Automated worker problem???

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

I'm used to workers falling asleep in cities in the late game. I just
had something worse, though.

I had conquered the Romans and the Maya, leaving large areas in need
of improvement. (The Romans never had iron, no railroads.) I'm still
in a battle with the Iroquois. During that battle a bunch of mech inf
got loose into what had been the Maya lands and seriously pillaged it.
I finally finished walking up the coast to connect to this territory
(I had conquered it with RoP through the Iroquois lands). There's
probably 20 untouched squares in the Roman area, another 10 in lands I
had taken from the Iroquios and the work isn't getting done.

Ok, I've got a bunch of sleepy workers. I find them, grab a bunch of
them and send them over into the areas in need of improvement and
start automating them again. The AI starts dispatching workers to
squares in need of improvement but there are still 2 right there that
can be reached in one turn but the worker vanishes. Where is it?
Halfway around the world in the city I just dragged them out of!

Does the system perhaps have a maximum number of automated workers
that it's willing to think about, the rest being stored in the
cities??

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

<SNIP>

Short answer - don't automate your workers.
I've never known the AI do anything sensible with them.

Perhaps - Auto clean pollution or automate this city with no altering.
Otherwise forget it.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

On Sun, 01 May 2005 17:20:07 -0700, Loren Pechtel
<lorenpechtel@removethis.hotmail.com> wrote:

>I'm used to workers falling asleep in cities in the late game. I just
>had something worse, though.
>
>I had conquered the Romans and the Maya, leaving large areas in need
>of improvement. (The Romans never had iron, no railroads.) I'm still
>in a battle with the Iroquois. During that battle a bunch of mech inf
>got loose into what had been the Maya lands and seriously pillaged it.
>I finally finished walking up the coast to connect to this territory
>(I had conquered it with RoP through the Iroquois lands). There's
>probably 20 untouched squares in the Roman area, another 10 in lands I
>had taken from the Iroquios and the work isn't getting done.
>
>Ok, I've got a bunch of sleepy workers. I find them, grab a bunch of
>them and send them over into the areas in need of improvement and
>start automating them again. The AI starts dispatching workers to
>squares in need of improvement but there are still 2 right there that
>can be reached in one turn but the worker vanishes. Where is it?
>Halfway around the world in the city I just dragged them out of!
>
>Does the system perhaps have a maximum number of automated workers
>that it's willing to think about, the rest being stored in the
>cities??

Not exactly. The AI won't use too many workers on a given square.
If there is no other place for them to go, they'll go back to storage.
The AI has become better at managing this with later versions of the
game, but it still "wastes" a lot of potential worker effort. OTOH,
from the AI's POV, the "resting" worker isn't committed on the next
turn, so if something should come up (like pollution), they'll be
ready to go. If the AI used a lookahead scheme to allocate *all*
workers, and could know how many spare ones it had, it could assign
the right number of extra workers optimally.

Note that excess workers aren't exactly "wasted", it is just that
above a certain point (for most things, the number which makes it take
two turns to complete) they could do work on more places, and finish
roughly in the same time for all of them. Of course, that means you
get any individual project done slower, but that is usually
acceptable. For pollution, though, getting the polluted square
cleared faster is worth the effort. The AI, though, isn't quite smart
enough to figure out how to do this without wasting its worker supply.

The AI also is a bit more sensitive to worker risks in Conquests.
Not perfect, but it seems less inclined to send workers out to war
zones than previously.

I never automate more than a small fraction of my workers, and those
only in my core safe home territory, fully road or railroaded for easy
mobility. They do a fair job at handling pollution without my
intervention, but aren't really that good for much else.

The specialized automation -- build road to, the nearest city
development ones, clear jungle/forest, etc. -- aren't too bad to use.
The workers will finish it eventually, becoming free, not going to
sleep.


--
*-__Jeffery Jones__________| *Starfire* |____________________-*
** Muskego WI Access Channel 14/25 <http://www.execpc.com/~jeffsj/mach7/>
*Starfire Design Studio* <http://www.starfiredesign.com/>

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

On Mon, 02 May 2005 01:07:58 GMT, "Fishman ><\(\(\(°>"
<nospam@butfish.com> wrote:

><SNIP>
>
>Short answer - don't automate your workers.
>I've never known the AI do anything sensible with them.
>
>Perhaps - Auto clean pollution or automate this city with no altering.
>Otherwise forget it.

I've got plenty of workers (I've been on the warpath for a while and I
favor building workers to bring the captured cities down to size 1 if
my enemy is still around. Note that when you build workers out of
enemy citizens they are slave workers--no upkeep.) and it would be
micro hell to deal with them manually.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

On Mon, 02 May 2005 11:19:27 -0500, Jeffery S. Jones
<jeffsj@execpc.com> wrote:

>>Does the system perhaps have a maximum number of automated workers
>>that it's willing to think about, the rest being stored in the
>>cities??
>
> Not exactly. The AI won't use too many workers on a given square.
>If there is no other place for them to go, they'll go back to storage.
>The AI has become better at managing this with later versions of the
>game, but it still "wastes" a lot of potential worker effort. OTOH,
>from the AI's POV, the "resting" worker isn't committed on the next
>turn, so if something should come up (like pollution), they'll be
>ready to go. If the AI used a lookahead scheme to allocate *all*
>workers, and could know how many spare ones it had, it could assign
>the right number of extra workers optimally.

That's not what's going on.

