are fast workers worth it?
- Thread starter laughingman12
- Start date
According to you, the normal worker spends turns 2 through 8, equalling 7, to build a mine. However, the fast worker spends turns 1 to 7, equalling 6, to build a mine. The fast worker does not build improvements any faster than the normal worker. So how come when the normal worker finishes the mine, he has to wait another turn, whereas the fast worker can begin a road the same turn that it finished a mine? As far as I know, all workers use up the rest of their turn to spend a turn improving (i.e. it has 2 movement points, you press the road button and the worker is done for this turn... it has 0.5 movement points, you press the road button and the worker is done for this turn).
The only turns that fast workers ever gain you is 1 turn for every time you enter a forest or an unforested hill, and that's it (save for various cases, but let's stick to basics). In your case, since all you're doing is improving a hill, you'll only save 1 turn because instead of moving into it and doing nothing, you can move into it and start right away. Fast worker does not improve faster.
ADDED: I figured out where you got your stuff wrong. No, building a turn's worth of improvement does not take 2 movement point... it takes ALL remaining movement points. If your worker had 1000 movement points, if you put it to do 1 turn's worth of road-building, whether at the beginning of the project or at the very end, it'll still use up all of its turn.
obsolete
Deity
I so do wish zombie69 were still around (haven't seen him in half a year now). H e was a micro-manager, and the kind who'd use every single exploit with workers he could find. Would have probably had some interesting things to say on this UU.
I tend to think of the long term benefits of the fast worker. On average, you save roughly 1 turn per worker.
Let's say you have this scenario:
8 cities w/ 20 workable tiles each.
Each tile requires 3 improvements (average, for simplicity's sake). 3 improvements = 3 turns saved by fast worker.
8 cities x 20 tiles = 160 x 3 turns saved = 480 saved turns. Divide 480 by the number of workers and you have and you can see how many turns each worker saved you. To maximize the benefits of the fast worker, do not overbuild them.
You would need one additional normal worker (3 total) to produce the results of 2 fast workers. Granted, you'll need to actually use the +1 movement bonus. With a little planning and foresight, this isn't too difficult.
It's my opinion that since you would build the majority of your workers early, having to build less workers would be highly beneficial if trying to start up an army. I would think that the movement cost savings would be effectively put to use by reaching specific resources more quickly...33% more quickly. There are some variations as to how to best put them to use: resources gathering, improvements, trade/movement, chopping, etc. And besides, I hate babysitting workers, so less = better.
Let's say you have this scenario:
8 cities w/ 20 workable tiles each.
Each tile requires 3 improvements (average, for simplicity's sake). 3 improvements = 3 turns saved by fast worker.
8 cities x 20 tiles = 160 x 3 turns saved = 480 saved turns. Divide 480 by the number of workers and you have and you can see how many turns each worker saved you. To maximize the benefits of the fast worker, do not overbuild them.
You would need one additional normal worker (3 total) to produce the results of 2 fast workers. Granted, you'll need to actually use the +1 movement bonus. With a little planning and foresight, this isn't too difficult.
It's my opinion that since you would build the majority of your workers early, having to build less workers would be highly beneficial if trying to start up an army. I would think that the movement cost savings would be effectively put to use by reaching specific resources more quickly...33% more quickly. There are some variations as to how to best put them to use: resources gathering, improvements, trade/movement, chopping, etc. And besides, I hate babysitting workers, so less = better.
Incorrect, you save roughly 1 turn per forested xor hilled tile that you walk into. If you maximize efficiency (you should build a road onto each forested tile you move in, fast or regular worker, to do this; also with a regular worker, you won't move it onto a forested or hilled tile while another worker is on the same tile), then you will only save 1 turn for every forested xor hilled tile that your cities have (and not right away or importantly).
Once you've built a road on the tile, then you don't gain any turns by using a fast worker as opposed to a regular worker. Even if you haven't built a road and it's an unforested unhilled tile or a forested hill tile. This is because the regular worker can move into and start work right away on the first tile, and the fast worker also loses a turn when moving into the second tile.
Note: "A xor B" means "A or B, but not both" (whereas "A or B" is generally regarded as "A, B, or A and B, but not neither")
Gliese 581
Your average civ junkie
But why would you always build a road? This is completely unecessary unless you're going to come back at some point and can't get there AND work on the same turn, which you can after chopping a forest. Prechopping is another matter. Also, while it's helpful in the long run to always build a road on a hill, the emphasis here is LONG RUN, i.e. when you want to build a railroad there.. so unless you need a road for defense or for better communications between cities and strategic locations, you can ignore building a road on a hill as well if there is more work that should be done asap elsewhere.
popejubal
Emperor
When you are building roads in the mid game, you'll use 2 workers to build a road on a plains/grassland unforested tile (3 on Epic) so that you can get the road built in one turn. The workers will use one move to get to the tile and then they will use their remaining move to build the road.
