Late Game Tedium - Discussion and Solutions

[Libertarian]

And what happens to your worker when an enemy soldier happens by, or when your rival civ's border expands, or when your coal has disappeared and you can longer build railroads, etc.?

[Grumbold]

You're still finding work for each worker to do each turn or losing efficiency. The only saving in mouse-clicks is between scrolling to the new area to be worked vs moving the unit there.

[Atahualpa]

Libertarian: Good Points! Let's see.

Capturing workers would be not possible anymore. Hmmm.
Okay lets assume a soldier is near than I think it would be no problem that all of the tiles being worked on that surround the enemy soldier are automatically stopped being worked on. Some kind of ZOC that hinders them doing their work.

When coal dissappears logically all railroadbuilding is canceld

And when the civs border expand logically you cant work on these tiles anymore.

I see no problem with the last two points. The first about capturing and ZOC could make problems.

You're still finding work for each worker to do each turn or losing efficiency. The only saving in mouse-clicks is between scrolling to the new area to be worked vs moving the unit there.

Completely wrong.
You mark the tiles that have to be railroad assign the number and voila. It is done. You can mark a hundred tiles (as said maybe with bigger sized brushes) and that doesnt save you time????

Else you have to move every worker on every tile and hit: 'r' a hundred times you have to move workers and hit 'r' for a hundred tiles. Plus you save a lot of scrolling time.

Problems do exist however with this "solution".
For example: How to determine how fast the railroads should be built? How to determine how to stack the workers?

Problems arising, maybe it is not possible to do this very easy.

ata

[Grumbold]

Drag/highlight may help with point to point railroads but I don't see it being much help for 'every tile' improvements where the most efficient expansion is the next tile to be utilised per city rather than all of city A radius before all of city B radius etc. The initial phase of railroading is the bit I quite enjoy managing myself - getting an imperial transport network up and running and maximising my super-industry cities output before my one coal runs out. Its the 'fill in the blanks' irrigation, road, railroad and mining that is boring. Your system is a small saving but I don't think its radical enough to cure the tedium.

[nato]

Grumbold - I agree PW is not a perfect solution to terrain improvement tedium. You are totally right.

Currently I think the best solution would be to improve the worker automation routines. They don't have to be perfect, just good enough that you don't lose too much optimality using them. Good automated workers would be superior to PW.

Using city improvements to represent terrain improvements might be a good idea. However it also might just shift the managment tedium from workers to cities.

My dream solution is still what I posted under "Radical Idea to Reduce Tedium", using techs to increase terrain output. Zero tedium! But thats not likely to happen.

Oh yeah, I would LOVE to have stacked combat rather than just stack movement ... sigh if only ... but I think we will be lucky if we just get movement.


Atahualpa - Wow a brush, like laying walls in Age of Kings (sorry for the RTS mention RTS haters). Clever! I'd have never thought of that.

I could see it as being more possible if individual workers were selected and you could use the brush to give him orders. I really like that idea.

The "continental pool", with workers not appearing on the map, would be pretty identicle to PW I think. PW with a brush tool would be a big improvement over the original PW idea though.

The bombardment idea would make it like you had a unit occupying the tile bombarded. Maybe, I'm not so sure ... I don't know if a unit's barrage of shells is really large enough to prevent all work on a tile sized area.

That brush idea really might be onto something, I think... Grumbold has a great point that lots of clicking = tedium, and the brush would save clicking ...


Libertarian - I think using Atahualpa's brush idea would be like giving the Worker an order queue ... the brush idea just lets the player give the Worker the queue in a quick way, without having to click every tile. If one of those events occured, interupting the Worker's order queue, how about the queue is just canceled, and the Worker enters the activation queue? Just like sometimes units on a Go To command do when they come across an enemy.

Now I have to take a break from saying "queue" so much ...

[Skanky Burns]

Sorry, i fail to see how 'mass improvement designing' with brushes would improve automated worker efficiency. Or how it differs to standard automating workers in any useful way.

As automated workers stand now, they make improvements based on how useful they see each improvement would be. Road connections to and around cities, mines and irrigation around cities only, then roads/rails in squares inside your cultural border, but not in any city radius. I dont know exactly how the automated workers decide what should be done and where as i control all my workers, but i know from the AI's workers that the algorythm is more advanced than "build roads everywhere in this 4x4 box".

Obviously the alogythm for the automated workers is not as efficient as it could be, and a good player will be able to optimise their workers much better than the AI, but there are also much worse ways of automating the workers.

I dont see PW being any better than this system either, as you still have to go to each city and place stuff down. For me it would be even worse, as without a worker telling me i had some 'improvement points' to use i would forget about improving for a couple of turns, and once i remembered place heaps of improvements down. This would result in a less efficient empire than automating my workers ever could.

btw: You can already automate workers to just build railroads (for example), or to build a railroad between cities or such. Automating several would probably mean that they stack to help each other.

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by nato
Using city improvements to represent terrain improvements might be a good idea. However it also might just shift the managment tedium from workers to cities.

