Late Game Workers or Late Game Slackers?

The purpose of workers is to do things that aid commerce. That is, build roads, connect resources to cities, improve resources, connect cities to cities and clean up pollution. Aiding commerce aids conquests.

But what do you do with them when all of your cities are connected by railroads, every tile is irrigated or mined and all of the jungle is gone?

If I have 50 cities and 100 workers and have no plans to expand much further, what is the best use of the idle hands?

What I have done so far is to automate a few, say ten or so, to clean up pollution and fortify the rest. I have found out that when I do automate and the pollution is all cleaned up, these workers go into the cities for some R&R and I have to search my cities to find them.

Plus, if I have a lot of automated workers it takes much longer for the interturn to finish because the game must determine for each and every worker what that worker can/has to do before deciding it can do nothing. I tested this. My interturns were taking 20 minutes (PII 500 MHz 128MB machine) when all (yes, ALL) the workers were automated (improve, but do not alter). When I found them and moved them to one location and fortified them, the interturn became much quicker (a minute or so, but I did not time it).

I do not think that fortifying workers is the best thing to do with them when most of the work is done.

But, what is the best thing to do with them once most of the work is done?

Well I never have all my work done as new land will come into my possesion the whole game. I guess if it was OCC, that would be different.

So if what you say is the case, then I would keep all my slaves as they cost nothing and fort them out in a safe place. Then I could find them when pollution hit.

I would keep enough workers/slaves to clean two tiles on a mountain.

Then I would add workers into my cities, natives only. This reduces my cost if I am above it.

By the time I get to that point, I'm usually making plenty of gold and don't give much thought to their maintenance. Also, I usually play industrious civs, so don't have quite as many workers. That being said, I have two ways of handling them.

1. As vmxa said, use them when you acquire additional lands.

2. If I'm playing a peaceful game and unlikely to have new lands, I divide them up into teams for pollution cleaning. Before replaceable parts, it takes an industrious crew 8 turns on flat land, 16 on hills, 24 on a mountain. After RP it takes 4, 8 and 12. I put them in an order so I know in advance how many are in each crew, and wake the proper-sized crew to do the job. I really HATE pollution and don't want to be bothered searching for the workers or using more clicks than necessary to take care of them, but I never automate workers to do anything.

Like gmaharriet, I at least divide them up into teams that are capable of cleaning up one tile of flatland pollution in a turn. That makes cleanup easier. Merge in any native to save on maintenance along with any slaves from eliminated civs. After that, they usually just sit and wait. If you have tiles that don't fall into any city radii, it's theoretically useful to plant forests in empty flat tiles in case uranium depletes somewhere else. In one game where I was totally dominant I had a couple large chunks of land that had no cities but still fell in my borders (couldn't be bothered to manage another city at that point). So a couple of Modern Armors pillaged away the improvements and my workers planted a forest preserve, a wildlife refuge, and a bird sanctuary (all of which looked, well... a lot like forests). I suppose you could spell your name in forests or railroads if you had enough space...

edit: One more thing... if there's still anyone left on your continent, you can create a wall of slaves to stop the AI from meandering around in your territory.

I concur with what everyone said so far. I would merge most of the native workers into cities. Then I would separate the rest into a few stacks, and fortify them near my capital. There would be 3 or 4 stacks that could clean-up pollution on flat land in 1 turn, and 1 or 2 stacks that could cleanup pollution on hills in 1 turn.

The advantage of fortifying them near the capital is that that capital can be quickly located by pressing the ‘H’ key.

In my previous game, I captured a large number of slaves early on. As the trend continued and my collection of slave workers grew (it peaked at seventy-two sometime in the Middle Ages!), I picked out a large area of grassland and parked them on it, organizing them in groups of three (just right for doing a road in one turn). Then I could grab whole stacks, move them all with one J command, grabbing two or three stacks if needed (say, to build a mine on a hill tile) and improve the tile in a single turn.

Turned out to be very handy as my empire grew.

Happens to me every peaceful Space Race of Diplo game. I use them to join cities to max them at no growth and max shields faster.