I had gobs of workers stuck in a city and a whole bunch of untouched
tiles within my cultural radii.

> The AI also is a bit more sensitive to worker risks in Conquests.
>Not perfect, but it seems less inclined to send workers out to war
>zones than previously.

Yes, I figured that some areas that weren't being touched were because
they were near war zones. However, squares 15 behind the battle lines
aren't under threat.

> The specialized automation -- build road to, the nearest city
>development ones, clear jungle/forest, etc. -- aren't too bad to use.
>The workers will finish it eventually, becoming free, not going to
>sleep.

Yeah, the build-to commands are nice.

 

[nick]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

Totally agree. The only time I automate them is for pollution and even then
they sometimes spend a turn doing nothing even when there's still pollution
for them to deal with!


"Fishman ><(((°>" <nospam@butfish.com> wrote in message
news:O3fde.14443$5A3.7716@newsfe4-win.ntli.net...
> <SNIP>
>
> Short answer - don't automate your workers.
> I've never known the AI do anything sensible with them.
>
> Perhaps - Auto clean pollution or automate this city with no altering.
> Otherwise forget it.
>

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

On Sun, 01 May 2005 17:20:07 -0700, Loren Pechtel
<lorenpechtel@removethis.hotmail.com> wrote:

>I'm used to workers falling asleep in cities in the late game. I just
>had something worse, though.
>
>I had conquered the Romans and the Maya, leaving large areas in need
>of improvement. (The Romans never had iron, no railroads.) I'm still
>in a battle with the Iroquois. During that battle a bunch of mech inf
>got loose into what had been the Maya lands and seriously pillaged it.
>I finally finished walking up the coast to connect to this territory
>(I had conquered it with RoP through the Iroquois lands). There's
>probably 20 untouched squares in the Roman area, another 10 in lands I
>had taken from the Iroquios and the work isn't getting done.
>
>Ok, I've got a bunch of sleepy workers. I find them, grab a bunch of
>them and send them over into the areas in need of improvement and
>start automating them again. The AI starts dispatching workers to
>squares in need of improvement but there are still 2 right there that
>can be reached in one turn but the worker vanishes. Where is it?
>Halfway around the world in the city I just dragged them out of!
>
>Does the system perhaps have a maximum number of automated workers
>that it's willing to think about, the rest being stored in the
>cities??

I have never seen automation send more than two or three workers to a
square for even a difficult job like clearing a jungle. I thought it
was strange that they would hide in a city when there is still work to
do. They also don't seem to differentiate very well between squares
within city borders and territory squares which cannot be worked.

I have seen them do much worse than this though. I recall conquering
a distant city and having all my workers run though a neighbors civ to
get there. They all got stuck in a pile half way because something
blocked their passage. Other times they all hurried into a war zone
forcing me to spread out my already thin army to protect them. I just
turn off automation during war. If they move at the end of the turn I
can't even protect them.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

On Tue, 03 May 2005 10:15:31 -0700, Loren Pechtel
<lorenpechtel@removethis.hotmail.com> wrote:

>I've got plenty of workers (I've been on the warpath for a while and I
>favor building workers to bring the captured cities down to size 1 if
>my enemy is still around. Note that when you build workers out of
>enemy citizens they are slave workers--no upkeep.) and it would be
>micro hell to deal with them manually.

I find the AI has few workers left when I conquer a civ in Conquests.
In PTW or before I recall capturing dozens of workers in the final AI
cities. I remember one AI having something like 50 slave workers
from all these different civs they coquered. I just took over three
civs in my current game and did not get even one woker from within
city borders. My only chance is to get them still working with fast
units. The AI must sell them off or something.

Maybe your solution will help make up for that. And like you said
save on gold too.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

On Mon, 02 May 2005 11:19:27 -0500, Jeffery S. Jones
<jeffsj@execpc.com> wrote:

> I never automate more than a small fraction of my workers, and those
>only in my core safe home territory, fully road or railroaded for easy
>mobility. They do a fair job at handling pollution without my
>intervention, but aren't really that good for much else.

Automation works well near the end of the game if pollution begins to
alter squares. Those little messages go by too fast for me that say
things like "this square dried up".

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (More info?)

On Fri, 06 May 2005 20:05:46 -0400, P12 <nowhere@all.com> wrote:

>I have never seen automation send more than two or three workers to a
>square for even a difficult job like clearing a jungle. I thought it
>was strange that they would hide in a city when there is still work to
>do. They also don't seem to differentiate very well between squares
>within city borders and territory squares which cannot be worked.

To *SOME* extent it's been fixed with Conquests. When the Mayan nuke
got through my SDI virtually every worker I had descended on the spot
to fix it.

>I have seen them do much worse than this though. I recall conquering
>a distant city and having all my workers run though a neighbors civ to
>get there. They all got stuck in a pile half way because something
>blocked their passage. Other times they all hurried into a war zone
>forcing me to spread out my already thin army to protect them. I just
>turn off automation during war. If they move at the end of the turn I
>can't even protect them.

Again, conquests seems to be better at this. I've lost almost no
workers despite having them on automate. Few of them have gone near
the line of battle.

However, they have omitted many other tasks also.

I just had a thought: The tasks they were omitting were at least for
the most part in an area where to get there by the most direct means
would have taken them next to the line of battle. There was this
Iroquios finger sticking pretty deep into my territory. (Actually the
result of my picking on the easier targets first.) Maybe they weren't
willing to go next to the battle line and didn't have the brains to
see that they could go around.