Workers

I see. I always felt that Trading Posts in CiV were a bit disappointing compared to the ones in CIV that gained in value the longer you worked them - that was a really cool feature imo. But I do tend to plop down a couple around my capital and larger cities until at least I get a GP to replace them with.

I miss the hamlets/villages/towns too .

Crafty Bison said:

edit: Oh yeah, don't plant GP on lux's or strategics, they won't be improved .

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They actually changed it in a patch a while back that GP improvements now hook up strategic resources (in case one pops up where you planted the GP), but not lux. However it's still a bad idea to plant a GP on a strat or lux because those tiles usually provide a nice boost when improved.

For puppets always leave a non-river grassland completely unimproved and only put TP on tiles that produce more than 1 food unless that tile is already producing commerce. The reason for this is that you want to keep your puppet population to a minimum because they absorb happiness so those citizens will be more effective in cities you control.

You should pillage as many farms (and TP in bad spots) as you have time for before you take the city. Any that remain have a worker move to that tile and start building a different improvement (destroying the improvement that was there) and stop him before he finishes. You also want to TP tiles with high production low food first (puppets with a lot of hills/plains are good).

WeaselSlapper said:

They actually changed it in a patch a while back that GP improvements now hook up strategic resources (in case one pops up where you planted the GP), but not lux. However it's still a bad idea to plant a GP on a strat or lux because those tiles usually provide a nice boost when improved.

For puppets always leave a non-river grassland completely unimproved and only put TP on tiles that produce more than 1 food unless that tile is already producing commerce. The reason for this is that you want to keep your puppet population to a minimum because they absorb happiness so those citizens will be more effective in cities you control.

You should pillage as many farms (and TP in bad spots) as you have time for before you take the city. Any that remain have a worker move to that tile and start building a different improvement (destroying the improvement that was there) and stop him before he finishes. You also want to TP tiles with high production low food first (puppets with a lot of hills/plains are good).

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What WeaselSlapper said (awesome name btw). Didn't know you could hook up the strats with a GP, but yes, don't plant them anywhere you could put a mine .
Btw does anyone know what puppets prioritise (after gold)? I seem to remember them going for hill TP's before grassland TP's. Does this still happen?

I'm to lazy to repost everything that was said here 10-20 times already. Just read everything. I'm a somewhat experienced player, but I still discover things...this forum discussion is very detailed and useful. I just hugely revised my improvement thoughts.

Seriously, if you want to be good at this game, you need to manage every worker you have by hand. And every citizen too, especially when your cities grow.

I miss CIV3, where micromanagement was the way to win, tedious but makeable.

I think micro is more important now in the newer games.

Say for instance, you have 3 pop in a city which is growing to 4 next turn. Click on production in the city list, but lock in your citizens onto their farming tiles or whatever they're working.

Interturn: You grow a pop, the new citizen works a hill for 2 extra hammers, which you got for you monument or whatever. Then you put the new citizen back to more farming-duties. Next pop at 5, do it again and you gain 2 hammers every time towards something built.

gozpel said:

Say for instance, you have 3 pop in a city which is growing to 4 next turn. Click on production in the city list, but lock in your citizens onto their farming tiles or whatever they're working.

Interturn: You grow a pop, the new citizen works a hill for 2 extra hammers, which you got for you monument or whatever. Then you put the new citizen back to more farming-duties. Next pop at 5, do it again and you gain 2 hammers every time towards something built.

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If you hadn't gone through all that, wouldn't the new worker just be assigned to work whatever tile prioritized, giving you food towards your next citizen or gold or whatever? It's not like the 2 hammers magically appear out of nowhere.

kaspergm said:

If you hadn't gone through all that, wouldn't the new worker just be assigned to work whatever tile prioritized, giving you food towards your next citizen or gold or whatever? It's not like the 2 hammers magically appear out of nowhere.

