Always automated workers before -- help...

[Susie]

Hi everyone --

Do you have any tips for me?

Previously I always played on noble, with automated workers, and most of the time was able to pull off some sort of victory. However now I'm trying to step my game up to Prince, and I feel like the inefficiencies associated with automation will handicap me. Do you have any guidance or advice for someone who has never thought much about what workers should do? When playing without automated workers, I find myself just doing whatever is "suggested" by the light blue circles, because I don't really know what the good decisions are (other than hooking up the strategic resources asap).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated... thanks!

 

[LiberiGlacialis]

Well, hook up the rescorces ASAP is a good one...

You could use them to farm/cottage spam, depending on what is needed (Farm for the Specialists, Cottage for the Commerce). Or to chop rush. Or to build forts near your borders. >>

 

[KMadCandy]

have you seen the articles in The War Academy? they can be quite helpful (but overwhelming at times ).

trying a new level and trying to focus on a whole new aspect of the game at the same time can be overwhelming too. i'm a wimp and step back a level (or stay what i was before moving up) to try out something new *giggle*. good luck and have fun. and welcome to CFC!

 

[oyzar]

food -> reasources -> other titles(either farms/mines or cottages or farms(for specialists). Basically as a rule a city should never work a unimproved title and a city should allways have enough food to grow as long as it is under the happiness cap. This means you are gonna need alot of workers. It is better to build a bit too much workers before you get more efficient with them(moving one space and improving is a small trick that saves you a couple hundred worker turns every game). Place your cities so they will have enough food then plop down improvements everywhere the city needs. a grassland farm might be higher priority than a plains horse title for a given city because it is low food and pop and hence needs to grow towards the happiness cap. Have roughly a worker or a one and a half worker per city.

 

[Peluin]

1) Decide what role each individual city is going to play in your empire and improve it accordingly. If a city is tabbed for production, build mines and enough farms to use the mines. If there's food left over, go with workshops or watermills. If a city is more economically inclined, throw up the cottages. There are some more creative and complicated ways to specialize, they're in the War Academy somewhere I'm sure.

2) Try not to get caught up in "finishing" one city. If a city is size 6 and you start improving your 10th, 15th or heavens forbid 20th tile, that's a waste of time. Personally I find it hard to move on though! And then yuck, you have to remember to come back after the city has grown!

3) Also I'd caution against going overboard with roads. I really think most of the reason I beat my roommate in multiplayer is his tendency to get caught up building a Eisenhower style highway system that reaches everywhere in his empire. Resources along a river don't need a road on them for access; the river is enough. Your first cities can be linked via rivers or coast, if you have sailing or cultural borders surrounding the waterways. Saving those worker turns early in the game when you only have one or two workers can be a significant advantage.

4) Just in case you didn't notice, workers in Civ 4 can "stack", and help each other build an improvement. Two workers building a farm build it twice as quickly as one. So, if you have multiple workers, set them to the same task so that you can get useful stuff done faster. A word of caution however, if you "group" the workers up for convenience, it'll lead to wasted turns in some cases. If building a road through the desert takes 3 turns for example, and you ctrl-select 2 workers to do it with, they'll both work on the first turn, but on the second turn one will work and the other will sit idly by doing nothing, but not ask you for orders since his "group" was busy building the road. Ew.

5) Improve your best tiles first. I listed this last because you already seem to know it. If there comes a point where you aren't sure what the "best" tiles are anymore, you could look in the city to see what tiles it's using and then make those better. On a related note, if I start seeing those little "tile is in use" hut things on random unimproved grassland tiles... I know where to put my workers. In fact, that usually means I need more workers.

That seems like enough to get started on to me

 

[lilnev]

"What should my workers do?" is the wrong place to start. Ask instead, "What should my city be doing?" Is it's role to produce military units? To work cottages, to run specialist? What will it's contribution to your empire be?

Once you decide on it's role, ask yourself, "Which tiles do I want to work, and what improvements do I want on them?" In general, every city needs a food surplus (+3F or +4F is a good rule of thumb, so even if it's long-term role is to work a bunch of cottages you should start with a few farms to support growth; production cities typically want some high-food tiles so they can support low-food mines; and specialized cites like a GP farm or Globe-draft might want as much food as possible). If you find yourself working unimproved tiles, you don't have enough workers. That goes for new cities, too -- send a worker along with the settler so that you can be working improved tiles as soon as possible.

So that's tile improvement, which is the fundamental function of workers. The other thing they need to do is build roads, but usually (except for sometimes hooking up a key resource like Copper or Stone) that should be a secondary priority. If you've got enough workers, you'll find that you have enough spare worker-turns to get a basic road network up without falling behind on your tiles improvements.

The third thing workers can do is chop to speed up production, but I wouldn't worry about that until you've got the hang of the first two: tile improvements first, then roads.

peace,
lilnev

 

[Susie]

Thanks for all of this advice. It will definitely help me! Also thanks for the welcome KMad.

 

[Tennyson]

Try automating workers for every city except your first two or three, and play a game where you're micromanaging just those cities. That should get you used to the process.