Difference between Workers and Citizens

[nick7948]

I'm fairly new to Civ and am a little confused as to the differences between citizens and workers. I do understand that citizens produce gold/food while workers can produce farms, trading posts etc.. My questions are:

When you don't need any trading posts/farms etc.., what is the benefit of using the automated setting for the workers? What do you gain by having a plethora of workers, on the automated setting?

If a tile in your city is showing 2 food, does this still produce this even when no citizens are working the tile? If so, what is the benefit of placing a citizen on that tile? I assume it increasing the production, but am a little confused.

Thanks!!

 

[Soronery]

Never automate workers.

Workers improve tiles.
Citizens work tiles.

1 Citizen can work 1 tile.

Food->City grows (more citizens) If your city is starving it will eventually lose a citizen (mouse over the growth icon to see exactly how much food you have, how much you are losing/gaining, and how much you need)
Production (hammers)-> build stuff
Gold -> Gold added to gold pool.

If you click on the city it will tell you it's total production of everything in the top left corner (I think).

If you have too many workers destroy some of them or use them to scout. Workers are units. All units cost gold per turn to keep (unit maintenance, mouse over your gold icon to see details about it).

 

[Monthar]

Workers are units you build/buy to improve the tiles around your city. Putting them on automatic is a horrible idea, because they do a lot of stupid things. Such as:

1. Stop working and run to the nearest town or even well outside the boarders just because one of your units spotted a barbarian or enemy unit that's too far away to capture the worker in one turn.
2. Build roads all over the place if something, including another of your workers, blocks their path. This is bad because you pay 1 gold per tile that had a road. So all the excess roads can bankrupt your civ quickly.
3. If you didn't check the box to prevent them from changing an already improved tile, they'll waste turns changing a tile between farm and trade post depending if you need food or gold.
4. If you didn't check to the box to prevent them from chopping down forests they'll chop them all down even if you wanted to save them to help rush a wonder.
5. They will build a farm or trade post on desert tiles, even if that tile will only yield 1 food or 1 gold when the improvement is complete. The only times any desert tile is worth improving and having citizen work it are when a trade post gives 2 gold and 2 science or the tile has a resource on it that is actually worth working. (See the food requirements below for the reason)

Citizens are the population of the city itself. So if the city lists a population of 5, you have 5 citizens that can work 5 of the tiles around the city. You only gain the // if one of the citizens is working that tile. In the upper right of the city screen are some focus boxes for default, food, gold, production, science, great people, etc. Changing the focus will change the tiles the citizens are working. However, you need to be careful, because setting production focus and sometimes gold focus can cause the city to not produce enough food. If you had 5 hill with mines, because your automated workers mined all the hills and you set focus to production, all 5 of your citizens will likely work those tiles, leaving none to work the farms.

Each citizen requires 2 food. So if you have a population of 3 citizens and 2 tiles with 3 food each, 1 of the citizens can work a tile that doesn't produce food, while the other two work the 3 tiles that produce 3 food. Alternately that 3rd citizen can be turned into a specialist if you have buildings with the specialist slots, such as the university (2 scientist slots), temple (1 artist slot), market (1 merchant slot), etc.

Edit: When you do automate your workers, they will try to improve the tiles around the city based on that city's focus. So if you're on production focus, they'll try to make mines or lumber mills everywhere they can. If on food focus, they'll put farms on every tile possible.

 

[TPQ]

I'm fairly new to Civ and am a little confused as to the differences between citizens and workers.

Citizens make up the population of your cities, so a size 10 city has 10 citizens.

Each citizen can be allocated to a tile from within the city screen and can also be placed inside certain buildings to help produce great people.

If a tile inside the city screen has a green face, you have a citizen working it, if it is grey, you don't.

Citizens can be automatically assigned tiles to work by the city Governor and can also be assigned manually, or semi-automatically by selecting a type of focus, such as food, or production.

Manually assigning citizens allows you to lock them to a tile and are represented by little green locks.

Workers are civilian units that can improve tiles by building farms and mines etc, allowing your citizens to get more food and production etc from each tile.

Workers also build roads and improve luxury and resource tiles, allowing for trade routes and access to luxuries and resources respectively.

When you don't need any trading posts/farms etc.., what is the benefit of using the automated setting for the workers? What do you gain by having a plethora of workers, on the automated setting?

The benefit of automation is that workers will generally hook up luxuries and resources as soon as they become available to work without you having to find them and manually assign a worker.

However, the AI that controls worker actions is fairly stupid and will often build an inefficient road network, which wastes money, get themselves captured by enemies and try to build roads to city states half way across the world, which usually wastes money and gets them captured all in one.

General best advice is to always manually control your workers.

If a tile in your city is showing 2 food, does this still produce this even when no citizens are working the tile? If so, what is the benefit of placing a citizen on that tile? I assume it increasing the production, but am a little confused.

If a tile doesn't have a citizen assigned, then it's not contributing to the city that it surrounds. Each citizen requires 2 food to live, so assigning a citizen to work a 2 food tile will not make the city in question grow more. For growth, a tile needs to have in excess of 2 food worked by a citizen, unless you have maritime city states providing food.

A tile with 2 production and no food will provide 2 production when worked, but other tiles (or maritime city states) will need to cover the food cost of the citizen working that tile. In a way, food equals production, as you can use excess food to assign citizens to high production, zero food tiles, which you couldn't do without excess food, without starving a city and reducing it's population.

 

[nick7948]

Thanks everyone, very helpful responses. After hearing the responses it led me to two other questions.

Assuming I don't need any new workers, and also don't want to buy any more units or building (because of not wanting to spend more gold), is the best way to go to choose the "Gold" option at the bottom? (ie. where it converts a percentage of production to gold)

If I have a citizen on a tile which is earning 2 foods, and then I use a worker to create a farm, does this multiply the amount of gold that the citizen works, or is it a separate gold output? (i looked in the guide but am a little confused)

Thanks for all the responses.

 

[Monthar]

When building wealth you're turning a percentage of the city's production into gold. I think it's 25%. So if that city has a total, after multipliers, of 20 production you'd gain an extra 4 gpt (gold per turn) when building wealth in that city. Building science works the same way.

Food has nothing to do with gold. It is only for feeding your current population and growing more citizens. So if you have a citizen working a 2 food tile and build a farm on that tile to bring it to 3 food, that extra 1 food can either be used to grow your city's population or to allow another citizen to work a tile with only 1 food.

 

[Soronery]

1 citizen works 1 tile
Whatever you see on that tile is what that citizen produces.