building oil wells a better way

[vlar]

If no attacking is taking place then it is no big deal to construct an oil well, but otherwise finding an idol civilian and sending him to construct an oil well is a pain. The main reason it bothers me: when you auto select an idol citizen (either using the dot (.) or the icon), the screen centers on him!! I don't want the screen to center on him, I just want to find an oil field and send the closest worker to start building. Does anyone else find this annoying in the heat of battle, and does anyone else know a better way?

[Jaybe]

If the screen didn't center on the idle worker, how would you know where he was relative to the oil field??

If it's a single player game, then just press the bleepin' pause.
If you were in an MP game, then I can understand it can be really stressful. Uh, well, not really! Never played MP, probably never will.

[Grond]

I agree it does take a lot of multitasking to build a bunch of wells and refineries when you reach industrial. I will probably always have to use cannon time for every game when I hit industrial, you just can't afford not to watch the enemy for that long.

[Nacht]

Ctrl+click or Ctrl+. will select a civilian without centering and you can use the minimap to know where he is. You still have to center on the oilfield to construct it afaik.

[Swissy]

Also, go into the options and change your civillian options to "Build" and the idle time to "short". It will auto build oil wells once industrial is hit, otherwise will stand around or go to repair if needed. The problem is you'll never have a idle civ around when you need one.

[niDe]

What I usually do is select the closest city and queue some citizens then take some farmers from the city and build the oil wells, I then know once those newly created citizens pop out they will fill up the empty farms, no problem.

Suppose you could do this with lumberjacks and miners if you wanted

[vlar]

Originally posted by Nacht
Ctrl+click or Ctrl+. will select a civilian without centering and you can use the minimap to know where he is. You still have to center on the oilfield to construct it afaik.

Great! This is exactly the type of control I was hoping for. Thanks Natch.

[vlar]

Originally posted by Swissy
Also, go into the options and change your civillian options to "Build" and the idle time to "short". It will auto build oil wells once industrial is hit, otherwise will stand around or go to repair if needed. The problem is you'll never have a idle civ around when you need one.

This is also really good advise. I use "build and gather" though. I don't think civilians will leave their city's territory raduis to construct an oil well. I'll have to double check my idol time. Thanks Swissy.

[Dagg]

I do the same as nIDE once oil is in play i take a Vill from farms in each town and have them create oil wells in like 4 cities or so. Then I make sure and create 1 new vill per city and choose the vill/farm icon to send newly made vills to the vacant farm.

[davepy]

I do mostly the same as nIDE and Dagg, except that I pull two of the closest farm/lumber camp/mine, 1 to build the well and 1 to build a refinery. Of course, you only need to replace 1 of them since the refinery builder will go back to farming/mining once he's done.

Even in the middle of a fight, I don't find it all that disruptive to start mining my oil wells (and I don't like pausing, even in single player).

[niDe]

Another thing to do is when you start researching the Industrial Age, build citizens and send them to patches of rock so when you hit Industrial you can whack some wells straight down.

[Grond]

I set it to build and gather and then queued up a boatload of citizens in ancient. The first couple went and started chopping wood. The rest stood around and never built anything even though I reseached enough for them to build a temple or market not to mention a couple farms. If they can't build a farm I don't have much confidence in them building oil wells or refineries.

[Red Scorpion]

Originally posted by Grond
I set it to build and gather and then queued up a boatload of citizens in ancient. The first couple went and started chopping wood. The rest stood around and never built anything even though I reseached enough for them to build a temple or market not to mention a couple farms.

Sorry, but I found this quite funny. Citizens will only 'Auto-Build' if the Building's Foundations have already been placed or they'll assist other builders nearby. They certainly don't just decide to build something on their own innitiative, "Hey, he's not built a Temple yet, lets go build one"

[Grond]

Thats what I thought but Swissys post seem to imply the opposite.

[Rolfski]

If you want a real auto-build in single play click cooperative AI in the pre-game options.

Problem is of course that this also means that the AI will help you in auto-research, auto-move, auto-fight, auto-create but worse of all, auto-spend.

What is cannon time btw?