First I want to thank everyone here with many guide. I've played Civilization 4 few years ago. And recently I try it with higher difficulty (Emperor++). So I need some advise to win with these difficulty.

I have some question about controlling the workers.
1. I often gather 4-6 worker as a group for faster complete a task. If I complete doing the improvement for one city then move to another city to continue? Is that ok?
I saw many people said the number worker is around 1 - 1.5 per city. Is there anyone leave that dedicate worker for each city (worker is always near its city)??

2. I only need many worker do improvement at some point:
- when newcity just establish (do the improvement on the resource, farm for enough food, mine on the hill, cottage...)
- building lumbermill or preserve forest when got the technologies
And I rarely change the improvement when it's has done. So at other time, my worker don't have much work to do.
Can anyone give me some advise? What are you often do?
If I build farm everywhere first to raise the population then switch some to cottage. Is that better?
Otherwise at many time (especial later game), I feel my worker seem useless and the cost I have to pay every turn is a waste.

It's doesnt hurt to group workers, if you have lots of them. Usually. But, if you have more workers in your stack than the Improvement takes turns to complete you will loose some Worker-time. (Like you build a road (2 Turns) but have 3 Workers in your Stack, so it will complete right away, but only 2 worker have worked, the 3 is a lazy bum)

When they become unemployed i just put them to sleep somewhere. Or give them some stupid job to do (like Building forts somewhere...) They will be needed again, when you get to Railroad. Also sometimes you might want to change over a conquered cities improvement.
They do cost some maintenace, but it's not too bad.

For new city I usually try to have at least 2 workers at the site, more if I have. As the city gets developed, 1 worker is enough.

It's not bad idea to group workers to get things faster but be careful as it's gonna slow you in some circumstances.

For example:

You have 4 workers and you need to chop 4 forests.

With grouped workers you'll lose 1 turn getting them on the forest tile for each worker and forest. That's 16 worker turns lost on movement.

If you seperate workers so each one moves on separate forest tile only 4 worker turns total are lost. And you get things done faster.

And as Refar said if something needs to be done in 3 turns than one worker will be idle.

worker build times are the main reason why i struggle with epic/marathon cause i'm not used to a mine taking 8 turns or whatever so my timing is way out

Yes, I understand that. Actually, I'm not totally keep them in 1 group, when I saw 1 worker in group idle (can continue doing something), I assign that worker for new job.
The point of my question is that: If I group 4, 6 worker to one job --> they only can do improvement for 1 city --> if I need improvement for several city so I will have to move them, and it may take fews turn to move to another city. But the job will be completed sooner --> that tile provide the extra resource sooner. So I wonder which is the better?

And because I control the worker that way. So my number worker seem not too many as people. I'm not sure if that will affect to the developing rate of city??

grouping workers gets work done more quickly at the expense of long term development elsewhere: how badly do you need that mine?

Stacking workers together will lose you a lot of worker moves. Just for the fact that you will be running them all over the place.

There is never too many improvements. Unless you improved every single tile of a city, then you can move a worker away from it. It's not because you are currently not using certain tiles, that you won't need them. You want to be able to switch tiles based on the current need. Prod <-> food <-> commerce.

In conclusion it's not because your city pop is only 7, that you only need 7 improved tiles. That's why you need to keep workers improving your cities.

As for late game workers, once you railroaded & lumbermilled everything you can disband some if you want. It wouldn't be the first time I disband workers late game. But still keep enough workers around though. You might want to transform cities in hammer powerhouses for space parts with workshops. Or spam farms everywhere if you want a diplomatic victory.

I will sometimes keep pairs of two workers running around together, to get things up and running that need to be done quickly, but more than that? inefficient. Also, you will constantly be needing to change your cities around, watermills can be pretty good later, workshops become powerful later, you can get away with fewer farms, etc. Windmills become more powerful... Of course the lumbermills and such.

Not to mention late game Ill typically pillage every cottage I find in enemy territory and make production power houses everywhere.

Yes, thank you all.
I'll try this way in next game.

Stacking workers together will lose you a lot of worker moves. Just for the fact that you will be running them all over the place.

There is never too many improvements. Unless you improved every single tile of a city, then you can move a worker away from it. It's not because you are currently not using certain tiles, that you won't need them. You want to be able to switch tiles based on the current need. Prod <-> food <-> commerce.

In conclusion it's not because your city pop is only 7, that you only need 7 improved tiles. That's why you need to keep workers improving your cities.

As for late game workers, once you railroaded & lumbermilled everything you can disband some if you want. It wouldn't be the first time I disband workers late game. But still keep enough workers around though. You might want to transform cities in hammer powerhouses for space parts with workshops. Or spam farms everywhere if you want a diplomatic victory.

There's some cutoff to this though, right? A pop 6 city with 12 improvements probably has enough improvements (especially if it's something like a mostly commerce city, with a food resource, a hill or two, then cottages...there won't be many ways to change that pop around for the time being!). If you found a new city, I can picture diverting a worker improving such a city elsewhere for a while.

I still struggle a bit with streamlining workers, or having too many/few early on. It's situational and tough to get a 100% feel for.

The cost of moving workers depends on speed. Losing three turns on Marathon is not a big deal, but it is on Quick. The same goes for stacking workers, on Marathon it is more useful than on Quick.

There's some cutoff to this though, right? A pop 6 city with 12 improvements probably has enough improvements (especially if it's something like a mostly commerce city, with a food resource, a hill or two, then cottages...there won't be many ways to change that pop around for the time being!). If you found a new city, I can picture diverting a worker improving such a city elsewhere for a while.

I still struggle a bit with streamlining workers, or having too many/few early on. It's situational and tough to get a 100% feel for.

Yea of course you don't need fully improved bfc early game, I put my argument a bit too strong so don't take it literally. :lol: I also run my workers away once I feel that I improved enough.

But "in theory" for a pop 7 capital you might want to have improved all resources, hills & 7 cottaged tiles.

Thanks a lot,

I've another question.
I often place my cities so they not overlap each other (in the worst case, maybe overlap one or two tiles) while they still acquire as much as bonus resources as possible. So I feel I waste some tile between my cities and increase the distance. AI places their cities much closer.
And only in the later game, few of my city can reach size 20 to work all 20 tiles. Is that a waste? Is that better to keep only 16 - 18 tile to work then others go to special list?

Morningstar, welcome to the forums!

I think it is generally not that useful to optimize cities for when they will reach size 20. For most of the game, they will be in the 6-12 range, and I think most games are won or lost in that time period. What I try to do is (1) make sure every good tile (resource, flood plain, riverside grassland / grassland hill) is used by your cities at a decent size (say size 8), and (2) have a plan for making a productive city at size 6-8 and a plan for how it will grow after that, but it is imho more important to have the city make a strong contribution to the empire while at size 6-8 than to have the optimal city at size 20...

Also remember that late in the game, when you have size 20 cities, it will be a matter of 10 cities each using 14 tiles rather than 7 cities using 20. At that point, the maintenance for those 3 extra cities is not really that important anymore.

If you really want to maximize your workers, give them orders one at a time and use work+cancel orders. For example, if your worker is moving to a tile with 1 movement cost that is 2 tiles away and you have no roads built, instead of sending him there and pressing end turn, move him 1 step in the right direction, give him a build order, then click on him and select cancel.
Now you just saved yourself a worker-turn.