Sometimes you can miss something really obvious.

[couerdelion]

Some common practice can be a little habit-forming and I’m sure that many of you will have, at some time, put two or more workers on the same job to complete it faster. For many improvements this makes perfect sense – rapid linking of cities, opening a new resource etc. But there is one where it is possibly to be the least efficient option, that of chopping (forest of jungle)

I will use a case where you are chopping some building to completion and need two forest tiles chopped. Moving both workers to the same tile and chopping this will take 3 turns (Epic speed). Repeating the process for the second tile will take another 3 turns giving a total of 6 turns to chop.

If I use the first move to move the workers to different forest tiles I can then use the next 4 turns to chop both down and saving myself 17% of the total time. Even if you take one extra turn to get worker 2 to forest tile then I still save 1 worker turn since the first will be free to move somewhere else on the next turn.

[Shaka II]

Yes, pairing workers is generally not a good thing to do for that reason, but it also depends on whether one cut will do a critical job such as getting a settler or a wonder out a turn or two earlier. So, a calculation in hammers needed and turns to cut is in order for such critical builds.