Workers and Scouts - War Contributions

Blatc

Prince
Joined
Feb 24, 2015
Messages
449
I'm going to highlight a few 'other' ways in which I use workers and scouts to contribute to Domination games. Feel free to share your own.

In setting up DomV, using workers to pre-build roads towards your next target can save a lot of time, allowing you to get maximum use out of superior units (assuming you were able to tech ahead, or have a UU). Somewhat related, if you're going with a 3 or 4 city start, it's worth considering which city locations for your last city (or 2) will connect best with other civs/capitals. I'm sure this has been covered before, given this forum is where I learned about building roads in advance.

Once you have enough 'extra' workers, they can also be used as a pseudo meat shield or zone of control impediment during battle. This carries a risk: if your war fails, those workers are likely lost. However, if you roll over your opponents, you get most if not all of these workers back, and likely more. A wall of workers, or a few well placed with zone of control effect, slows down your opponents, allowing your ranged (or siege) weapons extra time to get to work. This isn't necessarily the same as worker baiting, as you are doing this while attacking the city; however, you should have some horsemen/knights/etc. around to regain at least some of the workers, and continue the process.

Similar to above, when moving on to the next city, look for opportunities to have workers scout ahead, preferably with enough units nearby to recapture the unit on your next turn. Compared to having the worker 'covered' by a military unit, this extends your sight and potentially sets up worker baiting from units you haven't even seen yet. Again, you need to have extra/expendable workers for this to work, as you want some to help pillage/heal/repair (even if you don't have Pyramids); hopefully your opponents have already improved their terrain and built roads for you, and you can focus on conquering cities.

Scouts
In a perfect world, you could just pay to upgrade scouts into scout-archers (and further down that line); however, just-scouts can contribute to your war efforts.

Scouts can pillage roads that are either:
*outside your opponents territory, which if at peace carries no diplomatic consequences, as far as I've seen. If you have some spare time, you can do this simply to hinder their progress (i.e. even if they aren't your next target)
*inside your opponents territory, which of course means war. I've done this a few times to slow their troop movements between cities, speeding up what is often my first city or capital capture by a few turns, which can have a snowball effect on the rest of the game

If your scout didn't upgrade, doesn't have extra vision, and you don't really care if they live or die, try and set things up so they can draw fire for 2-3 turns while you take a city down (this is early game; later, they'll be gone in 1 turn). Your scout will be most helpful in this scenario if they can get on adjacent tiles of improved, rough terrain: they get a defensive terrain bonus, pillage/heal, and move onto another improved, rough terrain tile.

You can try some of the above with captured religious units, though I tend to just delete them right away.

Workers and Scouts - they hate your enemies just as much as you do, so bring them along for the war!
 
I like to use Workers to chop forests and jungles in enemy territory clearing out the way for my ranged troops to strike. Often though, it backfires horribly because I send out a forward worker to chop a forest down unprotected, a Pike gets out to capture it and since the forest is still there, I waste an entire turn chopping the Pike. When I don't manage to kill him though, that worker is as good as gone for good
 
I believe it is Military Caste in the Honor tree that removes 1 unhappiness and adds 2 culture. I often bring my scouts back after exploring to act as the garrison. It's usually timed pretty well with my first attack, allowing me to use my whole real army while still getting the MC benefits.

For workers, I have never taken worker-baiting as far as you have :). Perhaps I just don't have enough workers, I seem to always be bumping against the unit cap in my first war.
 
Worker baiting is a bit of a make or break strategy, if you do it well, you can do serious damage even to a superior defense
 
The simplest worker bait involves a bunch of ranged that can fire on the position the ai can capture it, and one horse unit. Ai takes worker, you shoot that unit dead and retake worker. You then move horse off to repeat until the ai has even emptied the city garrison lol.
 
The simplest worker bait involves a bunch of ranged that can fire on the position the ai can capture it, and one horse unit. Ai takes worker, you shoot that unit dead and retake worker. You then move horse off to repeat until the ai has even emptied the city garrison lol.

Obviously, but if your burst punch isn't strong enough to kill off the unit you baited with the worker, you're in a bit of trouble :)
 
Obviously, but if your burst punch isn't strong enough to kill off the unit you baited with the worker, you're in a bit of trouble :)

True, but the game is pretty forgiving with movement/scouting. You can kind of tell which unit will be snagging that worker. Predicting your reliability in killing it is a matter of experience.
 
Build the Pyramids and take Citizenship from the Liberty. Then when you attack cities, take a worker with your melee unit (unless they have a lot of missle strength, you only need one) and wait outside the city on some kind of improvement. It lets you pillage, attack, and repair the improvement all in one turn - or at least on standard speed. I've not tried on anything else but it stands to reason quick works and epic shouldn't be that much worse.
 
yes, Liberty + Pyramids means workers get to repair tiles in a single turn even on Standard, so you can abuse the hell out of that. You can even go the extra mile and have some of the units stashed on tiles belonging to a now razed city and you get free money
 
Top Bottom