Worker strategies? and ? on overpopulation

[zabrak]

So maybe that's what caused my super low income? Too quick an expansion without the proper economic structures in place to support it?

Spoken like a pro. It's the city maintenance costs that are killing you. Each city you acquire not only adds its own maintenance costs, but boosts the maintenance cost of every other city you own. This can make even one, seemingly trivial, acquisition shift your entire economy from thriving to crashing. I usually raze nearly every city I take until a few techs past currency (markets and the trade route bonus) and code of laws (courthouses and the Forbidden Palace).

I've never turned worker automation on myself, since that's one aspect of micromanaging I tend to enjoy. Based on what others have said, and on my observations of the AI's lands, the computer loves cottages for most of the game, then later on will focus on food to the exclusion of all else, even tearing down fully improved cottages (I believe it relies on pumping out Great People to do its research). That's one thing I'd fault it for, the other two are:

- It has poor prioritization and strategic planning. I don't think it communicates with its build-planning script, so it doesn't, for example, save chopping its forests for key wonders. It also doesn't seem to realize that an impending invasion means you need that mine operating now, not another cottage, even though you'll need both eventually. Nor does it understand that railroads, as Yosho mentioned, give a production boost to mines, lumbermills, and oil wells, and won't prioritize building them there.

- It always builds the resource-access improvement, even if you have plenty of that resource and no viable trade partners. Dye, incense, silk, furs, and uranium all produce less commerce with plantations/camps/mines than fully improved cottages, and a railroad plus mine on stone puts out more hammers than a quarry. But the computer will keep building the access improvement regardless of how many you have or what the relative strategic values are.

[Overcast32]

Also - don't forget...

If your empire becomes to "lop-sided" it will cost you extra city maintenance as well. I believe the further a city is from the capital the more it's going to cost in upkeep.

This is where the palace improvement helps out - make your Captial a central city, it might help save you a few coins.

Don't build the palace in every city! It's more of a way to move it - not really a building, per se....

I made that mistake for the longest time in Alpha Centauri. I'd wonder why my economy would fluxate so much - it's because I kept relocating my headquarters, I didn't read the description of that improvement right. just thought I'd mention that, I can't be the only one who didn't notice that at first! hehe

I tend to build improvements in a very limited fashion, I like to keep some forest around a city, if at all possible - then if I need to hurry some production, I can. If not, it makes the map look better anyway. I guess I'll build with more imagenation than anything, hehe.

I like to put cottages on the roads between the cities, primarily and then put farms in the other terrain. I almost never build more than 4 farms, so far it seems to be just fine that way. I've never yet ran into a real problem with starvation. I think only one city out of all the ones I've had actually ran a shortage on food.

[justinparks]

Apparently I'm in the minority here... I tend to smash all forests on my border cities as soon as I can. Not only to help rush the buildings for the new city, but just to prevent any counter attack from having that extra 50% defensive bonus in my territory. I hate it when a stack is sacking my town, and I KNOW I could smash them to pieces and prevent them from destroying my defensive bonuses / collateral damaging my troops, if it weren't for that damned forest's defensive bonus.

When it comes to building wonders, my towns that have fully improved landscape surrounding them always tend to out do other cities in build times, even after considering the bonus to chopping trees. Never fully understood how to make that work for me. :P

[zabrak]

That's by no means a bad strategy. There are a few things to keep in mind regarding chopping:

- You get more hammers from a chop when it's inside your cultural borders than when it's outside. Sometimes you can wait a few turns for your borders to expand to make it more valuable.

- The chop hammers get multiplied by the production bonus of whatever you're working on (organized religion for buildings, Heroic Epic for units, Industrious civs with wonders, Financial civs with banks, etc.). In other words, depending on the beneficiary city's project, that forest might be worth a lot more if you time the chop bonus properly.

- Certain terrain just won't support the food required to pop-rush, and cash-rushing doesn't really get optimal until Communism. A grassland forest with a lumbermill and railroad feeds itself and gets you three raw hammers. Two of those kinds of tiles get the same food and more production than a farmed grassland and a mined/railroaded grassland hill. The health bonus can be pretty useful as soon as the late early game. And it's not like you can replant them if you change your mind later. So while it's certainly not always the case, sometimes keeping those forests around is a good idea.

[Strategist83]

Originally posted by kittenOFchaos


Agreed, with the exception of extracting key resources windmills should replace your mines later on in the game.

Interesting, I don't replace mines. Which is a very good thing when suddenly a silver deposit is discovered somewhere.

[MadDjinn]

one thing that I didn't see mentioned for happiness is the Globe Theatre...

if you happen to have a city that can get a really high Health level, but you're dragging the bottom for happiness, use the Globe...

it means 0 (that's forever 0) unhappy people in that city. it also means you have no reason to build things directly for happiness in that city. Temples, maybe if you're going that route for the numbers, but Colliseums aren't needed etc...

[justinparks]

Actually, speaking of not having to build buildings...

If I have a city that has more happy people than angry people... or healthy people than sick people... is it worth it at all to build buildings that help against sick / angry people?

I haven't moved past Noble yet, so my towns are, for the most part, still all pretty healthy without much effort by me. I ended up with a lot of cities where the only things left to build were Recycling Centers, Hospitals, Supermarkets, and other buildings where the only percieved benefit to building them was to increase my +healthy numbers. In many of those cities, I had FAR more healthy citizens than sick...

Is it worth it to built those buildings anyway? Do I see any increase in culture / production / ANYTHING from building a Recycling Center in a city where my healthy population is easily double my sick population?

[zabrak]

Nope, no benefit to boosting a city's happy or healthy points other than avoiding unhappy or unhealthy citizens.

Of course, sometimes it's worthwhile to build up a big lead to give yourself some flexibility. Pop-rushing increases a city's unhappiness for a while, for example. So does a long war, especially against a civ with cultural influence in a city. I also recall chopping a bunch of forests to help build factories faster, and the double whammy to healthiness in my cities without aquaducts was unexpected.

The other thing is that buildings often have more than one function besides boosting healthiness or happiness. Supermarkets and recycling centers don't (and so I rarely build them, because like you, I've secured so many health resources by the time they're available that I'm rolling in healthy points), but hospitals give units resting there a healing bonus. Granaries, harbors, and grocers have health benefits, but also growth, trade, and cash benefits, respectively. I rarely build temples for their primary benefit, the happiness boost, but rather so I can use more priest specialists and build more culture-magnifying cathedrals.

Fortunately, as I said earlier, most of the game's processes are fairly transparent.

[MadDjinn]

yeah, what he said...

happy citizens can be hard to come by in a war, so definitely make sure you've got room there if at all possible... but at 2:1 ratio, you likely have no worries.

and as you move past Noble, those buildings will become more interesting to you (especially the health ones late game) as the base values drop for you.