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No, food is assigned at the beginning of the 'off turn' whereas hammers are assigned at the end. So at the end of your turn, computer sees you have food overflow and assigns the new citizen. Where does the citizen go? If it's a food tile then the food has already been counted, so it adds nothing for the turn. but if it's hammers, they haven't been counted yet, so the new citizen will add to the hammers for this turn - win! So micromanagers will set focus to production, but lock the food tiles asap with their new citizens. i don't know when gold or other things are counted though.

Also, for unhapiness issues, food is done by city going down the city list, so if you're on 0 hapiness with 3 cities with 1 turn to the new citizen, the first city on the list will get the new pop at happy rates, but then the other 2 will get their food on unhappy rates. great people generation works in a similar way, so you can multipop within cities but not across cities.

Use trading posts in Jungles and the tiles of puppet cities.
I farm everything beside a river, unless it's a resource. The boost from Civil Service is awesome.

Crafty Bison said:

What WeaselSlapper said (awesome name btw). Didn't know you could hook up the strats with a GP, but yes, don't plant them anywhere you could put a mine .
Btw does anyone know what puppets prioritise (after gold)? I seem to remember them going for hill TP's before grassland TP's. Does this still happen?

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Thanks, I like that fact that my name is almost always unique.

The puppet priority is the exact same thing that will happen if all tiles in a city are unlocked and you set it to gold focus.

Enough food to feed all citizens>Gold>Excess food for growth>Production (all for quantity 1, I don't know how many excess food it will take for the city to make that a priority over 1 gold).

So with a puppet given the choice between a grass TP and hill TP it will take the grass. Now if the hill has a resource is its producing more GPT than the grass it will take the hill assuming the city won't starve because of it. That's why it's best to leave non-river grasslands completely unimproved and after rivers only put TP on tiles with low food and some production. Gold/silver/gems are all great tiles for puppets.

Honestly unless a city is geared for science or really starved for food I almost never improve grasslands tiles. If I need the gold I'd rather run a Merchant specialist than work a grasslands TP, but most of my gold comes from trade routes and my puppets. Usually my population limiter is happiness so I try to have my citizens only working high yield food/production tiles so my science city can grow as large as possible. With how espionage works I may rethink this strategy (I've only played 1 G&K game so far) and my spies weren't as effective as I thought they would be at catching the technology thieves.

Historically my tile improvements have been in this order.

1. Get a few high food tiles up for each city early for quick growth
2. Resources (order depends on my needs)
3. Rest of the river tiles (pretty much all will get farms)
4. Production tiles
5. Roads when I need them

I never improve or work desert tiles and I as I stated before I rarely improve grasslands tiles. Plains will almost always get farms (river planes and hills are my favorite tiles). Most forests get lumbermills (unless they are chopped to rush early production) or on a hill where they will usually get replaced by a farm/mine.

Would generally agree in the main, but there has been a little shift in GnK because of the changes to hapiness. The religion and mercantile CS features make hapiness a lot easier to come by, so while good tiles obviously still take priority, growing your cities and improving and working other tiles isn't quite such a cardinal sin as it was in vanilla. Of course, if you're a late medieval mongolia I'd still say stop city growth so you can war quicker, but in general I don't find standard grasslands to be so bad to put a TP (or farm) on if you've got buffs for it as it used to be.

I know many people would say you should NEVER automate workers. Maybe that's true if you're playing on deity, but generally automating workers is not a huge problem.

In the very early game I always control my workers. I improve resources, build mines and farms, connect cities and things like that. Once the critical infrastructure has been built I usually automate my workers and let them do what they want. If I see a worker doing something very stupid, then I may order him to do something else. And if a long time goes by where my workers are automated, then I occasionally take control for 10-20 turns to build more mines, or whatever it is that I want that my automated workers aren't doing. Once I'm satisfied that my infrastructure has been built up then I automate them again.

Also. as you discover new tech's new resources become available. I might take a few workers and order them to improve coal, aluminium etc. This way I get the resources much faster. So I switch back and forth between automation and manual control through the whole game. And my workers are automated probably 70% of the time. I don't see a reason to micromanage mundane tasks such as building new farms and stuff like that once you have the basic infrastructure built.

