Terrain Improvement?

[Ozymandous]

Originally posted by Bleyn
While we (almost) all hate micromanagement, there is one thing that is worse than having to micromanage. That is being unable to micromanage. Especially something as critical to game flow in a Civ game as terrain improvement is.

Imagine not being able to give commands directly to the workers in Civ3, and only being able to control them through an interface like the City governer one.

Easy, then REMOVE individual workers and allow players to 'instantly' upgrade any terrain feature assuming they have enough in their "public works" account as CtP does now.

What's easier to program, having an AI automatically stick a certain percentage of it's GDP into a fund that can be easily assigned to certain terrain, or having to move workers, that can be captured, etc?

I sincerely HOPE that for Civ4 they drastically reduce the amount of MM required regarding workers, and such because it's unnecesary.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
Not sure if someone has already mentioned this possibility but, how about you have a public works budget, as in CtP, bus STILL have workers? In this system, the amount of work a worker can perform is limited by your PW budget! That way, even if you have an army of workers, you can't do much with them if you don't have the neccessary budget (for both labour and materials!)

See my posts above in this thread - that is pretty much what I proposed...

[CerberusIV]

I voted other. Having played all the versions of Civ and CtP the idea I really like is being able to say what you want done on a particular tile, and what priority it is, and have the workers automatically assigned to do it.

It would be Civ but you could have a choice between automating workers (who will do the specified tile improvements) or retaining control yourself. That way you could effectively automate your core areas (where there is little danger of workers being captured) and retain control of workers in more dangerous border areas.

A better way of setting out what you want workers to do rather than the present hopeless automation or having to do it all yourself for every task gets my vote.

[Greenwatch]

I like the system currently implemented in civ3. Units modifiing the terrain is definitely a better way than using the public works method. I think however that military units should be able to act as workers but only during piece time and less efficient than a standard worker. This could really add an interesting element to the game.

One additional thing I would like to see is the number of tiles with trees affecting global warming. Say a civ plants forests on all of it's un-used squares. This should slow down global warming. Further, all civs do this, it should significantly slowdown or even stop global warming. On the other hand, if the forests of the world are desimated by logging/clearing, this should severly affect the global warming issue.

Just a couple thoughts. Let me know if anyone likes these.

[lajzar]

Foe reference, the CTP system is a public works budget. This is taken from the industrial production by a slider. You can then place improvements anywhere within your borders, and a "under construction" icon appears immediately, replaced with the actual improvement a few turns later.

Also for reference, the MoM system is that only certain races can build improvements (the only improvement in teh game was roads), and it costs gold to build, as well as requiring the use of a specialised worker unit.

I have yet to see any system as good as public works. For those who want to be able to capture workers, you could add that any pillaging done while an improvement is under construction has a chance of capturing workers. Captured workers are represented as slave units. A slave unit can be sent to a city and added to the population. Cities with slaves in them ought to be able to resend them again by building a slave unit, which can then be added to the population of a different city. Blood cult govs can sacrifice them, and certain other units (slavers) can turn defeated military units into slaves, or capture population and turn them into slaves.

[OliverFA]

The Public Works system that automatically manages the workers is the best option. If you are a micromanagement lover you can still control all of them, but if you like to delegate in an effective way (not like the horrible automatic settings of Civ3) you can also do

In fact this should be extended to some other parts of the game. Some sort of national policies that apply to all your cities.

[MJohn99519]

I don't think the added complication of the PW as another point indicator would be needed.....just some sort of method by which you can tell your workers to concentrate on specific improvements, and lay out an exact path or area that you want them to develop. That way, we can still micromanage, but we won't have to pay nearly as much attention to them as we currently do when we use the 'build to' command, and they dont fill in the area that we want them to.

[Panag]

hi ,

Civ3 style - Workers working the land. Physical units.

and it should be possible to improve the desert to plains , plains to grassland , etc , ....

have a nice day

[Lawrence of Arabia]

ctp was rotten through and through. i dont see why in every thrread people want this game to be more like it. keep the civ3 style - workers working the land.

[grap1705]

My idea is: how does it work in real life?

The mayor (in this case: us, enlightened leaders of our glorious civilization) determines the urban plan, with zones for framing, industry, shopping malls, etc... But after, that depends on private initiative. If you have no farmers, then building a farm is of little use.

On the other hand, some improvements are conducted by working teams under public orders: roads, airports, fortresses, etc...

