Land Improvement Boring?

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by 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.

His solution was a way to cut down on the total number of workers that are created in the game to cut down on micromanaging.

Originally posted by DrSpike
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.

...which is why I made the suggestion that simply increasing shield cost of a worker and increasing the time to complete TIs is a much better way to go. If anything, that solution places more emphasis on your decisionmaking AND cuts down on micromanagement.

Suddenly, you are face with critical decisions about where to improve. Less workers means that they end up needing to cover several cities. And with increased shield cost reducing the number of workers in the game, they suddenly become much more valuable strategic commodities during warfare.

I want my strategic games to make it very hard to accomplish everything that I want to do - the current civ3 setup makes it all too easy to amass a veritable army of workers.

[DrSpike]

Hmm, I suspect most would be amenable to tweaks in the way workers function in Civ3. I prefer the shield cost idea to the palace one, and it is easily implementable. Within a different model (ie the Civ4 model) it may well be a moot point anyway.

[stevel]

I too would prefer a more expensive worker solution.

One problem is that the payback on a worker is about 15 turns, making them incredibly cheap.

Even if you make the workers 30 or 40 shields I probably would still build an army of them later on, and they would be too expensive early - although you could have different tech dependant/obsolesence classes of worker that vary in cost -- like the settlers in the dyp mod.

I agree with hex that the idea should be that you can't optimise every tile being used - choices should have to be made between different improvement/worker action options, which is what I had to do with 1 worker every 50 turns.

Development did slow down though, particularly with land trade networks being developed.