Hehe, I know what you mean... I always have full production queues so the idle bonuses are pointless to me. But it depends on play style I guess.

Haven't played much of Beta 4 yet, but there have only been a couple of cases in previous games where any of my cities have had a chance to sit idle - there were always useful improvements to be built of one kind or another, and the backwater settlements that didn't need to churn out troops also tended not to reach high levels and get the better buildings.

Then again, it also doesn't help that I never get to the late game on large maps any more due to the load save/crash bug, so my cities tend to be limited in number and geared towards troop production.

Cities, especially now in Beta 4, should never be left idle in the first 100 turns or so. There has to be a prompt when cities go idle and it shouldn't go away until you explicitly select an 'idle' option for the city.

Oh, and by prompt, I mean an obtrusive pop-up every turn.

I think all bonuses when idle should be removed and replaced with something else. Its annoying, and I never want such buildings. It feels half-baked to me. 

I agree that a production warning (with an option to toggle it on/off in options) would be nice. Warlock: Master of the Arcane does this so well, that sometimes I feel the game is playing itself

ofc no but there is ALWAYS something to build

even some research building to have a better research later

right now i just dont see much working

i mean i always choose to build something because if i have 50% research more for few turns then i will have 70 80 less for the next

i dont know  the idea behind is interesting but it doesnt seems to work totally, but im open to hear some different feedback

I agree. Warlock has an excellent solution for that, though it's not completely copyable as the queue there makes a difference between units and buildings.

This sounds like a simple solution worth trying if they can't think of anything better.  I think they call the option in AoW "Produce Goods" or something like that, of course FE doesn't have to use identical terminology.

Anyway, I like the idea.

Yes, FE needs to steal the idea of Civ5, where the Next Turn button isn't even there until you've made all the decisions you need to make.  It gets replaced with a button that addresses the next decision pending.  And yes, "Idle" should be a specific thing you have to set the city to, and it should show what bonuses you will get at that city if you choose it.

I don't like them either. I especially don't like that a Conclave's most significant early game research bonus is when idle. 

i don't like the "when idle" stuff either... maybe if it was an awesome benefit worth doing, but i don't believe the current benefits outweigh building more stuff.

I also agree the "when idle" bonuses are of little use.   I will often not build a building with this bonus unless it comes with another useful bonus or I have just run out of stuff to build near the end of the game and will actually have cities sitting idle.   By that time I am usually just deciding which method I will use to win the game and am powerful enough that the bonuses have little real value since I have tons of gold and have already researched every tech.  They should get rid of them or make them big enough there might actually be a benefit at a particular point n the game where using the idle bonus out-weighs the drawbacks of halting production.

I'm okay with idle bonuses, even if I rarely put them to use. You can actually see the type of idle bonus the city is getting (if any) in the city display bar. My biggest concern is that they often come to early. My guess is that they were implemented to make rush researching the civ tree less impactful. I honestly haven't tried bee-lining warfare instead so I can't say if they are working correctly. Given that research comes from city levels though, and how much a difference food from tech/buildings makes, it's unlikely bee-lining warfare would be a viable strategy.

If they increased base food from grain and reduced grain gained from buildings the idle bonus for warfare civs might become more relevant.

Sort-of agree with OP, but it depends partly on details of implementation.  If they could make it faster to build things and tweak it so some cities would spend more time being idle while top-line specialist cities focused on building stuff, then ok.  Otherwise ..... AoW:SM really did handle this well, like everyone says.