So my suggestion is:
- when you create a city, you can determine right away the urban plan for farming, mining and trading, for the 21 squares (or to be adapted if it is decided cities can grow over than 2 square radius or if the map evolves to hexes!), even if the city limit is temporarily limited to the surrounding 8 squares. And then, those equipments improve over time, depending on city size (intensity of exploitation factor) and power supply (see my thread on energy: a strategic national issue).
- but in parallel, you use workers (and later engineers, or some kind of more efficient worker evolving with explosives and bulldozer tehcnologies) to conduct specific public tasks like roads, highways, railways, airports, fortresses, etc...

So combining over time improvement and workers seems the most real solution to me.
And if we want to improve micro management (which I personnally like, being fond of controlling all levels and aspects of my game) we should also make workers' work dependant on the availability of a public work budget (to be collected nationally through macro economic indicators like in CTP2, but used through workers that can be captured or killed like in Civ).

Ideally, to satisfy everybody, the game should give an option for activating or not micro managmeent, so that fans of pure military strategy can still play Civ rather than desert it for Risk. But they probably already did, over bored by the lousy military handling.

[Addled Platypus]

I like the public works system as well


How is this for a twist

If there are Idle workers, they can contribute to building a wonder

[Skanky Burns]

Civ3 style - Workers working the land. Physical units. 26 41.94%
CtP-style Public Works 26 41.94%

Well this poll was decisive.

[snoopy369]

I of course vote Civ3 style, from those of you who read my posts

Skanky, you should make that first post without any bias -- ie, take out the "micromanagement hell" part, and anything else like that. Original posts in polls should be informational, not biasing.

[Panag]

hi ,

grap , if you want to know how it looks like in real live , take a look at Israel , from desert to plains , from plains to gras , ..... with loads of labor , thats why it should take like 24 turns or so , and loads of water , ..... so only squares with special irrigation should get transformation , ...... and for the next 24 turns those tiles should lose one shield as to cover the work thats done there , .....

have a nice day

[Lord_Davinator]

let nature take it course... and if you do not like what nature does... take her in your hands and shake her until she does what you want her to do

[Addled Platypus]

tiles should lose one shield as to cover the work thats done there


I like the way you think panag


what else is locked up inside


Ideas like that smack of thought

[GePap]

I laid out my proposals eslewhere.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

i dont know if this would work, but have a city improvment called Mines, Roads, Irrigation that cost a certain number of shields. everytime it gets completed, it irrigates/builds mines/ etc on the square that you click on in the city view.

[Addled Platypus]

How many here have the 1.22 patch for conquests?

There is an improvement made to workers actions

can auto build roads/rails- click the button/click destination
sit back and watch the progress (and does a good job of it too!)
It does take the best way to get there.

several other auto buttons for the worker


Now to waste several more hours experiment with the other buttons!

[Jonny]

I really like wrylachlan's Public Works Manager proposal from earlier in this thread. It still allows the player to control how each individual tile is improved, but without the hassle of moving every single worker around.

[Tassadar500]

It looks like people are pretty split between Civ III terrain improvement and CTP terrain improvement. I think, though, that Civ IV will stick to the normal Civ series style of improvement.

[peteruk223]

I voted CtP becuase it was much better to use and easyer. It also saved time aswell well thats what I tought.

[Drachasor]

Well, I have a few ideas.

1. A CtP public work system is used, but you can still build worker units. Workers can decrease the time it takes an improvement to appear. They also allow you to build outside your territory (not at increased speed though). This latter effect only works on the square the worker is standing on.

2. Here's more hybrid system. Workers are used to build forts, airbases, and other tile improvements that don't give resources bonuses. A public works system is used for tile improvements, like farms and mines, that give a resource bonus. Workers can still decrease the time it takes for the latter to appear.

Both systems dramatically reduce the number of workers you need, but allow you to use them if you like to micromanage.

Now, I can see a lot of objections to the second idea, as it seems overly cumbersome. However, if currently proposed ideas are used to decrease road/rail sprawl (give no resource bonus, cities gain trade bonuses by being connected to the road network, etc), then the number of workers will also be very small, but of significant use (road building, fort building, etc). Also, if my idea about letting cities give and take shields to/from a national store is implemented, then excess shields in this store can be used to build improvements.

Anyhow, I think it is high time Civ moved away from the extremely cumbersome and time consuming pure worker-model.