Crafty Bison said:

No, food is assigned at the beginning of the 'off turn' whereas hammers are assigned at the end. So at the end of your turn, computer sees you have food overflow and assigns the new citizen. Where does the citizen go? If it's a food tile then the food has already been counted, so it adds nothing for the turn. but if it's hammers, they haven't been counted yet, so the new citizen will add to the hammers for this turn - win! So micromanagers will set focus to production, but lock the food tiles asap with their new citizens. i don't know when gold or other things are counted though.

Also, for unhapiness issues, food is done by city going down the city list, so if you're on 0 hapiness with 3 cities with 1 turn to the new citizen, the first city on the list will get the new pop at happy rates, but then the other 2 will get their food on unhappy rates. great people generation works in a similar way, so you can multipop within cities but not across cities.

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Thank you for explaining it so nicely, I know how it works, but couldn't find the wording for it. Well done and copied and pasted into my little book of stuff to remember!

A mate told me in a SG that those hammers appears "magically" in IT, I didn't beleive myself until I tried it and yep, that monument is a turn or two faster to build. So now I use it all the time in the early game for all new cities, later I can get a bit lazy.

What do you guys do with Oasis tiles?

not sure u can do annything with them . altho would be nice if they counted as "acess to fresh water" for farms

Yeah oases can't be improved; they are pretty sweet tiles though so you'll probably be working them anyways, especially with petra.

iconocast said:

not sure u can do annything with them . altho would be nice if they counted as "acess to fresh water" for farms

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They do count as access to fresh water for adjacent tiles.

oman19 said:

As some of my previous threads have stated I'm fairly new to Civ but diving right in. My next question is about workers.

Before now I have always automated them while I learned the other aspects of the game. I feel as I'm now far enough along to start considering to control them myself.

What should I take into consideration when I'm deciding what improvement to put on each tile?

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Another thing to consider is, don't go off developing every single tile around your city unless that's all you have (especially with how costly workers are in Civ V). I generally improve as many tiles as I have population, plus one (so a city size 2, gets three improved tiles). You do need to stay on top of it, of course, so you don't have population working unimproved tiles. And if there's nothing left to build, get those roads laid out.

Crafty Bison said:

No, food is assigned at the beginning of the 'off turn' whereas hammers are assigned at the end. So at the end of your turn, computer sees you have food overflow and assigns the new citizen. Where does the citizen go? If it's a food tile then the food has already been counted, so it adds nothing for the turn. but if it's hammers, they haven't been counted yet, so the new citizen will add to the hammers for this turn - win! So micromanagers will set focus to production, but lock the food tiles asap with their new citizens. i don't know when gold or other things are counted though.

Also, for unhapiness issues, food is done by city going down the city list, so if you're on 0 hapiness with 3 cities with 1 turn to the new citizen, the first city on the list will get the new pop at happy rates, but then the other 2 will get their food on unhappy rates. great people generation works in a similar way, so you can multipop within cities but not across cities.

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I see. Well, I'll still hold my doubts as to whether this will make a significant difference in the long run, but you obviously have a point that a few free hammers is better than no free hammers.

NordicExpanse said:

Another thing to consider is, don't go off developing every single tile around your city unless that's all you have (especially with how costly workers are in Civ V). I generally improve as many tiles as I have population, plus one (so a city size 2, gets three improved tiles). You do need to stay on top of it, of course, so you don't have population working unimproved tiles. And if there's nothing left to build, get those roads laid out.

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Actually getting your cities hooked up with roads can take priority over other tile improvements depending on the situation. Especially if you have a lot of rough terrain/rivers/forests and are about to go to war. Or if you need the extra gold income from the trade routes. Even beyond that prioritize my roads after resources, river tiles, and a 1-2 production tiles per city. After that (sometimes before depending on the terrain) I do roads, then the rest of my production tiles them some $$ tiles.