Too Many Workers

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Ethelred
I set the governors to NOT build

Great Wonders
Small Wonders
Settlers
Workers

Sometimes I turn off building military units as well. What happens in this case is that the governors are down to producing improvements and wealth, and its easy to spot cities producing wealth and change that to what you want at the moment.

That's exactly what I do. The last thing I want to see is a city with high corruption trying to build a wonder. I turn off everything but buildings, since I decide what units to build and when. It seems to me, that they do a halfway decent job at building what buildings I would want, when.

[Carbon Copy]

Too many workers? This is a contradiction in terms!

If you're playing with the governor on, the best advice I can give is to turn the governors off. They don't know what they're doing.

If your problem is that you have a lot of workers sitting around doing nothing, this isn't necessarily a problem:

-If you don't have an incredibly huge army, don't rejoin workers to cities. The AI will be much less aggressive towards you if you have a high unit count, and workers are included in this assessment.

-If you don't have every single tile improved, roaded, and railroaded, you might as well do this now. I like to plant forests and erect fortresses on every unused tile, just to help me visualize what tiles are available to be worked.

-If there are tiles that haven't had forests on them before, you can lumberjack each forestable square once for the ten shields, then rebuild whatever improvement was there before.

-Pollution control. Just gather all the workers on a given continent in one spot (preferably not inside a city) and fortify them (I like to build a fortress to mark this spot). When pollution pops up, wake up and Shift-P workers from this stack until it's gone. When pollution is cleaned up, return them to the stack and fortify them.

-Combat engineer duty. Having a lot of workers on hand can enable you to take HUGE swaths of enemy civs in 1 turn by building rails in newly-captured territory, if not enabling you to conquer them outright without them being able to retaliate. Just be sure to have enough units on hand to cover these workers so you don't lose them all (though it's probably no biggie at this point to lose 5 or 6 here or there).

Maitenance, schmaitenance. By the point in the game where you start to have a lot of workers doing nothing, you are (or should be) raking in HUGE piles of money every turn. If you find yourself low, run 0% science for a turn or two to raise your treasury back up in the 1000s. If there are too many of them, just fortify them, don't join them back.

[louiethelesbo]

Lazy Workers

Whenever I play the French or the Zulus..the workers are lazy. They always hide out and it takes them forever just to do routine tasks. American workers are very good....and loyal.

[Fitz]

Originally posted by Carbon Copy
-If you don't have an incredibly huge army, don't rejoin workers to cities. The AI will be much less aggressive towards you if you have a high unit count, and workers are included in this assessment.

This is no longer true. They fixed it in 1.16f.

I like the combat engineers idea, but I find in general that you only need 1 worker per city (native anyway) by the time you've railroaded everything to take care of pollution. That assumes you haven't gone on a razing rampage, in which case you certainly will have plenty of captured workers, which end up on Shift-A for me once I've railroaded everything. Of course, I keep about five on manual for the occasional correction of errors in improvements ("wait a sec, I mean't to put irrigation there, not mines), and take those captured ones off to auto to fix the pisspoor job the AI does of improving when I capture a new city as opposed to raze it.

[Zoid]

Originally posted by JohnMK
Is it common procedure here to exploit the AI's programming weaknesses? I always thought one should play as realistically as possible.

If there´s an exploit available I use it. It´s stupid not to IMO

[Cyclotron]

I used to use them as bait like empty cities, but I have since reformed and now usually offer them to other civs for sums of gold or some gpt.

[Grrr]

Another reason why to offer them to the AI is that they are often used to build up cities, and can help with cultural reversion and wonder razing later in the game. I did this to a large English city this morning. I didn't want the wonder destroyed.

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
This is another worker question: Under what circumstances can you trade workers back to a civ? I have a bunch of workers from Japan. They're in my capital, but during peace negotiations, I can't offer them to Japan. Why not? I could do it with other civs...

Not sure if you've sorted this yet. But if not:

I don't think you can trade workers as part of peace negotiations. Wait until after you are back at peace with them, and then trade as much of 'em as you want

[Grrr]

You can't trade workers in peace negotiations.

[ACooper]

As Ethelred already pointed out, you can customize your governor to do or not do anything you want. You don't need to turn them completely off, just change what they can or cannot build. Also make sure "Automatically built previous unit" is off.