My dream solution is still what I posted under "Radical Idea to Reduce Tedium", using techs to increase terrain output. Zero tedium! But thats not likely to happen.

It really depends how they balance it out. Would inventing the tech automatically result in all cities instantly upgrading be too powerful? Should the emperor (you) have to consider whether to finance fast adoption of that knowledge in key cities (rushing the building the tech makes available)?

In MoO, a planet (city-radius) could host a finite number of people and factories. Discovering a tech would instantly make more space for new population or more factories but the city would have to grow or use its production on building more factories to make use of that advantage. In civ terms I see putting a building on the production queue and maybe rushing it as far faster than instructing workers to upgrade all appropriate tiles in the city radius. It has no 'click' savings over auto-worker but you don't have to worry that the auto-worker has chosen the wrong tiles to start on.

[nato]

Skanky Burns - I agree that for Civ3 automated workers is probably the most realistic solution.

I am willing to accept the loss of efficiency from using them ... but I don't think many players are, as is. There must be some room for improvement ... if the routine was somehow improved, more ppl might be willing to use them, solving lots of tedium.

Same goes for governors.

Once again, I agree PW is still too annoying, because it requires tile by tile work, one at a time.

Grumbold - I think if you could click and drag an area, it would save on clicking pretty well ... I agree, more radical solutions would reduce tedium more, but the brush idea might be doable with workers.

MoO 1 sure seems to have gotten a lot right! I do remember being really disappointed when MoO 2 switched to a boring conventional just-like-everyone-else city improvement style.

I really believe sometimes ppl just imitate the past too much, and don't think out of the box enough.

As for my tech advancement idea, it would lead to a sudden sharp increase in production. It would be powerful, but as long as everyone could research the tech, everyone would have the same benefit. I think it would work fantastic, but others disagree. It would be zero tedium!

Your city improvement idea has a lot of merit, and is certainly better than the current model. Its just that managing cities is one of the main tedium items, so I think it might just be shifting things around, unless governors or build queues were much improved.

However your improvement idea, and my tech idea, are probably both too radical to really hope for. Right now I think an improved worker AI is the most realistic hope.

[Hurry]

Posted by nato:

Third is maybe using Governors to handle city management ... I don't know much about this since I was never willing to trust them, but maybe it is worth the inevitable loss of optimality.

I don´t think I believe my eyes. You are complaining about a feature you haven´t even tested!

I use governors for handling citizen moods almost from the beginning, and in my opinion they work good enough. Yes, I sometimes micromanage cities, but mostly the governor is pretty decent. If the governor is turned on he will take care of riots, so that is a no-issue.

The automated workers (shift-A) suck at the beginning of the game when you have a limited number of workers and lots of unimproved tiles. At this stage you have to carefully decide how to use your workers. However, during the later stages of the game (which are under discussion here) they work pretty well. The only problem is that they won´t clear pollution (effectively). I believe this could easily be fixed in a patch, since it requires minimal coding.

As I see it, the only major problem is the lack of stacked movement.

[nato]

Hurry - I don't really consider myself a huge complainer, though I do think there are some fairly large fixes that need to be made.

I actually did use the manage mood feature sometimes, but found the manage city building unworkable. I think most ppl agreed with this on the forums...

You have a good point about the efficiency of automated workers depending on how many there are. I just think the routine needs a little improvement ... otherwise why is no one happy using them?

Oh yeah, thanks for the smiley ... I'll try to write stuff that your eyes can believe in the future ...

[Skanky Burns]

I forgot to mention before, good effort Nato for starting a rational discussion on late game tedium.
Your list and analysis of said list is pretty spot-on, and reflects most peoples ideas of fun/boring decisions.


That said, Civ for me is a game where i can build up my empire. That includes all the tile infastructure. So for me, building all those tile improvements and actually being able to watch my "civilized areas" growing constantly is also a fun aspect for me - therefore controlling my workers is fun for me. But judging by most peoples complaints about moving workers, this feeling isnt shared by others

[dadacp]

One possibility would be to punish players for too much micromanagement, or reward them for automation. It's perfectly natural that city governors or worker battalion leaders would resent being told every last action that they should take, and that they should know better than a far-away nation leader how to accomplish their task. Let automated workers work faster than non-automated, and micromanaged cities have more corruption or unhappiness. Then players would only micromanage when neccessary.

Right now, governors and automated workers are less competent than the player. So perfectionists will try micromanage everything, and the game slows down. If the governors and automated workers are made more competent, and the player is given a bonus for trusting them, the game would play much faster.

Letting extra food production carry over to the next population level and and extra shield production carry over to the next item in the queue would also help a lot.

[Grumbold]

I can feel the phrase "imperial force points" being coined somewhere


We can see how well it pans out in MoO3. My initial reaction on hearing this idea was 'how dare the game dictate to me how much I can or cannot micromanage my own affairs'. Often it is only by micromanaging something for a few games that you can discover how much difference it really will make. Then when I know a game well I can make accurate judgements about when to Shift-A almost all my workers, switch on governors or whatever.

[Atahualpa]

If you could automate them t o pollution cleaning that would be one step in the right direction.

ata