settlers and workers

[star mouse]

Originally posted by lockstep
My suggestion for a civ3 expansion pack: Keep the 'worker' unit, but add a 'public works' system that can be applied only within yor civ´s cultural borders.

Keep the workers, but introduce public works. My idea for a public works system is a single global "orders queue" for all workers. Available workers will fulfil the orders as efficiently as possible. If one needs more workers, the advisors tell the player. If the workers are idle, the advisors also tell the player.

For example, one might have orders to place a road on tiles so that two major cities are connected. All the available workers will flock to this area to complete the road. While the workers are building these roads, the player can then decide to build a mine on the hill, and irrigate some squares. When the workers finish the road, they will then complete these additional orders.

This idea combines the best of both worlds. The player has the workers/settlers of CIV, and the ease of ordering them around of the CTP PW system.

It should also be possible to give individual workers specific orders.

The problem with this system is the possibility of workers wandering all over the map, completing orders strictly in the order they were placed on the queue.

ADG mentioned not building roads as part of a tech-based strategy in CTP, which reminds me that roads seem to have a radically greater importance in Civ3 than any of its predecessors (direct lineage or not). From my understanding, we will need a road connecting any city to any resource that it wishes to have access to (either within its cultural borders, just outside its cultural borders, or via another city). Furthermore, trade will also require roads.

So, not only do we have the added decision-making with regard to population points v. expansion, we also have the quandry of develop v. expand. Should be very ineresting, indeed!

I can hardly wait.

[Colonel Kraken]

Star Mouse, I think you have a GREAT idea. This would alleviate my concerns, and, like you said, give us the best of both worlds. If I could "build" a road, let's say, but have it greyed out (or something similar) to show it isn't currently finished -- the workers would then automatically congregate to this new construction project to complete it.

Check out the demo of Rails Across America. It has a really nice system of showing railroads in construction versus ones that are completed.

I would like this very much.

[Adagio]

Yeah, Star Mouse have a rgeat idea there, though Firaxis need then to make it work completely so it doesn't make any dumb desisions, like 2 workers walks to a unbuild road far away while it is obious that worker 1 will have finnished the whole road before worker 2 arives, which I guess will be diffecult to implent...

[jsw363]

There's a system similar to this in Tropico. You set up a space for a building and then workers come and build what you've set up. It's a bit annoying sometimes since they are hard to control and they don't always finish the buildings as well as they would if you could control all of them. Also this system is made for a game with more worker units. There is a priority feature which allows you to prioritize some buildings and downgrade the priority of other buildings.

jsw363, I hadn't recognized the similarity to the worker concept in Tropico. Good catch!

Of course, the inability to fully control those workers--beyond setting general priorities--is probably more realistic, although frustrating.

[Edward]

Not having played CTP, I too am unfamiliar with the Public Works system. Can a city only improve terrain in it's city radius? How do you make roads between distant cities (through the wilderness beyond the cities)? Or are roads merely for production rather than travel in CTP?

[Comrade Tribune]

I would want settlers and workers AND spies AND diplomats AND caravans AND explorers AND missionaries AND some entirely new civilian units...

Why should 95 % of everything that moves be military?

[star mouse]

Originally posted by Edward
Not having played CTP, I too am unfamiliar with the Public Works system. Can a city only improve terrain in it's city radius? How do you make roads between distant cities (through the wilderness beyond the cities)? Or are roads merely for production rather than travel in CTP?

A player could only place PW within the borders of their civilisation. In CTP, borders were defined as the area that your city would cover when it expanded to its maximum size. In CTP, the area a city exploited depended on the size of a city. For example, a city of size 6 only exploited the 8 tiles surrounding it, but when it grew to size 7, it exploited 21 tiles. The maximum size of a city radius is 5, but this could be configured.

The annoying thing would be tiles outside a city radius could not be built on. You could have a single tile outside your empire with cities on all four sides, but you could not build a road on it.

As for my idea, a good way of automating the workers would be for a worker to pick the task in the queue that would take the least time to finish, with a weighting added depending on queue position. The length of time needed to complete a task is the sum of the time needed to get to the tile and the time to complete the task itself. So if a worker needed 3 turns to get to a tile plus 5 turns to build irrigation on that tile, the total time needed to complete the task is 8 turns.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by jsw363
There's a system similar to this in Tropico. You set up a space for a building and then workers come and build what you've set up.

That's a bad system in Tropico.

The Public Works system won't work with Civ 3 where resources are essential when they often lie outside of a civ's cultural border. The system used in SMAC/X seems to be the best so far.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by star mouse
A player could only place PW within the borders of their civilisation. In CTP, borders were defined as the area that your city would cover when it expanded to its maximum size. In CTP, the area a city exploited depended on the size of a city. For example, a city of size 6 only exploited the 8 tiles surrounding it, but when it grew to size 7, it exploited 21 tiles. The maximum size of a city radius is 5, but this could be configured.

