How do I use a work boat in Civilization 4?

I've invented "sailing", and I have built a work boat. I can sail it out where there are resources (food and coins, for example), but there is nothing I can do.

I thought there should be some options similar to what Workers have. For instance, workers have options to build improvements like farms. When I select a work boat there is no option to build a similar improvement.

How do I use work boats effectively?

Solution 1:

Work boats can only create improvements on tiles with special ocean resources. The water tile must contain clams, fish, crabs, whales, or oil. Furthermore, the tile must be in your territory.

Additionally, in the case of oil, you'll need Plastics to construct an Offshore Platform, and in the case of Whales you'll need to have Optics to construct Whaling Boats.

Unlike workers, work boats are consumed when they build their tile improvement. So if you have 2 fish tiles in your city's radius, you'll need 2 work boats to get the bonuses from both tiles.

In this screenshot, you can see 2 "fish" resources are in the radius of my city. I have a work boat on the lower fish resource tile. When a work boat is on a resource tile, you'll have a special command available to construct the resource improvement, which I've circled.

There are little "fish" icons pointing to these tiles, if you don't have these you can press Ctrl+R to make them show up, I believe. The tiles have blue circles because I think I have some sort of "recommend worker actions" option turned on in the preferences.

The work boat will not be able to do anything on any of the other water tiles in the city's radius - only the two fish tiles are able to be improved by the work boat.

Solution 2:

The easiest way to use workboats is to set them to automatic. This will cause them to seek out any usable tiles and build the proper improvement. I usually just have a fleet of automatic workboats roaming around for whenever I enfold a resource tile.