Tomoyo said:
Never automate, unless you have improved your lands so much that your workers cannot mess it up, you need to keep your workers from destroying your lands.
then use automate without overriding previous improvements. Preferably as said use only automate clean polution. Even that i prefer to do myself though, when i have railroads, i normally just move a big stack of workers around, press the needed buttons to do a job until enough workers are doing it to do it in 1 turn then move to the next job. The AI will spread the workers around for multiple jobs.
NOTE: while it is more efficient to stack your workers when you have railroads and if you do it with some care also when you have roads already on the tiles to work, stacking workers when working unroaded tiles is inefficient since then multiple workers must waste a move.
Since i see many people around on this forum who still do not understand this, i will explain it once more and also the real impact it makes:
suppose you have 2 workers in a city and you have 2 tiles to irrigate:
NOT STACK:
1 move both to different tiles.
2 both irrigate turn1
3 irri 2
4 irri 3
5 irri 4
STACK:
1 move both to tile one
2 irrigate 1
3 irrigate 2
4 move both to tile two
5 irrigate 1
6 irrigate2
Now the cost of it:
A worker is about half the cost of a settler. Little less in shields, but food is the real cost of these units so i calculate half.
If you think you can't compare it like this for the matter i am going to: If it would be worth less than half a settler, you wouldn't build any and build only settlers instead since cost IS half.
A settler = a city.
so 1 worker turn = 1/2 city turn.
With the example i gave, 2 workers were working 1 turn longer. so that is 2 worker turns = 1 city turn.
So you payed 1 cities full production (food + shields + gold) by stacking teh workers on that 1 job.
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