automating formers

[Thrawn]

I would just like to know if other players prefer to automate formers, or manually select terraforming. I know that many times formers don't make the best choices when they are automated, but when they are automated, the game flows much more smoothly.

[WhiteElephants]

Smooth??? Smooth??? You're a madman!!! I've had a smoother time swallowing broken glass.
[This message has been edited by WhiteElephants (edited June 27, 2000).]

[Neptunus]

LOL,

Indeed, there is nothing "smoother" from ten dozen formers crossing the continent to get from one base from "Siberia" to another at "Cape Town" just to build a farm, returning again to "Siberia" the nest turn for a patch of mag tube...

Seriously now, as they say "you never know unless you try" the first time I used automated formers was also the last. It happened back in the past and distant time during my first game of SMAC. I never did that again...

It may be frustrating to have formers (and engineers in the old CivII) swarming around but I still believe this is the only way to keep tracking of what you're doing, and WHY you're doing it (usually the time you NEED to do it) and I'm referring to terraforming of course. Certainly the automated formers usually take "strange" initiatives. Unfortunately, the automated preferences option is no cure to that.

On the other hand the "solution" given by CtP (public works) though practical it has no style and "elegance", always according to my tastes. I still want to send 4 formers to dig a thermal borehole in 2 turns, or rise a bridge of land in 2 turns to get closer to my enemy for strategic purposes. What I'm trying to say is that most of us are already accustomed to micromanaging and see that as an OPPORTUNITY to gain control not a BURDEN...

[Googlie]

Neptunus:

hear hear !!!

Like you, I automated formers once, in my first or maybe second game.

Now, six hundred games later, I don't mind the manual control, even when I have almost 100 of the suckers in my really big games

Googlie

(I exaggerate the numbers, of course, for effect )

[Ned]

I automate the following:

- seaforming
- tubes
- sensors
- fungus removal

I also fully automate after all the basic infrastructure is built and before fungus become important. What a former does in this case is to build tubes, soil enrichers, sensors and bunkers. (The latter can be a real problem if worms appear.)

Seeing how formers place roads in every square with the AI factions, I have never tried to automate roads. But if you could tell a former to only connect cities, this would be another possibility.

The basic problem with autoforming is that you cannot tell the former to build only forests or fungus, or mines on non level rocky squares, or boreholes on level rocky squares, or farms and sensors on rolling wet squares. If you could do any of these things, autoforming land would be increasingly possible.

[Neptunus]

Googlie, that's exactly what I'm trying to say... What my point was (which was deliberately hidden) is that now I have developed an almost mazohistic pleasure of micromanaging terraformers...