bad idea. Their choice for tile improvements really sucks. Make the basic improvements and the road network yourself and automate only later to do the railroad sleaze and perhaps pollution cleaning (although I wouldn't do even that). In this case, automate them with Shift-A, it preserves already made improvements.

[Addled Platypus]

only with pollution clean up 4-6 depending on the mess

the auto railraod build is not to bad, short inter city connections

[Egbert]

I don't automate workers. They do too many things I don't like and they waste too many turns just going back and forth.

Nothing worse than a big stack of workers zooming to the frontier right under the noses of an enemy invasion force.

If I am at peace I will automate some to clean up pollution but that is laziness on my part.

[vorlon_mi]

Once I have secured my home island/continent,
I will use shift-P to automate workers to only clean up
pollution -- esp. after I have built factories.

Before that, I will sometimes use ctrl-R or ctrl-shift-R
to have a few build specific road or railroad (respectively)
links to target cities.

I like to make the choices about which tiles to mine,
and which to irrigate, so I never do simple automation.