The annoying thing would be tiles outside a city radius could not be built on. You could have a single tile outside your empire with cities on all four sides, but you could not build a road on it.

And one more thing, when building an improvent outside the city borders you can't actually see the improvement before an unit have seen the place after it was built, which was too unrealistic because what about the people who built it, couldn't they have drawn the map with the new improvement.

And for 2 cities that are too far away from each other so the nation borders didn't reach each other it became imposible to build a road from one city to another

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Comrade Tribune
I would want settlers and workers AND spies AND diplomats AND caravans AND explorers AND missionaries AND some entirely new civilian units...

Why should 95 % of everything that moves be military?

Caravans? I would hope to never have to return to the system employed where a significant proportion of micromanagement was moving caravans around, and has been made obsolete.

The purpose of not 'moving everything around' is to minimise micromanagement tasks where they are not needed!

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison


Caravans? I would hope to never have to return to the system employed where a significant proportion of micromanagement was moving caravans around, and has been made obsolete.

The purpose of not 'moving everything around' is to minimise micromanagement tasks where they are not needed!

Caravans are needed. I want to use them for smuggling -trading with an enemy- and to simulate American espionage under the cover of free trade (exploration of your opponents, and they can´t do much about it if they don´t want to declare war).

[lockstep]

Originally posted by ADG
And for 2 cities that are too far away from each other so the nation borders didn't reach each other it became imposible to build a road from one city to another

The solution: Establish a third city in between.

No kidding, public works in CtP2 had some problems which I nevertheless deem rectifiable. OTOH, Workers a la SMAC/Civ3 are a potential micromanagement nightmare, at least when playing on large maps. The idea of a 'global' worker build-queue with prioritization orders was tested in Tropico and has, IMO, largely failed.

Originally posted by Urnan Ranger
The Public Works system won't work with Civ 3 where resources are essential when they often lie outside of a civ's cultural border.

To quote myself: 'Keep the 'worker' unit, but add a 'public works' system that can be applied only within yor civ´s cultural borders.'

[Adagio]

Originally posted by lockstep
The idea of a 'global' worker build-queue with prioritization orders was tested in Tropico and has, IMO, largely failed.

You're right it failed, but I believe that idea only was made, but it wasn't repaired in the "palces" it needed to get repaired. Which means the idea could be made to work when using a couple of days (weeks) more to make it work proberly...

[Daoloth]

Hey UberKrux, isn't it embarassing falling for a hoax?

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/predict.htm

And Uber, did you know the word gullible isn't in the dictionary? If you don't believe me- look it up!

[Slax]

Originally posted by Colonel Kraken
I have never understood why so many people think it is so wonderful to micromanage a bunch of settler/worker units all over the map to make roads and other such improvements. I hated that in CivII. Furthermore, removing a population from the city to accomplish this seems extreme to me.

CtPs public works system wasn't perfect but it gave a sense of government projects being completed with public funds and hired hands. And, if you saved up enough, you could build many things at once. This was appropriate simply because every turn spanned 5, 10, 20, or even 50 years.

Although, I must admit, I never have understood why the player (and thus the government of the civ) should be allowed to build things like farms, mines, marketplaces, etc. These are things that would be built privately by entrepreneurial individuals.

Oh well.

I vote for the CTP method, for the reasons mentioned above.

[tuckson]

Originally posted by fluffy
try playing SMAC - the 'new' system has already been tried and tested for 3 years...

Hmmm... maybe I'm a bit of an outsider , but ehhh... I really did not like SMAC at all.

But the decision to split up the old setteler in a seperate settler and a worker seems quite valid to me. Makes planning a bit more easy.

I also rarely played CTP (sold it within a week) and never heard of Tropico. But the idea of a global construction queue sounds pretty nice. As for me I think it should be able to group a couple of workers and link them to a queue. This way you could avoid problems mentioned earlier this tread like workers, wandering half the world to arrive when the job is done. Also the trickyness of having the game decide which workers to put on job will be avoided. And simply ungroup them to let them go their own way.


Thinking 'bout this
Maybe it's even better not to group them. We should just be able to create one or more queues. Then one could link one or more workers to it. (Just an extra order/keycombination, a list of running queues shows up, pick one and the worker starts working at the highest priority job in the queue). When the queue is empty, a message pops up if you want to add jobs or delete the queue. When deleted, all workers become available again. Of course a worker can be disconnected from a queue at any time.

[Inverse Icarus]

whats even better about the seperation between settlers/workers is that in scenarios, you can disable settlers and still improve terrain.

it was messed up when the Russians in the WW2 Scenario started founding millions of new cities.