Mandatory retirement?

[OneInTen]

I don't see why some people have such big issues with the workers. For me, it's generally that my land is completely improved before railroads, so I'll either join my workers with cities or fortify them in wait for the tech to come (depending how long I have to wait).

When I get the prerequisites for railroads (steam power, iron, coal), i'll either wake my workers, or have the cities pump them out for a couple of turns. With this worker army (usually closer to 30 than 100, but whatever), I can always get the railroads over my entire civ in under 20 turns (I know this because that's often how long I'm trading iron or coal for).

After that, I just let my workers join the cities again for more growth (since I'll have hospitals by this stage), leaving under a dozen for polution clean up.

So I don't think you need 100+ workers, and the worker intensive period only really lasts 20 turns max, and during that time you could easily automate most of them to only build railroads, since that is a job they usually can do fairly well. I prefer to get the job done ASAP so I move them myself. It's pretty quick - just a flick in one direction with the numpad, shift-R and another tile bites the dust. I get a perverse kick out of making those ugly brown roads disappear!

Yes, it's not the most exciting job in the world, but it's hardly anywhere near as tedious as some make it out to be.

[barefootbadass]

Originally posted by Foot
I think that the patches shouldn't just fix bugs, they should fix the complaints people have about the game. Such as giving you longer to appreciate your science. Making the game go to 4000 ad would be good.
And fixing the science would also be handy.
As well as making the AI stop cheating.

Umm, I haven't heard anyone besides you who wants to be able to play to something like 4000 a.d., and only a handful that want to go any further.

Really, aren't you sick of a given game by 2050? By 1900 I'm ready to be done with a game, and that's like 125 turns (I think) from the end at 2050.

If you want to have longer to appreciate your science then make it faster(switch to democracy, build up your cities, build more cities, trade more with the ai, and/or go to a higher difficulty level)

Fixing science? What are you talking about?

The AI cheating is currently the only way you are going to get a good challenge. In fact even if they could make an AI that really was smart, there would need to be some kind of handicapping system to challenge people that were still better than it and give those who weren't that good a chance to play a competitive game.

[barefootbadass]

Originally posted by yin26
Yes, that's better than nothing. Though the AI on the workers is pretty weak. They will run around literally in circles sometimes doing NOTHING while some pollution, for example, sits nearby. Or the computer doesn't calculate that the 5 workers already on a pollution tile will finish the cleanup long before the other 50 workers now running across the map to get there will ever arrive.

What's really dumb is that the automated workers run around to different squares on your railed empire trying to decide where to improve, and that every consecutive worker goes through this 'decision' process. Why they couldn't have had the unit ai for the worker calculate it 'in its head' is beyond me(actually it isn't, they could have, I should have worded that 'Why they didn't have'). Look there! I'm thinking like an automated worker, taking you to every random place(or not so random) place my thoughts go.

[Flight]

workers on automatic will improve things wherever they can until there's no squares left ot improve when they will sleep in the nearest city. What's wrong with that? You can stop them changing tile improvements with shift-A.

Yeah they dont all go to a pollution spot, but iirc that is a known bug that will be fixed in the next patch (whenever it arrives) so then your workers will all sort out pollution until its all gone. I've never seen them run in circles or do any other strange things, but then i have all unit animation turned off

The only annoying thing that isn't a bug is when they dont connect your cities with railroad (or road) straight away, but improve all the tiles around a city first. I think you can fix that with shift or ctrl (i forget) + N. Simple...

Also i agree about the AI thing, most of my turn time in the modern era is workers cheacking every tile, aren't they all one entity, where that entity checks for improvable tiles and sends out individual units to do the task?