Land Improvement Boring?

[Last Conformist]

I hate how the AI's workers always flee to the nearest city when my units turn up, because the closest city is typically the one the troops they're fleeing from is head to anyway. They should flee deeper into friendly territory instead.

I assume automated workers do the same when the AI's invading me, so that would be yet another reason not to automate them.

[TheArsenal]

AI and automated workers do some strange things during war time. Speaking anecdotally, it seems to sometimes be able to recognize an immediate threat and flee, but doesn’t recognize the general threat of a hostile border and that a fast moving unit can come romping across to snatch a worker at any time. This is complicated by railroads where workers can teleport into harms way when you’re not looking. In the perfect game, workers would stop automation the moment war was declared.

Off topic a bit, but the most annoying automated system for me when it goes awry is the “continental rally point” which most of the time works well. I was using it in a game last night when the Romans sent a fair size stack of troops over my border. As soon as I completed my city build instructions, I had the frustration of watching several cavalry move directly away from the threat, which in the end caused me to lose more units than I should have in that situation. If there is a way to cancel the order somewhere before units start moving, I haven’t found it. In this case, it should be set up that foreign units on your soil without an ROP should automatically cancel all pre-set unit movement.

[jomateix]

Originally posted by Thriller
And as you know, automation is a pretty bad idea.

Truly? I always automatize my workers (except for large roads) and also I put the city governor on for people riots.

Sometimes the workers make errors of planinng, but usually they do good.

I forgot something allowing the automatization?

[Willem]

Originally posted by Jerh9e1k5
Is there somewhere that we could change to mine grasslands? With my very limited knowledge of programming I'll leave this challenge to the Apolyton community!

Jerh9e1k5

Yes, you can go into the Terrain section in the editor and change the values in there. If you set the Mining bonus to 0 for Grassland and Plains, you and the AI will no longer be able to build them. I do that in my own game since I think it's ugly having mines all over the map.

You can also go into Governments and set it so that Irrigation has an effect in Despotism. I've also done that in my game since I've increased my citizen's food requirement to 3. I've compensated by reducing the Worker rate to Anarchy levels, so it takes much longer to develop a tile.

[Last Conformist]

jomateix: With a bit of experience, anyone should quickly learn to handle land improvements better than the AI, and city governance better than the governor. The efficiency gains over an entire game can be humongous.

Of course, one's entitled to feel that sacrificing efficiency for less tedium is worth it. While I don't automate workers, I sometimes leave my cities to the governor. Particularly new acquisitions with lousy production and severe unhappiness.

[jomateix]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
Of course, one's entitled to feel that sacrificing efficiency for less tedium is worth it.

That's me!

[eris]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Last Conformist

Of course, one's entitled to feel that sacrificing efficiency for less tedium is worth it. QUOTE]

As long as you don't mind the sneers, blatant or implied, that seem to come from somemore experienced and (definiely) skilled players, you can do anything you want. Otherwise you will get the quiet admiration of those too shy or lacking in self confidence to say out loud that they play the game for fun, not perfection.

The game is all about trade-off decisions. I guess one of the main ones is deciding where you are in that balance between skill-challenge and just-plain-fun. I think we all adjust it as we play. Note the satisfaction displayed when someone reports they have just maganged a new game difficulty level or survived an originally bleak looking situation.

I find that discussing Civ3 is as complex and convoluted as playing Civ3, and I find myself not overly unsurprised or unhappy at that finding. I wish I could offer more strategic advice, but in truth, the best advice I have seen or offered consists of rephrasings of "Have Fun!"

[snuggs]

Before I'd actually played PTW2 I though PW sounded like a great idea - turned out to be badly applied and horribly sterile.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
The real funkiller is removing pollution in the late game. I really hope they rethink that particular concept for Civ IV.

Considering Soren referred to the current pollution model as 'whack-a-mole', one may be hopeful that something new (or borrowed) may be around the corner.

[Last Conformist]

snuggs: PW?

NYE: I heard that too, and it indeed sounds promising.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by notyoueither


Considering Soren referred to the current pollution model as 'whack-a-mole', one may be hopeful that something new (or borrowed) may be around the corner.

Hehe I didn't see that quote. It's good that they realise the existing model could be improved, especially with Civ4 now in the works.

[stevel]

One mod I've experimented with is to make workers unbuildable and have the palace create a worker every 50 turns or so, thereby reducing the micromanagement workload.

Unfortunately the AI wasn't good at moving workers to discovered islands so they never got developed, and I haven't worked out how to rectify this

[DrSpike]

But the work you need to do is still the same right?

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by stevel
One mod I've experimented with is to make workers unbuildable and have the palace create a worker every 50 turns or so, thereby reducing the micromanagement workload.

Originally posted by DrSpike
But the work you need to do is still the same right?

The actual micromanagement work is less because you end up cutting down on the total number of workers in the game. It's the sheer number of workers that add to the tedium.

I'm guessing though that the gamepace ends up slower - less Tile Improvements means slower production/growth/science/commerce.

You can also increase the cost of workers and increase the time needed to create tile improvements. This would foster a more critical decision to either invest more shields into infrastructure, or get by with less workers. And longer build times for TI means that a player will not be prompted as much to move workers around the map (which is a big part of the tedium factor)

Ideally though, there should be the same type of mechanism for workers as what is in place with the creation of armies - the ability to lock-stack them. Give them an additional bonus for production time if they are lock-stacked too...

[DrSpike]

But surely if you have the same amount of work all you can do is spread out the micromanagement? I don't really see how that helps.

Plus I don't like things that reduce depth. How many workers should I produce at each stage............lots of trade-offs and decisions are killed along with anything good that comes from the modding the palace to spit workers and ban building them.