What to do with a trillion workers?

[Panag]

Originally posted by Master Zen


In MP most people disband or gift their workers rather than let you capture them... it is highly unlikely you'll end up with a horde of slave workers.

hi ,

that depends from player to player , from game to game , .....

have a nice day

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by panag


hi ,

that depends from player to player , from game to game , .....

have a nice day

no sane player would ever let you capture their workers even if they were on the brink of defeat. Wars in MP are amost always do-or-die affairs and people always prefer to raze cities and disband units rather than have them be captured by the enemy

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by panag


hi ,

a forest slow the enemy down in both SP and MP , .....

have a nice day

Why state the obvious. What does it have to do with the discussion? Are you trying to confuse me, it is easy to do.
Like you always say have a nice day and I mean it. A little banter is fine by me.

[Solomwi]

vmxa, the wait comes in the fact that you only have x number of slave workers and, in my games at least, x never equals four times the number of tiles I want, or usually need, railroaded in that first turn. Usually, I build up my worker force as I expand, add them to cities as I get everything roaded and optimized, then build it back up again right before SP, get my railroad in and start adding them back to cities. Bottom line is, in every game I've played, the slaves need augmenting when RR is first available, no matter how aggressive I've been.

Besides that, as MZ said, those industrious workers under Demo after RP are a thing to behold .

[dexters]

Ideally, you never disband or join workers and they are working all the time and you face worker shortage rather than surplus.

In surplus situations, either you've created too many workers yourself, or you got too lucky and captured/bought too many slave workers. If the former is the case, disband and join the workers to cut some gpt payments, if the latter is the case, fortify and wait for jobs.

Good Empire management implies good management of supply and demand of workers. If you're suffering worker surpluses pre RR, then you've overbuilt workers relative to the size of your Empire or your tech progress is too slow. Surpluses shouldn't be an issue until AFTER RR when most of the major work is done. Even then, I still find use for my workers clearing large patches of jungles, changing some mines to irrigation to increase specialists etc.

[vmxa1]

Solomwi what you say is true in general, but we are talking about a specific set of parameters. In this case we have essentially unlimited slaves. Hence no wait, no need to retain natives.
The Demo and Replacement parts effects slaves as well as natives. They work at half the natives speed regardless of the speed of the natives. This means every time you get a tech that increase the natives, it increases the slaves as well.
All the external parameters and conditions that are being tossed in are swell, but we have only one set of conditions in this example. I am only addressing this one proposition.

[Solomwi]

I realize that, but we're not given enough information to really avoid general best practices type arguments. He says he has trillions of workers, obviously an exaggeration, but we don't know (unless I missed a posted .sav) the size of the map or his empire, the actual number of captured workers, city spacing, etc. that would all go into a decision of how much manpower is needed and can be afforded once one hits the industrial age. Without that, looking at as many combinations of those factors as possible is really all we can do.

[vmxa1]

Well he did say that all work was done at that point and the workers were idle. I see no reason to think he was negligent and should be doing some work that is not being done. So we have no need to hold the natives in this scenario.
That is not to say that there are no cases where it would make sense to keep them, only that I see none for this one.

[dexters]

Native workers often make the difference in the RR frenzy phase of the game, especially if a war creeps up or there is suddenly a production race for wonders. Depending on where he is in the game, saving gpt may not be that significant if Steam power is just a few turns away.

In a general sense, and not having had the chance to see his game, it is very odd to have surplus labour before RR. Either his game is just chugging along and no one is researching any techs, or he built too many workers to begin with

[vmxa1]

dexters you are reading in things that are not in evidence, that is my whole point. We are talking about a set of circumstances that are defined, not a maybe or a what if. That is a different issue.
Yes IF we had RR soon and IF we this or that blah blah blah. We do not have any other conditions and under the ones we have there is no reason to pay for natives to sit on their hands, when you have copious slaves sitting on their hands. Not what IF we do not have lots of slaves, that is the condition we were given.
IOW if you change the hypothesis all bets are off.

[dexters]

He mentioned he just invaded the persians to grab some jungle territory. I'd say keeping all workers would be beneficial for fast jungle clearing.

Again, no game was posted so your guess is as good as mine. That said, if he overbuilt workers, I would prescribe as you did. Simply disband the ones that cost money. But barring how the other variables fall in the place (time to RR) the specifics of the map, etc, 15 gpt is nothing and it would be best to keep the natives around rather than switch cities to building workers when RR hits. With a war in progress, I see no reason to disband workers. The natives will pay dividends with the jungles.

I do not mean to exclude your views, and I hope you're not offended by my own take the situation. We just don't agree 100%, that's all. I go into the What ifs, and alternate scenarios because the poster wasn't clear in laying out the situation.

[Eli]

A quick update :

After conquering all the cities around my FP and Palace I stopped with the wars, cleaned ~30 Jungle tiles, built a ****load of Radar Towers, added pop in some slow growing cities and now I have 7 native workers as crack pollution reducing teams and 24 fortified slaves for emergencies.

It was annoying to manage them all, but they were very helpful. It took me 10 turns to completely develop the lands around 6 newly conquered cities.

[vmxa1]

Sounds good to me Eli.

[dexters]

Originally posted by Eli
A quick update :

After conquering all the cities around my FP and Palace I stopped with the wars, cleaned ~30 Jungle tiles, built a ****load of Radar Towers, added pop in some slow growing cities and now I have 7 native workers as crack pollution reducing teams and 24 fortified slaves for emergencies.

It was annoying to manage them all, but they were very helpful. It took me 10 turns to completely develop the lands around 6 newly conquered cities.

That's one of the things with the late game when it is not uncommon to spend 20, 30 minutes moving your workers around. I usually get up to 40 - 50 workers on my huge map games so it's even worse.

When industrial revolution goes into full swing, those workers will have lots of jobs cleaning pollution so I'd recommend against disbanding any. With At least you can splurge a bit and build coal plants in your core cities while you wait for Hoovers.

[Rhothaerill]

Sorry, I thought you had more slave workers than that or I wouldn't have recommended disbanding as many. You'll definitely need a few more workers for railroading and pollution control when that starts up. Capturing more from other civs is my favorite way. I like to have at least 40 captured workers by around the middle of the Industrial Age if possible. By the middle of the Modern Age though (assuming I've built the anti-pollution improvements) then I start thinning the worker force again.