A drawback of grouping workers?

[drsparnum]

Yeah, don't take my complaining here as wanting workers out or anything. I think the increased number of worker improvements that allow more city specialization is the second biggest improvement from Civ3 to 4 (after the changing of corruption to paying a civ wide maintenance cost).

[Blaupanzer]

One worker per city is a good rule of thumb. If you're India, a few less. Note you can usually poach workers from the AI, but it's really an exploit.

One problem with worker stacks in earlier versions, the AI bee-lining to take them from you, seems to have gone away in CIV IV. The AI will take freestanding workers, however. The other problem, leftover worker moves by some workers in a stack, can only be solved if you "pile on" workers without actually grouping them or if you check every stack every turn. In the later game, while you are busy fixing messes where your allies pillaged improvements in the land you were conquering, stacks are close enough. A few lost worker moves are not that critical when you are concentrating on the "front," such as it is.

[Generaldoktor]

It is still lost efficiency and unnecessary. These manic-phobes about micromanagement ought to stick to chess. I just got done playing a few centuries; I got workers running around conquered Spanish territory in stacks, (including cleaning "mess" from Catherine's pillaging, as described above. ) I want this done as quick as possible because, believe it or not, I'm the front runner on Noble/Aggressive/Raging/Continents with 12 other civs picked for their aggressiveness and I got to the top of that heap landlocked on a continent!

These captured Spanish ports are my first ports of the game and my "pals" have had Astronomy for about 50 years now. Also, dear ally Catherine is No. 2 dog on the lawn and she might just eye me next if I don't get my act up and running from the recent war. (She pillaged a lot, but conquered considerably less, typical AI.)

Point being; click the stack, see if any of the workers are still showing yellow or green dots in the upper left, indicating they still have movement/labor left over. Hit the "same type" orders button on the interface to regroup the live ones. Move them to the next task, leaving the spent ones behind, (until next turn.) There! Was that hard? I've been saying this ever since this thread got started practically and everybody thinks its a bad idea. I get two-three projects done per turn on Marathon with stacks varying from six to ten workers. There is a small amount of micromanagement involved, but once you get used to moving the keys, it is very minimal. The results, especially on Marathon, which does tend to plod a bit, are very gratifying.