Captured Workers

[MrMismatch]

What is the best use of captured workers? I normally play an industrious civ, and try to keep plenty of workers. When I capture workers i build either Radar Towers or Airfields. If I do not have the required techs I generlly make the best use I can out of them, I hardly ever build outposts, since I can biuld radar towers after radio. I find that workers captured over seas are best used to build airfields, allowing quick reinforcements around the world. This only works if I have overseas holdings to begin with.

Just a random thought.

[Donegeal]

Depends on your government type. If you are a republic where each unit above and beyond the alloted free support cost 2 gold per turn, I would use native workers to build your Airfields/Radar towers and just use the free slave labor to clean up pollution. Otherwise I would just use them as normal workers.

[teaster]

I have a preference for using captured workers for airfields and radar towers as well.

Another use I have found is to use captured workers of a civ that has been wiped out to pump up the population of a newly captured city to turn it into a productive city more quickly. This helps minimise the "Stop your aggression against our mother country" unhappiness. Of course the native population has to have been knocked down to a size 1 or 2 by artillery and the cities infrastructure of roads/irrigation/mines has to be pretty much intact to make this worth while.

[Cookie Monster]

Do captured workers in C3C count against your unit costs? I thought that they were free, hence you would want to hold onto them and use native workers to create airfields and such.

[steven8r]

They do not count against unit cost. That's why they show-up in the section, "Units the civname have captured".

No maintainence on them. They're free.
(Oh the irony: Slaves are Free)

Steven

[Mace]

Isn't it true, though, that captured workers are only HALF as productive as your own workers? I thought I read that somewhere...

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Mace
Isn't it true, though, that captured workers are only HALF as productive as your own workers? I thought I read that somewhere...

Yes, though in C3C it may be less than half if they do not get the industrious bonus (if you are industrious).

All a captured worker costs is the effort to tell it what to do. If I have an abundance of captured workers, I'll build airfields, etc. with my native units.

[MattPilot]

I keep the slaves and use native workers for airfields. On my current game, i got 6 native workers and 28 slaves. Getting more slaves is often the reason for a war . Once i get enough slaves, i just remove all native workers to get rid of maintence cost.

Would you rather keep 15 native workers, or 30 slaves? Both 'groups' do the same job in the same amount of time. The Difference is, ironically, more costs less .

[MattPilot]

.... though i'm curious, does keeping captured units affect the 'mood' of the other civ?

Say i got 20 slaves from korea, would they be furious with me (can't really tell, cause all civs are always furious with me , regardless if whether i have slaves from them ore not)

[ChrisiusMaximus]

I think they feel better if you join them to a city and more so if you give them back but using them as slaves definitely hurts your rep.

[Cerbykins]

Holding slaves never seems to bother other civs with me that much...but having pinched cities - DOES
Still, even that can be fixed in time..

[Donegeal]

Yes, having slaves of an AI civ effects that civs mood toward you. Having citizens in a city you control that are of another civ also effects mood. If you have a choice of what slaves to keep, keep the ones that are from an eliminated civ. Then there is no one to piss off.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Actually don, I think I remember in the SPDG for Civ3 we needed to get rid off ALL slaves, regardless of whether they were from a still-existing civ or not in order to boost our chances of being voted for at the UN.

[pauli]

the odd thing about the ai getting mad about you keeping their people as slaves is that they'll sell them to you!

last big game i played, i ended up with something like 160 captured workers. unfortunately, by that point i'd actually made it past the railroad and pollution phase, so i had nothing for them to do. boosted a lot of small city populations cause of that

[Arrian]

I typically use slaves for terrain improvement like normal workers. Once the main improvements are done, the natives join cities. Depending on how the game is going, there might be two stages of this: one in the middle ages, another after RR's.

That's if I have a lot of slaves, obviously. I want enough workers/slaves to be able to clean pollution in 1 turn (unless I get unlucky and get multiple pollution blobs on mountains all at once).

-Arrian