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Hats off to Soren Johnson on the vast improvement of automated workers in Civ3 to their SMAC counterparts.
For those of you who think otherwise here's some tips for workers, and later on some tips for Soren on further improvements.
A for automate, bad, very bad. Never use this.
Shift-A is your friend, use it. This is global automation without changing existing terraforming. If a city doesn't have water access, the workers will irrigate to the city. They will mine/road all hills and mountains. They irrigate all desert(IIRC). And grasslands and plains they will alternate irrigate/mine. Once EVERY square in your empire the worker has access to is improved, it goes to ready. It will road/railroad all squares outside of city radius, but not mine/irrigate them.
Shift-I is the same as regular automate (not Shift-A) but localized to the current city. When all improvements are done, it goes to a ready state.
Ctrl-R is to build a road from where a worker is now to someplace you choose. Keep in mind that the worker will choose the path of least resistance, going around mountains and such, but will also go around other civs units if they are in the way.
Ctrl-Shift-R is to build a railroad to a certain point. This is great when you have that vast sprawling empire with roads everywhere, but you need connectivity quick. Simply un-automate various workers, and have them build railroads to the opposite side of your empire. Otherwise automated workers begin railroading when possible, just not very effectively.
Sift-F and Shift-J are to remove forest and jungle. Jungle is useless, so by the middle ages you should have some spare workers removing it. At some point forest becomes less useful than mining or irrigating that square, grab a few spare workers and get to chopping. As they clear the forest/junlge your automated workers will improve the terrain.
I use automated workers almost all the time. Early game I manually control each one until I have a small empire established, then I use ctrl-A on all but a few. Those few are roadbuilding to resources, future city spots, or neighboring civs.
A few criticisms though. The computer insists on wierd behavior, which I have seen in every game I have played. Some examples:
The need to send 50 workers to work one square.
The need to use roads instead of railroads to use up movement points, thus ending their turn when they arrive at the square of destination. ie if I manually sent the worker to the square they could do it with 1/3 movement point, instead the computer forces the worker to walk thru two other road squares first, then walk onto the destination square ending its turn.
Not building a road or railroad on a square it passes thru.
Some things I'd like to see:
Computer won't send more than 4 workers to any given square. Sure, some things might take more than one turn to complete, but that's ok.
If a worker is in a square and it doesn't have a road/railroad it builds one before moving on.
Ctrl-Shift-I would work like Shift-A but for the local city.
Standby mode. When a worker is in standby mode it is idle, but when pollution appears or borders expand or improvements destroyed, it works, and when finished, returns to standby mode.
Automated workers are great, you just have to know how to use them. Sure they have some faults, but hopefully with a patch or two that'll be resolved. Not only will this make your automated workers more efficient, just think how much better the computer will do. }
For those of you who think otherwise here's some tips for workers, and later on some tips for Soren on further improvements.
A for automate, bad, very bad. Never use this.
Shift-A is your friend, use it. This is global automation without changing existing terraforming. If a city doesn't have water access, the workers will irrigate to the city. They will mine/road all hills and mountains. They irrigate all desert(IIRC). And grasslands and plains they will alternate irrigate/mine. Once EVERY square in your empire the worker has access to is improved, it goes to ready. It will road/railroad all squares outside of city radius, but not mine/irrigate them.
Shift-I is the same as regular automate (not Shift-A) but localized to the current city. When all improvements are done, it goes to a ready state.
Ctrl-R is to build a road from where a worker is now to someplace you choose. Keep in mind that the worker will choose the path of least resistance, going around mountains and such, but will also go around other civs units if they are in the way.
Ctrl-Shift-R is to build a railroad to a certain point. This is great when you have that vast sprawling empire with roads everywhere, but you need connectivity quick. Simply un-automate various workers, and have them build railroads to the opposite side of your empire. Otherwise automated workers begin railroading when possible, just not very effectively.
Sift-F and Shift-J are to remove forest and jungle. Jungle is useless, so by the middle ages you should have some spare workers removing it. At some point forest becomes less useful than mining or irrigating that square, grab a few spare workers and get to chopping. As they clear the forest/junlge your automated workers will improve the terrain.
I use automated workers almost all the time. Early game I manually control each one until I have a small empire established, then I use ctrl-A on all but a few. Those few are roadbuilding to resources, future city spots, or neighboring civs.
A few criticisms though. The computer insists on wierd behavior, which I have seen in every game I have played. Some examples:
The need to send 50 workers to work one square.
The need to use roads instead of railroads to use up movement points, thus ending their turn when they arrive at the square of destination. ie if I manually sent the worker to the square they could do it with 1/3 movement point, instead the computer forces the worker to walk thru two other road squares first, then walk onto the destination square ending its turn.
Not building a road or railroad on a square it passes thru.
Some things I'd like to see:
Computer won't send more than 4 workers to any given square. Sure, some things might take more than one turn to complete, but that's ok.
If a worker is in a square and it doesn't have a road/railroad it builds one before moving on.
Ctrl-Shift-I would work like Shift-A but for the local city.
Standby mode. When a worker is in standby mode it is idle, but when pollution appears or borders expand or improvements destroyed, it works, and when finished, returns to standby mode.
Automated workers are great, you just have to know how to use them. Sure they have some faults, but hopefully with a patch or two that'll be resolved. Not only will this make your automated workers more efficient, just think how much better the computer will do. }
I much prefer to make an exception to this rule for cleaning up pollution as it should be a top priority.
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