If you want to build a road on a forest or hill, you will either move 1 worker onto a forest and lose 1 worker-turn to movement and take 2 turns to build the road (or 3 on Epic) or you'll move 2 workers and lose 2 worker-turns to movement while taking 1 turn to build the road. It depends on how desperate you are to get that road built.
Fast Workers can do this too, but they can move 2 tiles and then build a road or move onto a forest or a hill and still use their remaining movement point to build a road. In forested areas then, Fast Workers will build roads twice as fast as normal Workers on forests and unforested hills and they will build in exactly the same amount of time on forested hills.
Additionally, Fast Workers can move 2 normal tiles or 5 road tiles and still build a road on an unforested grassland/plains with the rest of their movement. That means a large stack of Fast Workers can build 6 tiles of road in 1 turn while a large stack of regular Workers can build only 4 tiles or road (at most) in one turn. This is especially important if you suddenly realize that you need to get a good chunk of your army somewhere fast or you need to speed a settler in a particular direction to claim a resource or area before the AI does. Hopefully you don't need to do this too often, but it does come up.
Also, if you just want to build a road to a neighbor's empire as fast as possible so that you can get your invasion started (I'll assume all unforested grassland here since you can usually find a path like this to most neighbors), the Fast Worker will help you there as well.
After you have been roadbuilding for a turn or two, your units will sit in groups of 2 (or 3 on Epic, etc) strung out along the road as each next unit uses its movement to get down the road that workers before it had created. Even an unlimited supply of regular Workers can build at most 4 tiles worth of road per turn since they have to get to the tile on the existing road before they can build the next piece. Fast Workers can build 6 tiles of road per turn and get you connected to that neighbor 50% faster.
No, Fast Workers aren't going to claim too many cities for you. They aren't so very much better than regular workers that you'll think you're building roads with Praetorians. They are better, though. They do have some pretty nice advantages (ESPECIALLY when building roads through forests) and they are yours for the entire game unlike every other civ who gets their unit only in the early game, the mid game or the late game.
The Indian UU is often the first unit they build and it's the unit they will build more of than any other unit. I'd say that qualifies it as being pretty nifty.
If you want to build a road on a forest or hill, you will either move 1 worker onto a forest and lose 1 worker-turn to movement and take 2 turns to build the road (or 3 on Epic) or you'll move 2 workers and lose 2 worker-turns to movement while taking 1 turn to build the road. It depends on how desperate you are to get that road built.
Fast Workers can do this too, but they can move 2 tiles and then build a road or move onto a forest or a hill and still use their remaining movement point to build a road. In forested areas then, Fast Workers will build roads twice as fast as normal Workers on forests and unforested hills and they will build in exactly the same amount of time on forested hills.
Additionally, Fast Workers can move 2 normal tiles or 5 road tiles and still build a road on an unforested grassland/plains with the rest of their movement. That means a large stack of Fast Workers can build 6 tiles of road in 1 turn while a large stack of regular Workers can build only 4 tiles or road (at most) in one turn. This is especially important if you suddenly realize that you need to get a good chunk of your army somewhere fast or you need to speed a settler in a particular direction to claim a resource or area before the AI does. Hopefully you don't need to do this too often, but it does come up.
Also, if you just want to build a road to a neighbor's empire as fast as possible so that you can get your invasion started (I'll assume all unforested grassland here since you can usually find a path like this to most neighbors), the Fast Worker will help you there as well.
After you have been roadbuilding for a turn or two, your units will sit in groups of 2 (or 3 on Epic, etc) strung out along the road as each next unit uses its movement to get down the road that workers before it had created. Even an unlimited supply of regular Workers can build at most 4 tiles worth of road per turn since they have to get to the tile on the existing road before they can build the next piece. Fast Workers can build 6 tiles of road per turn and get you connected to that neighbor 50% faster.
No, Fast Workers aren't going to claim too many cities for you. They aren't so very much better than regular workers that you'll think you're building roads with Praetorians. They are better, though. They do have some pretty nice advantages (ESPECIALLY when building roads through forests) and they are yours for the entire game unlike every other civ who gets their unit only in the early game, the mid game or the late game.
The Indian UU is often the first unit they build and it's the unit they will build more of than any other unit. I'd say that qualifies it as being pretty nifty.
If you maintain optimum efficiency, then you will not move the second worker into the same tile, you'll have him build a road somewhere else. However, the extra lost worker turn may well be worth it given the circumstances.
