Worker Worries

[minke19104]

Airfields are for offensive purposes. Say u captured an enemy town and gotten a couple workers on a distant island/continent. U want to immidiately make an airfield with one of the worker. This will make you lose the worker, but you will have "instant" airfield, allowing ur main force to fly in. Rushing an airport on that city is not an option, because of high price and resistors.

Think of Airfield as free airports without trade benefits and you get the picture.

Outposts are for scouting unsettled lands outside your cultural borders. I hardly build them. Theyre only useful to check out barbarians. But if I can build a city, I'll make that instead.

Radar tower is more usefull for defensive purposes. The AI builds them everywhere in late game. Fortified Mechanized Infantries in a size 12+ city located in a hill with Civil Defense + SAM site is probably the hardest thing to capture. I hardly ever built them, as by that time I have massive military that I dont have to worry about any possible invasion anyway.

Check out "Answers on Radar Towers" thread for more info.

As for worker, call me cruel , but I prefer to have slaves instead, even if I am Industrious. Slaves cost 0 gpt to mantain. Sure they are not as fast as my own, but having 20-30 free slave workers is a heck lot better than having to pay 10-20 of your own workers.

I've had games that I only have 3 workers of my own that I made in the ancient age until the industrial age. I also do a lot of ancient age wars so that I get a lot of slaves early on.

Another fun thing to do is to go for slave runs , that is to find an island with a backward civ, go in, plunder all the cities, capture all the workers and bring hordes of slaves back to your main continent with ur galleons.

Making your own worker is good in the early industrial ages though, when you have 12 size city but cannot make hospitals yet.

[badams52]

worker gangs...

In terms of worker gangs, if you read Cracker's guide on gangs, he does a great analysis of how to use gangs, how many, etc. Of course this changes over time while workers turns decrease depending upon govt and research, but it certainly helped me when thinking about worker gangs.

In brief, before democracy and replacement parts, cracker suggests 2 standard workers to clear forests and 3 for clearing jungles.

His whole guide is worth a read, though tough to get through.

Lastly, it's also good to try and waste a little worker turns as possible. In the early stages, I try to have my workers move no more than 2 roaded squares away before working or having them finish their move on the next unroaded tile to be worked. When railroads are starting to be built, this becomes more salient. Just think, the more the workers move without working, the less efficient they are.

[BigDork]

Minke...

I honestly didn't know you could airlift to airfields. I thought they were only for airplanes. That makes them a lot more useful then I thought they were. Well that's good to know for future use. Thanks

BigD

[CerberusIV]

Airfields are useful for airlifting units in and basing air units before you can rush an airport in a captured city.

I don't bother with outposts (I wasted a worker on one once). I also don't bother with radar towers because the AI simply isn't that good at attacking to make them necessary. The AI should only overcome you if it has a massive military and tech superiority at which point you have probably lost and RT's aren's going to make much difference.

[minke19104]

I sometimes queue up workers in cities bigger than 20 also. Extra citizens not working on tiles is wasteful for me at least.

[pedrojedi]

I like stacking up 8 workers to clear a jungle. It goes so fast.
Outposts are also good to place in a frontier mountain of a friend nation, since it gives a good vision of nearby forces, and does a good work when it comes to vigilance of potential traitor's forces.
The radar posts are good when you don't want to invade and battle, i.e. when you're going for diplomatic victory; staying on the defensive is the priority here, and when you get attacked (very common) by other forces, these posts represent a great advantage. Specially if there's also a fortress in a hills/mountain/forest/jungle.

badams: nice guide, but there's too much calculation. I don't like so much calculi in my gaming time.

[nbarclay]

The main time I like radar towers is when taking on a "stack of doom." The more AI units I'm going to take on in a given area, the more useful a radar tower there is.

[Mad Bomber]

Workers, Workers, Workers...I LOVE workers! I say the more the marrier, come free born or slave, artist or general laborer. Just make sure you get the job done, and no loafing on your a$$!

Typically on a huge map I will have somewere between 150-250 workers (not including about 100 slaves) before my victory comes.

[Dominae]

I never depend on foreign Workers, yet I make every effort to grab them at any stage of the game (in AU206 I capture/purchased around 10 of them before I had 4 cities!).

A good heuristic I use for number of Workers (which seems to work for me, no idea why though) is to produce a Worker or two in mostly corrupt cities (1 Shield per turn, normal growth), and get the rest of my Worker force from my 1 or 2 Settler/Worker pumps. These pumps never stop producing Workers (and the odd Settler) until 5-6 techs into the Medieval age. Only at that point do I feel like I have a sufficient number of Workers.

Obviously if I'm Industrious I'll stop producing Workers a little sooner, but the basic framework remains in place.


Dominae

[Dominae]

The best use I've made of Radar towers was in AU204, where, because of the chokepoints, you could essentially dictate the location of every major battle. The fact that the AI was lose most of its units to Infantry inside Fortresses with Radar Towers close by was less than fair, but it was the best way I could think of to cut the AI's forces (which outnumbered mine about 3 to 1) down to size.


Dominae

[BigDork]

Hi everybody...

Thanks for all of your answers so far. Now another question, if and when is a good time to add workers back into a city? Should this be done to new cities to get them up in size quickly? Or should it be avoided?

BigD

[Dominae]

I'll only Join Workers in one or two select cities early on, and only under special circumstances. For instance, if I'm going for an important Wonder, I might consider joining Workers. But I will not just do so to get my cities up to size "big" unless almost all tiles within my borders have been improved (I use 3-spacing so this means all tiles that will be worked once cities max out in size). In AU206 I had a lot of foreign Workers early, so I ended up joining a few to my Settler-pump city in order to get some really fast expansion. It sure did expand fast, but still wondering if this is the right move.


Dominae

[badams52]

Originally posted by minke19104
I sometimes queue up workers in cities bigger than 20 also. Extra citizens not working on tiles is wasteful for me at least.

Hmm, you might want to try mining the grasslands/plains/deserts so that the city won't go much above size 20. This way, you'll get more production from the city and won't need to build workers to keep the size down. And usually by the time I get size 20+ cities, I don't have a need for workers except for pollution -- everything's railroaded, mined, irrigated by that time.

BigD, it depends upon the situation. I often never add workers back to cities until I have too many running around and only need them for pollution control. Then I'll take the extras and add them to towns that can't grow quickly. Also, I start rushing city improvements if necessary to keep up with the population boom

[pedrojedi]

I only add workers to towns if I want fast growth. It's nice to found a city and have it in the next turn up to size 6.

[Mountain Sage]

Playing the French on a Huge map (Monarch, Emperor), a worker is the first unit I build from my 3rd city onwards (worker, warrior, settler/improvement etc.). Each worker improves 3-4 tiles and connects the city to the national road network, then
a) build roads for future settlers
b) build 'irrigation roads'
c) clears jungle (if any).

I never give them zone implants (Civ calls them 'shift-A') before having completed 5-6 tiles in each city. Then they are on the loose. Usually, by the time I get railroads, all the tiles are worked, then they lay down the basic RR network, and are then on the loose again. I never bother to build Mass Transit, since all pollution is automatically cared of in usually 1 turn.

Hope this helps.