There always comes a time where you have workers that have nothing to do, and sit idle in cities. I was thinking, perhaps instead they could be given an ability that would allow them to "work" in a city, providing a single hammer/coin/health (gotta pick). Essentially, they are acting as a unskilled laborers, like peace corp volunteer help or habitat for humanity...

This would give the added effect of helping the hammer-poor cities to still be productive. Perhaps don't allow the bonus hammers to be part of the multiplication process (a flat bonus post modifications if that is possible).

could just turn them into the plain "specialists" that give only 1 hammer

another idea i thought of was to make them like slaves, so that you can sacrifice them to hurry production

making them upgradeable to a military unit is one fun method ive employed as well.

making it possible to join them to a city for +1 population would be fun too (also achieves the base worker specialist thing but switches their maintenance from gold to food)

could just turn them into the plain "specialists" that give only 1 hammer

another idea i thought of was to make them like slaves, so that you can sacrifice them to hurry production

making them upgradeable to a military unit is one fun method ive employed as well.

making it possible to join them to a city for +1 population would be fun too (also achieves the base worker specialist thing but switches their maintenance from gold to food)

The military option isn't bad, but the population thing- would enable worker-bombing new cities. Seems abusable, I don't think it would fit with the spirit of the game.

Altough it is pretty much realistic, people going from one city to another.

Hehe thats usually my argument :)

How about instead of adding a population point, add a certain amount of food value- so at low populations it would be one point, but as the population goes up- it would take more and more. That because late game I have cities that can pump out a worker a turn- 20 turns to turn a city into a fully-developed capitol seems unrealistic.

thing is, at the point where a city can produce a worker each turn is usually the time it can grow 1 population per turn.

how about if you can join them to a city to give it +1 food? That way you don't get the pop automatically, but you do get a bit of something growth-related out of it. Seems weak enough that people wouldn't be too interested in abusing it.

you mean +1 food one time bonus? or +1 food each turn? hopefully you mean +1 food one time bonus, but that wouldn't be very useful.. and 1 per turn would be abused often to achieve insane benefits

1 food is too weak and 1/turn is too strong... Maybe it could be something like +10 food (one time only) ? Like the slaves ability, but with food instead of hammers.

Or you could just go pillage an enemies country, then take over his cities and put the workers back to work :)

How about having them join cities s a specialist that gives +1:food: and -1:gold:?

How about, if a worker is fortified in a city it give +1 Food and +1 Hammer -1 coin for as longas it stays fortified

How about having them join cities s a specialist that gives +1:food: and -1:gold:?

Ahh but you move a workforce into town... They going to eat your food, and produce work or goods, so a better option would be -1:food: and either +1:gold: or +1:hammers:

seems a moot point to me really. why do you have soo many idle workers? did you get lazy or jsut decide to be peaceful? or were you playing on a difficulty low enough were building military was not very important? workers should be balanced with expansion in mind so that you can keep them busy. if they are idle i highly reccomend takign another city or three. if you cant do that because you dont have the troops then its jsut poor planning and you were building the wrong units at the wrong time.

on a tangent to this if your worried about your tactics and often have too many workers try going with the OO religion a bit , build fewer workers and take slaves. then as your done with the slaves you can sacrifice them to build other things and move on with your conquest. after doing this a bit you may come closer to that fine line of the right amount of workers.

How about playing a map with 4 continents with 4 civs on each continent? I crushed my island and developed everything- it was half desert so most of it wasn't able to be developed. Having a tough time maintaining a foothold on the continent I tried to take next, even so- moving workers would be a pain. Of course now I have 3 druids running around terraforming so all of my workers are busy again.

Actually, it would be a pretty funny game dynamic if it worked the way chocmushroom described. You'd have to keep your workers out of your cities all the time so they wouldn't eat up all your food! Keep them working out in the fields, not safe in the cities! Would add a bit more amusement to getting attacked or having barbs come into your borders: you don't want to lose your workers, but you also don't want them starving your cities to death during the siege!

If I don't see a mod doing this soon, I'll be sorely disappointed.

Actually, it would be a pretty funny game dynamic if it worked the way chocmushroom described. You'd have to keep your workers out of your cities all the time so they wouldn't eat up all your food! Keep them working out in the fields, not safe in the cities! Would add a bit more amusement to getting attacked or having barbs come into your borders: you don't want to lose your workers, but you also don't want them starving your cities to death during the siege!

If I don't see a mod doing this soon, I'll be sorely disappointed.

Maybe you could sacrifice them for +10 food to, as your worker is eaten alive by the citizens!

I think they should could provide a raise in production and gold for the cost of a food item, seems fariest way to me, though the gold one is rather interesting as I can't remember if they cost upkeep or not?

honestly , i dont see any of these ideas as being viable.

1 - most of them are jsut a way to allow you to have an artificially inflated population with no worry about happy or healthy.

2 - if your soo worried about getting rid od them , build the soul forge or the demon alter.

there are already methods ingame for dealing with extra units. there are already methods ingame to help prevent having an excess of workers.

I agree with daladin. Its a tradeoff between wasting hammers and quicker improvements.