Worker: The thousanth told story

[Game-God]

Originally posted by rah
Yeah, I usually get a couple a game. Always a treat especially if it's a resource you don't alreay have.

In one MP game, my second city was my copper city with food specials and lots of hills. so it became my primary hammer city. 2 additional coppers and a gold appeared during the game in the city fat cross. SWEET.

and all you do is mine and let it sit until something happens?

Damn!

I need to let those workers give me Mine more often

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Game-God


OK so I should prioritize ALL cities to get Hammers or Food initially then when I begin to feel the Financial pinch I should switch over to Cottages or Windmills/Watermills? I notice that the Automated workers usually do this as soon as the technology is available. Maybe they have something afterall.

I don't usually do that, because it takes so long for a cottage to grow; when you build cottages, you want them up ASAP. I usually do mostly cottages/windmills in most of my cities, with perhaps a mine or two for some extra hammers, and make one or two cities that just make as many hammers as possible; it's good to have a few mega-production cities for when you want to make wonders and to just churn out the millitary units.

The fact that mines can occasioanlly give you resources is really neat, but it happens quite rarely, IMHO. Neat bonus, but it's not worth building a mine when a windmill is better just because there's a tiny chance it might eventually give you a resource.

[inca911]

I think the key to efficient worker usage is to optimize city production based on the goal of that city. So you want growth and lots of commerce in bank, grocer, market cities. You want growth and lots of hammers in production cities.

I'm primarily an OCC player, but here are some of my tendencies:
I start with at least two worked cottage tiles. Later game, I will pillage my own cottage tiles and replace them with production-focused improvements--like watermills. The need for production eventually becomes more important than the need for commerce. I often leave five forests unchopped for the health benefits, so I will lumbermill them later. I typically farm floodplains to grow rapidly, but it I'm pre-Globe Theater I will temporarily cottage a single floodplain to be able to adjust growth if my new citizen is going to riot. I'll also add specialists instead of allowing growth and getting a citizen who does nothing for me. That said, if you know you are getting another resource that will enable growth soon, then go ahead and grow and you'll have a jump when the resource gets connected or obtained. I think the key to improvements is to be willing to tear them up and transform cities based on the needs of the game at that point in time. Or at least to adjust the worked tiles as you see fit. I will definitely move a citizen to work a mine instead of a cottage tile if I need something built quickly. I'll then move the citizen back to the nice cottage tile later.

[Game-God]

Originally posted by inca911
I think the key to efficient worker usage is to optimize city production based on the goal of that city. So you want growth and lots of commerce in bank, grocer, market cities. You want growth and lots of hammers in production cities.

I believe in this also. I have tested on several startups and the other game above and found that my worker usage problems were mostly about city usage not being "tuned" to what was needed for the moment. Moreover, I have used workers both automated and manual and found that if following the above ideas from Blake I got some similar usages out of each city though not very much commonality.

Finale. I will be setting up my cities in different locations than before starting this thread, and building individual cities to use the available resources more efficiently. I still have a few bugs to work out with the system but I think most of that will be taken care of with experience rather than reading more thoughts on "how to do it". Granted there are always more ideas that work for someone else, and that is what makes this game so fun!

[jdunson]

I've got a slightly different take on cottages than a lot of folks here; it works pretty well on Noble, and seems to still hold up on Prince so far. (I play on Standard to Huge maps with generally Earth-like layouts, this may not work well on small pangea or the like.)

Cottages are an investment; much of the time you don't want or need very many of them in the early game, as you're better off focusing on food or production. What you want is towns in the late-midgame onward, after many turns of gradual upgrades and the various technology and civics improvements that increase their utility.

The most effective way to do this seems to be to let someone *else* make the investment. Expand until you meet resistance, focus on production, and capture mature improvements. Your core cities are the industrial heart of your empire (and possibly GP farms or cultural centers), and the conquered peoples pay for it all.

A good choice for this would be a civ that starts out mired in flatland jungle. Very early, they're hampered by inability to chop, and through the early game they'll be slowed by the need to chop jungle (and the unavailability of forests to rush-chop improvements). By midgame the computer will have typically cleared out most of the jungle and surrounded their cities with a sea of gradually improving grassland cottages (probably villages by now at least) sprinkled with a few workshops.

As a result, they'll probably be doing reasonably well financially and with tech, but behind on their military. Pick a good opportunity (probably just after you've gotten an offensive improvement of some sort), and attack. The loot you get from capturing cities should pay the increased bills until the cities come out of revolt and start paying for the rest of your now-expanding empire.

In short, "Don't build cottages, capture towns."

Addendum: Sometimes the computer will squeeze cities too close together, focusing on early development at the expense of later effectiveness / upkeep. Remember that razing cities doesn't affect the towns; you can sometimes do better if you raze 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 cities in the above situation, giving the remaining ones more room with the advantage of pre-existing mature improvements.

[Game-God]

Originally posted by jdunson
The most effective way to do this seems to be to let someone *else* make the investment. Expand until you meet resistance, focus on production, and capture mature improvements. Your core cities are the industrial heart of your empire (and possibly GP farms or cultural centers), and the conquered peoples pay for it all.

In short, "Don't build cottages, capture towns."

Addendum: Sometimes the computer will squeeze cities too close together, focusing on early development at the expense of later effectiveness / upkeep. Remember that razing cities doesn't affect the towns; you can sometimes do better if you raze 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 cities in the above situation, giving the remaining ones more room with the advantage of pre-existing mature improvements.

Welp I finally played this out and found that it can work with certain circumstances. I let some of the other civs just build to their hearts content then in mid-game I take the cities with the least resistance and most offerings. (I play a lot of War type maps)

I am not sure that I follow this. What do you mean don't build them? The squares are still there whether you build or not so why not build everything you can on ALL squares in the Big Fat Cross?

I have seen that the AI puts cities very close together and has more than one city using the same production space, but according to the pics above that Blake has marked out on my map for city placement this is ok. I have now tried this and find the costs for the cities are lower because they are so close together and usually I only lose 1-2 squares usage per city. Usually by end game they are not all filled out anyways in my civilization (not sure if this is a bad thing though).

Thanks for the ideas Jdunson!

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Game-God

I am not sure that I follow this. What do you mean don't build them? The squares are still there whether you build or not so why not build everything you can on ALL squares in the Big Fat Cross?

Several reasons.

The most important is prioritisation. You’ve got more jobs for workers to do than workers to do them. So you don’t want to build cottages on tiles that you are not actually using. Better to work on the cities with tiles that still need improvements or on better tiles.

Secondly you may want to manage the supply of forests for later chopping – when there will be things to build. Filling spaces means that the forests cannot grow back.

[Supr49er]

Originally posted by couerdelion
Secondly you may want to manage the supply of forests for later chopping – when there will be things to build. Filling spaces means that the forests cannot grow back.

Or maybe keep a forested city for your future National Park city. No due to population and 1 free specialist per Forest Preserve.