Anyone other than me hate Civ3 combat?

[Harovan]

Can you place tile improvements in enemy territory with PW? Because you can make it with workers, and it makes perfect sense to build a one-turn fort for an invasion stack with workers shipped with the units.

[bongo]

The upside is combat. During a war you can deny your enemy the use of workers, or force him to give them some serious protection. They become part of the combat even though they are non-combat units.

Ok, it IS boring to move 200 workers around(not that I ever had that many but that's just me) but it is only marginally more interesting to place your tile improvements with the PW system. When I first played CTP I thought 'PublicWorks, what a great idea' but after a while I got tired of. Maybe it was implemented wrong, maybe I am too fond of moving workers around.

[MrBaggins]

Yes, you can build fortresses, outside of your borders, provided you have a unit in the vicinity.

AFWIW, I'm for at least reverting PW construction placement back to CtP1 standards, if not a bit further.

[Harovan]

The worker concept may mean more micromanagement (it surely does!), but it's more flexible. You can put a bigger effort on a single job by adding more force. Do I want the road to be built in 1 instead of 3 turns? If so, I have to send 3 workers, and the road will be there. The aforementioned one-turn fort in enemy territory also fits in this category. It's nice to have the opportunity to put different effort in different jobs, and for realism fans - it is realistic too. Even the fort thing. The people doing this are called military engineers. One more good thing about workers is their different nationality, and the opportunity to add them back in the cities if they're done with their jobs. And grabbing enemy workers is fun. Try to grab enemy PW. You can't even pillage it until it's done.

[MrBaggins]

PW are just as much a part of combat as a worker is in Civ3. You can pillage TI's thus negating those spent PW's, which would have to be reconstructed... but thats not viable if you don't have a military presence in the area (because they'll be pillaged again.)

And if you choose, its simplicity to mod the system to give you extra PW for pillaged improvements.

PW as per CtP is as strategic as Civ3's system, only with less Micromanagement.

And you already have units to move around the map... varied military ones, that interact in a complex manner. I don't see the upside to adding several hundred more...

[MrBaggins]

Oh.. and PW allows for NUMEROUS different tile improvements: different levels even, and switching between, without a cumbersome interface.

[Harovan]

You can't pillage PW in progress.

[MrBaggins]

Easily moddable.

And you could change the system to build quicker improvements- 1 turn forts- by (mod in a text file) making additional more expensive (and theoretically, using different tech requirements,) TI improvements.

And there isn't really any reason why we can't implement stacked PW TI's so that they finish quicker either.

[Harovan]

Of course, the PW concept has not only downsides. An upside is for instance, that you can't exploit the AI by signing a Right of Passage agreement with it and then starve it's thriving cities down by planting forest everywhere.

[Harovan]

Yes, modding is one of CtPs strenghts, especially scripting. Although it has no editor and tinkering with hundreds or even thousands of text file settings isn't exactly an easy thing. It quickly leads to mistakes. Also a downside of the mods is, that they're available only in packets ("take all or nothing"), are mostly resource hogs and work badly with localized versions of the game.

[MrBaggins]

*chuckles* Reading through the thread it sounds like I'm a voice of doom... well... I'm not... I just don't think that including workers was a Good Idea (TM) not because of the functionality... their main problem is additional micromanagement, which really is the scourge of large empire games.

I think if it could be avoided, it should be. I'm not sure that it wasn't more politics that kept PW out of Civ3, than benefit of the worker system...

[Harovan]

Both workers and PW have their up- and downsides. Discussions what is better or worse are pretty pointless.

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Yes, modding is one of CtPs strenghts, especially scripting. Although it has no editor and tinkering with hundreds or even thousands of text file settings isn't exactly an easy thing. It quickly leads to mistakes. Also a downside of the mods is, that they're available only in packets ("take all or nothing"), are mostly resource hogs and work badly with localized versions of the game.

While there is some amount of playtesting and troubleshooting of new mods, there haven't been any real problems with mistakes causing problems. You can always fix what is broken, or revert to a different Mod.

The mods that we've been talking about are trivial SLIC or text file mods, easily integratable. like... "Insert the following lines at this point, or at the end of the file". Mods like those are simple to integrate into even existing mods, generally speaking.

Its only when you have two fairly sophisticated mods, which are using the same fuction or modifying the same resource, that there is conflict, and these have been dealt with well by existing mod makers. (for instance Good Mod being integrated into a number of other complex mods)

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Both workers and PW have their up- and downsides. Discussions what is better or worse are pretty pointless.

No discussion on a better system for a future game is pointless...

They are different systems, but they have the same end result.

It just occurs to me that the worker system has an unavoidable downside: micromanagement.

Pretty much any downside that the PW system has can be "solved" with minor implementation changes.

[Harovan]

As far as I can see, we are discussing present games and not future ones, for which we have by the way a special forum and no need to spam the others.

Micromanagement could be reduced by the interface and smart gameplay, like using workers in stacks fit for a particular work. We have stacked movement since vanilla Civ3 v1.17, the only thing we lack is stacked tile improvement commands. If we had them, a stacked "goto" and a stacked "build mine" wouldn't mean more hassle than to click on the "mine" interface and after this the tile.

I love workers and wish them preserved. You can go with your PW where the sun doesn't shine. I trashed CtP2, because I am not fond of futuristic stuff like fusion tanks and space bombers (or how the heck they are called), because I plain hate hidden units like spies and lawyers (not because I fear them, but because it's a micromanaging hell to expel the same spy coming out of the same city during hundreds of years every ****ing turn) and because I don't like PW. So there. Your mileage may vary.

What I would like added to Civ3 is advanced farms and advanced mines and the infinite RR movement cut down. That would be one of the few CtP things I'd like to see implemented.