Clarification: In forested areas (and nonforested hill areas), Fast Workers will build roads (roughly) 1 turn faster than normal workers. It would be slightly more due to loss of efficiency in times of necessity. If on normal speed (2 turns for a road), fast workers will complete the road in 66% of the time normal workers take. If on marathon speed (6 turns for a road), fast workers will complete the road in 86% of the time normal workers take.
An interesting strategy that I've never thought about. Usually my empire is well roaded, but even so, this would be an excellent roading technique for areas outside my empire... if I have a large chunk of disposable workers that is.
I do agree that as a UU they aren't that bad. Although their bonus is pretty small, it lasts throughout the game, so they make up for it through that. All I want to do is clarify to people that their bonus is not as big as most people think (and clarify exactly what their bonus is worth).
Gliese 581
Your average civ junkie
Or doesn't get it at all.
popejubal
Emperor
You're right. I thought about what I was trying to say later that night and realized that I had left out part of what I was trying to say.
In Civ, you can maximize efficiency or you can maximize speed. In the best of all possible worlds, you'll be doing both. Fast Workers are more efficient than regular workers on 2-move tiles like hills and forests and that adds to their effectiveness and speed.
In a regular speed game, you can either move 2 workers onto a forest tile, losing the turn for both and then build a road in one turn on the next turn.
Total turns for road completion: 2.
Total worker-turns used: 4.
...or you can send a single worker who will lose the rest of his turn and spend the next two turns building the road.
Total turns for road completion: 3.
Total worker-turns used: 3.
The fast worker, on the other hand, can move onto that hill or forest and then build the road on the same turn. That lets you use 2 workers without sacrificing efficiency. Move two workers onto the tile and build the road.
Total turns for road completion: 1.
Total worker-turns used: 2.
That's either a 100% increase in efficiency and double the speed or a 50% increase in efficiency and three times the speed. The big benefit here is being able use a gang of workers effectively. This is especially important when you are hooking up hill and forest based resources with a fair number of workers available (this is very common in the mid game when you build a new city or take over an AI's border city).
The Indian Civ can hook up any hill or forest resource in 1 turn with enough workers (not forested hills, though). Just pile workers on until the job is done. Other civs have to lose turns to the movement while they wait for a couple of workers to build a road to that square so that the remaining workers can move in and do the job. (Note that it does not take any additional game turns for the total job to have the first 2 workers build a road if you have enough workers since all of those other workers would have lost their movement entering that tile anyway).
All of this assumes that you are going to use 1 worker per tile. Even in quick games with regular workers, it's still often worthwhile to send a couple of workers onto a square to get the improvement done quickly so that the city and the empire as a whole can get the benefit earlier. If I hook up a gold resource in 2 turns with two regular workers instead of 3 turns with 1 regular worker, I get an extra 5 commerce in that city compared to hooking it up a turn later. In addition to that, if any of my cities are past their happy cap, I get the benefit of 1 extra useful population in each of those cities for an extra turn. I'd say that more than outweighs the cost of an extra lost worker-turn due to lost movement. The Fast Worker can get that resource hooked up in 1 turn which means 10 extra commerce and 2 extra useful citizens per
city compared to the way that you suggest.One of the worst things you can do in the early game is to split your workers. When you are improving resources, if you are mining a grassland gem and farming a corn with 1 worker each, you'll get the gems in 4 turns and the corn in 5 turns. Alternatively, you could put both workers on the gems and get them online in turn 2 and then still get the corn on the 5th turn since you now have 2 workers on the corn. That's an extra 8 commerce and that 8 commerce could be the difference between getting your religion or not in the early game or it could shave a turn off of Bronze Working for you so that you can whip the granary that 1 turn quicker and get the biggest benefits of your corn that much earlier.
I don't disagree with you here (for the most part). I do think that the Fast Worker bonus is quite situational, but those situations do occur in every game that you'll play and if you are piling workers onto your improvements instead of assigning 1 workers per tile, then the Fast Worker bonus is multiplied. Additionally the Fast Workers can zip across your empire 50% faster than their regular cousins and that means you can mine a critical Coal or Aluminum that much faster when it appears in some oddball corner of your empire that has stood neglected. This used to be especially important for Oil once Combustion became available, but now I just throw down a fort on the Oil ahead of time so that I get it instantly when I discover the tech.
I may merely be expressing my nüberness here but:
It is a safe assumption that
1. the fastest series of moves for completing the improvement network and
2. the most effective improvement strategy
are not remotely the same thing. To my mind #1 is just an abstract curiosity; in a real game you're leveraging crucial tiles, not shaving turns off the time at which the continent gets its last useless road tile built. Obviously the fast worker is a big help with either, but "building roads first on forested hill tiles" strikes me as something that has more to do with #1 than #2.
