Industrious Civs - Use workers in battle campaigns!

[ranald]

Without lumberjacking (IFE) you are always better off
removing the forest and never replanting it.

You get better production from improving the underlying
terrain (mines/irrigation), and it only gets better when you
can build railroads.

With IFE, you can turn workers' downtime into extra shields.
If you can stand the micromanagement, IFE encourages
you to simply build as many workers as you can possibly
afford and rewards you with amazing production.

BTW, before the patch you could plant and harvest the same
tile any number of times in one turn. At one point in one of my
games I found it took 3 workers to instantly plant a forest
and 4 to instantly cut it down, so I had these 7-workers teams
that would move from city to city, lumberjacking for whatever
city needed the boost the most at the time. I think the most
workers I ever had working one tile in one turn was 42.

Personally, I'm glad the patch removed IFE.

[GeorgeWang]

IFE is good because as mentioned before, workers aren't hard to get in Civ 3. It actually gets better in the industrial age because workers become really cheap, you have a ton left over from railroading your empire, and you are probably in a democracy.

Consider industrious + democracy + engineering (x4 worker efficiency) that keeps builds workers when there's nothing else to build. Sure, an extra 10 shields isn't going to make that big of a difference in industrious age. However, 20 teams, not at all hard to get, and its +200 shields per turn for less than a hundred gold upkeep.

Now, look at your empire. Doesn't it often seem you waste alot of shields because city shield production doesn't neatly fit into the limits. I.E. it wastes tons of shields on the last turn... So really, that +200 shields/turn which was alone would be approximately the shield output of three cities is actually even better than that because its far more efficient. And of course no corruption loss...

[gnomos]

Regarding Lumberjacking

Well, I have to say I'm disappointed with the solution to IFE. Granted, something needed to be done, it's nonsensical to be able to harvest the same square 4-5 times in a turn. But planting trees and reharvesting them is workable, lumber companies have been doing this for generations. The big problem I think was allowing stacked workers to instantly create a forest. it makes no sense that you can throw a pile of workers on a tile to make trees grow fast. What do they all do, sit there and think good thoughts at the tree? "Grow, my lovely tree, grow strong!" I think replanting and harvesting should be allowed, just limit it to only allowing one unit in the tile to be planting during a turn.

[Padmewan]

Don't let those workers over-accumulate! You pay gold upkeep on them. If they're not doing work for you, have them join low-pop cities.

[Xin Yu]

It is better to use a settler to build a small city inside enemy territory to a) provide a rest place for your injured troops and b) let your troops move faster (inside enemy terrritory road is useless since your troops move 1 space per moving point even on roads). Workers can be obtained easily by razing enemy cities, so it is not necessary to bring your own.

Generally, you use one settler to build a city then launch attack from it. Then raze large cities to get some workers and move them back to your city to rush build some more troops. Keep small cities since they'll be ok after a short period of time.