-Drachasor

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Hi Drachosar,

Your idea is VERY similar to what I've been suggesting.
My idea is that a worker is attached to the city which builds it-though it can be 'vectored' to another city via a central 'pool' in the Capital. These workers determine how quickly a specific terrain improvement/terraforming job is done-wheras your PW budget effects how many jobs you can have going at any one time.
For instance, lets say that you want to build mines, and mines cost 200 points each, and require 8 turns to build. If you have 600 points, then you can undertake the building of three mines before you run out of 'money', and they will be complete in 8 turns. If you have 3 workers in your worker pool, then you can assign them to each of your 3 mine building jobs-thus maybe reducing the time taken to 6 turns each. The downside of workers is that they require money and food to 'survive'-the amount being dictated by your wages and rations settings (as per CtP). Slaves, OTOH, require money and half as much food, though if you have slaves and you set your rations too low, then you run the risk of a slave revolt. If you emancipate your slaves at any point, then they will join your normal worker pool. Oh and, BTW, in my system slaves (and workers for that matter) can be 'sacrificed' to generate shields towards whatever project you're doing. Also, certain improvements (like labour farms, slave markets etc) can generate additional food, income and shields for the city-dependant on how many slaves the city has.
The number of workers assigned to a terrain improvement job determines the chance of your workers being 'captured' if that square has been overrun by an enemy unit. Even ig you haven't assigned any UNITS to that job, an enemy unit has a VERY small chance of generating a 'slave unit' if it overruns the square. In this instance, you will probably lose a small proportion of your population in the process.
One last thing is that, in order to do jobs outside of a city radius, you require your national Public Works budget, and you can assign any workers (or slaves) currently in your 'central pool' to shorten the length of a job.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[Addled Platypus]

Well said "The_Aussie_Lurker"


To furhter clarify

Depending on the amount of workers and depending on the amount of "jobs"

This could be like the trade screen, were I could select by job a different amount for each.
EXAMPLE
Total workers 10
Mine 3
Irragate 2
Clear forrest 5

Then you could select what city should get mined first?
and or pollution/forrest cleared

I would like to see a quick and easy interface

[Urban Ranger]

No Workers - the only advantage of them is getting killed by enemy combat units.

I suggest a combination system. A civilization can order certain tile to be worked on, and specify how many population points are to be used. Then the city (or cities) closest to that tile loses that many population points when work is in progress. Of course, the people would need food and payment.

A tile will also be improved overtime depending on how often it is worked, but it seems this is a bit limited. IOW it is very unlikely for any terrain conversion to occur. However roads, irrigation, etc. will be built.

[Kuciwalker]

I like the system proposed in a previous thread, where you create an improvement similarly to the way you do in CtP(2), and some of your workers automatically are set to goto the tile and do the improvement.

[dannubis]

and something related
the citizens working your tiles should become more productive once you reach a certain technological level.

i mean: a single farmer nowadays can produce a lot more food than lets say 100 years ago ... the same goes for a miner ...

[patcon]

The PW manager that some people claim reduces micromanagement doesn't seem to do that to me. You have assign output to a PW fund, then click on a tile to create the improvement there? How is that different than building a worker, sending him to a tile, and giving him a task?

When I need to do a lot of improvements, I create SoW's (Stacks of Workers) and move them in groups. The real drag is having to click "clean pollution" 8 times or more. If there could be a "stack task" analog to the "move stack" feature that would help a lot.

The "Guild Hall" idea got me to thinking, superworker specialized units. Once a civ acquires a requisite tech (different techs for different actions) a city with a Guild Hall and build superworkers skilled in one particular action (farmers, miners, road crews, lumberjacks, swamp rats, EPA workers, etc.). These would cost as much as 2 normal workers (shields and pop). The superworker would work at his specialized action with the speed of 3 normal workers (a gain of 50%), but at the speed of 1 normal worker on other actions (a loss of 50%, the price of specialization). Maybe allow workers to join into superworker specialized units; 2 workers can travel to a city with a Guild Hall and be upgraded into a superworker in a manner similar to military upgrades. (If the idea of combining 2 units into 1 is too hard, just make them more expensive in shields an 1 in pop.)

[Kuciwalker]

When I need to do a lot of improvements, I create SoW's (Stacks of Workers) and move them in groups. The real drag is having to click "clean pollution" 8 times or more. If there could be a "stack task" analog to the "move stack" feature that would help a lot.

I'm pretty sure they're even planning to have that in C3C in another patch, so it'll definately be in cIV.