Settler/Engineer control

[Campo]

I just discovered the Civ 3 threads and guess I'm too late to have any effect, but I haven't seen mention of the simple enhancement I want. I'd like to be able to specify a start and end point for a settler/engineer to build a road or railroad, and then have the settler take it from there. They'd just build a straight-line connection between the two points.

Why should we have to guide the settler/engineer every step of the way? It seems like such a simple time-saver.

[The Mad Viking]

Ah yes... but what if he tried to cross the 0/99 line while building the road? You'd lose track of the little feller for a few centuries as he reversed and built a road all the way around the world!

Good idea, it would be nice to have more control over the auto-engineer. I won't use him, I do everyone of my moves manually, right now I have 74 active engineers, because I don't trust them. (They build way too many railways) How about being able to assign an engineer to a city and script his moves? Road here, then here, then irrigate this square, then than one, then build a mine on that hill, then tranform those trees to grassland. 15 or 20 turns later, presto. Or at least have a user specified priority for what order they do things on what kinds of terrain?

[MidKnight Lament]

Of course with PW you just do it all yourself when you want to do it. But if we still have settlers then features like these could be useful.

[Psion]

In SMAC, with the Formers, you could tell them to build a road from point A to point B, and they could usually do it very well. You could also assign them to a city and only improve the terrain there. There aren't any scripts or priority lists, though. I really think they can do this in Civ3. I liked the SMAC system of colony pods to build cities and Formers to build TI. That would be good in Civ3 as well.

[Grumbold]

The engineer concept moved on well in both SMAC and CTP. After some initial disappointment I grew to like the CTP system of providing no bonuses for roads and rail except movement. It meant that the map stayed reasonably uncluttered and beautiful because there was far less motive to do more than just city-city connections. Any minor roads or rail links were just too small scale to be worthwhile displaying on a world map.

An intelligent but easy to use scripting method would be the ultimate, particularly if the AI actually started with several good ones and knew which to adopt under what circumstances. Lets hope they manage it.