EDIT: If the forested hill road came up merely because everyone has to build roads in forested hills sometime, then sorry. It just didn't strike me as the bread and butter of important (especially crucial early) improvements.
It is a safe assumption that
1. the fastest series of moves for completing the improvement network and
2. the most effective improvement strategy
are not remotely the same thing. To my mind #1 is just an abstract curiosity; in a real game you're leveraging crucial tiles, not shaving turns off the time at which the continent gets its last useless road tile built. Obviously the fast worker is a big help with either, but "building roads first on forested hill tiles" strikes me as something that has more to do with #1 than #2.
EDIT: If the forested hill road came up merely because everyone has to build roads in forested hills sometime, then sorry. It just didn't strike me as the bread and butter of important (especially crucial early) improvements.
popejubal
Emperor
Ultimately, #1 and #2 are fairly similar. You want to avoid wasting large numbers of hammer-turns (by producing too many workers or by having the workers sit idle as they end their turn moving into a 2 move cost tile) in a futile attempt to get resources hooked up as fast as possible. At the same time, however, you want your land improved as quickly as you can because you want your cities to work improved tiles rather than unimproved tiles.
You want those cottages online and growing toward towns as soon as you can have them. You want that gold mined and hooked up. You want those forests chopped to get Stonehenge/Great Wall built. You want your city to work the irrigated rice, not the 3/0/1 Flood Plains that don't have a farm or a cottage on them.
So how do you do that as effectively as possible?
With a regular worker, if you are 2 moves away from the tile you want to improve, move 1 tile and hit "r" to end the worker's turn. You have now built 1/2 a road and you are still going to get to the tile you want to work with a movement point left to start your improvement.
If you want to build a camp on an Elephant that lives in the forest very quickly and you have a few extra workers nearby, move 2 workers into the forest. Next turn, move all of the other workers onto that tile since it only costs 1/2 move and they can build the camp (with the first 2 workers help when they wake up on the next turn). I think this is a good idea even if the tile is on a river and would not need the road to hook up the resource to your trade network. It is a good balance between efficiency (losing only 2 worker-turns to movement costs) and speed of improvement (the remaining workers still get to work on the camp on the same turn that they would have if they had all just piled onto the tile in turn 1).
If I have a Settler and three Workers move to an undeveloped coastal area with 3 resources in 2-move tiles (1 gold, 1 copper and 1 beaver forest), I'll send 1 worker to build a road in each of the tiles. That way, I'll only lose 1 worker-turn per tile to movement costs (and I was going to build a road there eventually anyway). Once the three roads are completed, I'll have all three workers improve the gold or copper. They will all work together to improve the second resource and then they will all work together to improve the third resource. That way I don't lose too much efficiency and I still get my most critical resources online fairly quickly.
If I have forges in my core cities and a few of those cities have 2
citizens, then I'll probably ignore my usual method and just pile all of the workers onto the gold or silver so that I can get those citizens back as quickly as I possibly can. In this case, the wasted worker turns lost to movement costs are far outweighed by the value of the citizens becoming 
productive citizens. As with everything in Civ (and everything in life), there are exceptions to each rule of thumb.Perugia
Prince
One of the key uses of the fast worker is in the ability it gives you to stop working in a forest or jungle or on a hill to go and do something more urgent and then come back later and carry on without suffering a worker turn loss.
One way this helps is in pre-chopping as you can pre-chop whole swathes of territory and then when you come back to fell the trees you lost no movement whereas the normal worker has to lose a turn or build a road that you may not actually require.
As India starts with mining and the Fast Worker is hyper-efficient in the early game you can easily out pace the ability of your cities to grow to actually use all the improved tiles.
Then you can just part mine hills or part chop jungles and then stop that when you have the necessary techs to improve other tiles eg AH or Calendar again with no loss of worker turns.
This ability also helps when barbarians are around or you are at war with the AI you don't lose worker turns for abandoning a hill, jungle or forest compared to normal workers.
One way this helps is in pre-chopping as you can pre-chop whole swathes of territory and then when you come back to fell the trees you lost no movement whereas the normal worker has to lose a turn or build a road that you may not actually require.
As India starts with mining and the Fast Worker is hyper-efficient in the early game you can easily out pace the ability of your cities to grow to actually use all the improved tiles.
Then you can just part mine hills or part chop jungles and then stop that when you have the necessary techs to improve other tiles eg AH or Calendar again with no loss of worker turns.
This ability also helps when barbarians are around or you are at war with the AI you don't lose worker turns for abandoning a hill, jungle or forest compared to normal workers.
