Managing Your City Workers

Hello Fellow Die Hard Civ 5 Fan's:

One topic which is debated and or discussed a lot is managing your workers. Perhaps I am using the wrong terminology? but what I am getting to is which plots of land to work etc. while looking at your city screen. In the upper left corner you select which production setting you want or to focus on. I will usually have it set to Production since I am working on Wonders a lot.

My question is ... if you don't really want to be boggled down with which setting is best for your overall growth which setting is best.

I am sure the type of Win you are going for plays a role too plus your Special Ability.

Thanks

Brew God

Food.

Food gets you city growth, which improves everything - more worked tiles (i.e. more production), more base science, and more pop for specialists.

I will manually lock additional production tiles as needed when I need to produce something fast (like a university), but otherwise, my base setting is on food, and I will just lock a few production tiles (preferring food+hammer tiles like sheep, deer, quarries, etc) so that I am comfortable with how fast the city is producing normal buildings.

Set Default to Production so that at each Population Growth you get Bonus Production. Lock the best Food Tiles every time that you gain a Population. Ideally, you should pay very close attention Worked Tiles throughout the entire game not find a way to ignore this crucial advantage over the AI (who always uses Gold Focus.)

DarkestOnion said:

Set Default to Production so that at each Population Growth you get Bonus Production. Lock the best Food Tiles every time that you gain a Population. Ideally, you should pay very close attention Worked Tiles throughout the entire game not find a way to ignore this crucial advantage over the AI (who always uses Gold Focus.)

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This is optimal, but only if you micro every city such that you move the worker back to food after each growth "tick". If you are prone to forgetting to micro the cities this way, you wind up losing a lot of city growth over the course of the game. Since I'm often guilty of this, I keep my cities on food focus, and instead, when I see a city is about to tick over, I'll set it to production right before turn end, then immediately move it back to food focus at the beginning of the next turn.

I do this religiously though at the start of the game when I only have the one city - early advantages are magnified throughout the game, and getting that settler or granary finished a turn early in the first 40 turns of the game confers a much bigger advantage than you would think.

SDE is right here. Onion's approach is the most die-hard one for playing Civ. I personally cannot stand it beyond medieval era because it bores the poo out of me.

The rule of the thumb is that food is always the best choice because it allows you to grow, ergo produce more, have more science, and earn more. This being said, you want some of your things completed rather sooner than later and even though I usually don't go full production, or at least decide to do that quite rarely, it's a good choice to get library, workers, and wonders, of course.

One thing you may not know is that when you are building settlers, the game adds surplus food to your production. The thing is that it's not 1 hammer for every 1 surplus food. The exchange rate is much worse and deteriorates quickly with more surplus food. So, you want to maximize your production even by eliminating almost all food generation. Don't worry, your cities cannot be starving when they are building settlers. You can also use this fact when your people are starving for some reason.

Other than that, just make sure than no matter which focus you pick, the key plots are worked or the unwanted ones are not worked. By that I mostly mean academies on the positive side and some rich in gold tiles that are usually preferred by default governor, though tend to be the worst choices.

Makavcio said:

Other than that, just make sure than no matter which focus you pick, the key plots are worked or the unwanted ones are not worked. By that I mostly mean academies on the positive side and some rich in gold tiles that are usually preferred by default governor, though tend to be the worst choices.

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QFT - the governor loves to work plantations, ivory camps, and the like - which are usually terrible choices early in the game. Low food, low production, and high gold - but you should be getting your early game gold from AI trades, and mid to late game you'll be rolling in the stuff.