PTR in Ancient Times

[IronSpam]

Has anyone perfected making use of adding workers and settlers to city populations in the Ancient Era? I've often used population transfer resettlement in later times, but not really in the early game because I'm concentrating on other things.

In the Middle Ages, I settled a city off of my main continent with lots of hills and mountains, some ocean squares, and only two or three grasslands. As a fully industrialized city, this place was definitely a candidate for Wonder builder in the later game. Once I got over the corruption hump and built a few improvements, I realized that it wasn’t going to grow fast after about size twelve or so, especially with limited extra food sources. But, once it grew to that size, I knew from the food count that it could safely support the population needed to take advantage of those high shield production tiles.

To bring it up to the size of my more established cities, the main continent sent about a dozen workers over and they added themselves to the new shield production city, plus two neighboring cities. Luckily, the population cap of 12 imposed by not having sanitation provided lots of opportunity to build workers. I think it’s a waste not to convert the unspent growth into workers.

I was very happy to see that I didn’t have to wait for shield production to come up to speed as the new population worked the mines that were made just for them. Incidentally, I miscalculated the food count and found myself one short. The city oscillated between size 19 and 20 for the rest of the game, plus it seemed there was always a square that was either polluted or being cleared of pollution.

Later on I used this strategy to settle some remote tundra land masses. Thank goodness for harbors to give at least a supporting food supply from the sea, if not a growth supply. Look for those fish!

The strategy resulted in a conscious population shift from high-growth to low-growth cities, with transports carrying their precious cargoes around the map to add to far flung cities. Unfortunately settlers and workers cannot be moved around the board by airport, which was an awesome feature I used in Civ II. (I found that out the hard way.) Slow boat is fine, though – the trip is better than waiting dozens of turns for city size to fully mature.

My question is this. Does it make sense to employ this idea during the Ancient Era? Does it slow down growth to build workers simply for population transfer resettlement? I think I’ll patent that term -- Population Transfer Resettlement (PTR). It might catch on, especially since IFE is about to be patched out of existence.

As long as the food supply is there to support the existing population, why not use settlers or workers to skip those periods between population jumps?

The best justification I can come up with is that a city or cities with lots of food production can essentially do all of the population growth for other slower cities that are geared towards shield production to build wonders, which are sometimes lacking extra food for growth. Of course, those cities have to be prepared for the sudden leaps and have temples and colosseums built and ready to quell civil disorder from the resulting overcrowding.

In the Ancient Era, similar to the time before sanitation, there is a time before Construction is discovered and aqueducts are built. Cities are wasting growth because they’re capped at the population six ceiling. Or even worse, they go into civil disorder at five or six without the right edifices. Does it simply make sense to relocate those people rather than have them waste the growth or converting them to entertainers?

I haven't tried it yet, but any ideas for or against PTR in Ancient Times are welcome.

[Fitz]

I'd say convert them to workers, but don't resettle right off the bat. Most cities seem to get up to the size supportable by their city improvements fairly fast in the late Ancient era. In the early, your usually busy founding new cities anyway.

Those workers can easily be used to jump straight to size 10-11 once you get the aqueducts/improvements in place to handle the excess size. Basically, you get your size 12 cities population instantly, you just put half in temporary storage until you are ready for it.

Or you could just pop-rush the excess away.

[gus_smedstad]

I've done this in ancient times. In particular, there's the odd property of the size 6-7 transition that if you have a size 7 city with a grainery, and you build a worker, the city grows back to size 7 the next turn because the grainery has stored enough food for complete growth (20 food at size 6, 40 food at size 7).

I've used this effect to have a single size 6 city pump the growth of all the other cities in my empire. It feels like an exploit, though.

It's not something I'd do if the city generating the worker had anything else to do with the shields used to build the worker. However, there are many points in the game when you have essentially nothing to build with many cities, since multiple cities can't co-operated to build Wonders the way they could in Civ 2.

[Kinjiru]

This is not something I am advocating since it is way too powerful, but the first game I tried using the massive pop-rush strategy was actually a combination of pop-rush and PTR.

My second city was founded on a floodplain on the south side and 3!! wheat tiles on the north/northeast. So, I pop-rushed military units from my three staging points and used my massive food city to replenish the population points constantly.

So I would say a straight up PTR can be effective, but you need to have some seriously high food producing cities to make it work in the ancient era.

[Aeson]

I've found that adding captured workers to cities and then pop rushing military units is very powerful. It does away with the need for graneries or even good food sources. After the first few cities you raze, it just snowballs out of control. Each worker becoming a new military unit taking more workers becoming more military...

[SofaKing]

Also, when you hit the pop cap you can build workers, move them to your capital and trade them to other civs. I'm not sure about the morality of worker trading, but it's an efficient use of excess growth and production.