General rule of thumb for # of workers?

[Whammy]

When starting out the game, I was wondering how many workers i should be building as I continue to expand my civ. Maybe there's a general rule of thumb such as 1 worker for every city you have? I realise to some extent it would depend on the rate of expansion, because if there's a large slow down between your expanding, the other cities may be fully completed. However, let's say for argument sake a person's normal rate of expansion?

 

[King of Town]

I usually do one worker per city. Once I get to six workers they break off into two groups. I don't know if most people keep them all together always or if they send them out on there own like the ai does.

 

[DigitalBoy]

One per city has worked fine for me (although I sometimes end up with many more due to captured workers during wartime).

I'll have each city with a worker dedicated to improving that city. Sometimes if a city already has most of its tiles improved, I may have a newer city borrow that worker to help get its tiles improved more quickly.

 

[Morgrad]

The best answer is "as many as you need to prevent your cities from working (most) unimproved tiles".

One per city is a good rule of thumb in lieu of micro-managing it.

 

[Robo-Star]

When starting out the game, I was wondering how many workers i should be building as I continue to expand my civ. Maybe there's a general rule of thumb such as 1 worker for every city you have? I realise to some extent it would depend on the rate of expansion, because if there's a large slow down between your expanding, the other cities may be fully completed. However, let's say for argument sake a person's normal rate of expansion?

Four Workers for every three Cities.

 

[someguy486]

1 per city works well for me

 

[Bleys]

I generally have 1 per city, up to my first 10 cities. I dont usually make more than 10 workers.

I do keep them in packs (ungrouped, there is a bad thing that happens when they are grouped, you can lose a LOT of worker turns), and when I get a new city, my pack of workers will SWARM it and get the roads and improvements up very quickly.

Even if your workers have no tiles to improve, they still have uses. A worker down in the frozen tundra actually fogbusts, and can chop those forests up for a small boost to the closest cities (you get something like 12 hammers per forest if your worker is 10 tiles from the city, roughly)

 

[Verge]

At least 1 per city; I usually run with 1.5 per.

 

[Mike Hussey]

Should you stack workers like in Civ3 or not? If so, how many per stack?

 

[ggganz]

I wouldn't put 3 in a stack. 2 max.

 

[Bleys]

You should never "stack" them in the conventional sense. You can have more than one worker on a project, but each should have his own orders, or you will lose worker turns.

For example, if a forest takes 5 turns to chop, and you put a stack of 2 workers on it, and command them to "Chop forest" as a group, when the forest is chopped, one of the workers will have a turn left, but it wont cycle to him. However, if you give each one individual orders, it gets done the same turn, but since the last worker didnt need to chop, he can do something else.

There are many worker tricks like this, especially with roads. I almost always hit W when a worker turn comes up, until all the workers who have current orders have done their thing. That way, if a road gets built, or a forest chopped, you dont waste any movements, stuff like that.

 

[ggganz]

Yeah, I kind of like tricks like that in games. Like in CoD hitting Shift after each grenade lets you switch back to your gun faster. (also i think shift at a precise point in reloading a BAR). Makes me think I know a lot about the game.
which i dont........

 

[Thanny]

I use worker stacks, because it speeds things up without having to seriously micro-manage. Workers lose tons of turns when idle (unless you're foolish enough to kill them and build more when you need to improve a tile again), so a couple workers losing a turn when the improvement is finished by only part of the stack is nothing to worry about.

Rather than use a city-count formula, I go by the size of the landmass. For a small island with just a couple tiles, I'll usually keep a stack of four workers (so the improvements can be rebuilt when destroyed in war). For larger landmasses, I keep one or more six-worker stacks. If I had to guess, it'd probably be somewhere around 5 cities per stack. I keep them on automate (with options to not change improvements and not chop forests) after I've manually built what I want, so they'll at least do *something* when war causes improvements to be pillaged like crazy (especially when the AI gets Guided Missiles). I'll manually check what they did after the war is over, and fix anything that doesn't match what I want.

 

[realitytvlover]

1 worker per city is usually good, but if my empire is rich in resources then I'll build an extra one to take advantage of them quickly.

 

[grommit5]

I like one per city. I stack in pairs later in the game to speed things up and reduce some of the micromanagement.

 

[Silence101]

If there's a lot of jungle around, I'll usually build a few extra, but I think the 1:1 ratio (one worker per city) is a good general rule. I like to use my workers to explore neighboring civ's territory w/ open boarders if they run out of things to do.

 

[Armorydave]

As many as other Civs provide up to the point where I need to start destroying them because of the unit cost. I usually keep the first 10-12 and then take in more as the empire demands. After that, the surplus get deleted as soon as they are captured (especially since it costs money to maintain them outside your cultural borders just like military units).

If I was building them my answer would be "as many as it takes so that your cities aren't working unimproved squares but stop at the point where they add to my unit cost".

 

[Silence101]

As many as other Civs provide up to the point where I need to start destroying them because of the unit cost. I usually keep the first 10-12 and then take in more as the empire demands. After that, the surplus get deleted as soon as they are captured (especially since it costs money to maintain them outside your cultural borders just like military units).

That's actually a good point as well - I like the 1:1 ratio, but when I start agressively expanding, I don't usually build more workers for cities that I capture. A 10-12 cap is probably good depending on game speed and map size.

 

[Bleys]

I like this part of your post:

Rather than use a city-count formula, I go by the size of the landmass.

Thats a very strong point. Whenever I move to a new continent/island, I determine how many workers I build/schlep over based on how big the land is.

However, I most definitely do NOT agree with this part:

I use worker stacks, because it speeds things up without having to seriously micro-manage. Workers lose tons of turns when idle (unless you're foolish enough to kill them and build more when you need to improve a tile again), so a couple workers losing a turn when the improvement is finished by only part of the stack is nothing to worry about.

This may be true later in the game, when your looking for stuff for your workers to do, but during the critical parts of the game, worker turns are pretty darn important.

I "stack" my workers all the time. I put 3, 4, or more on key upgrades, I swarm in on new cities and mass-upgrade their tiles even if they dont have the population to work them all. But I treat each one as an individual, with its own orders. I had a stack of 3 once, one finished a build, and 2 of them had a move, yet I was not even "notified" by the automatic unit cycling of that fact. If grouped stacks were a part of the unit-cycle even if a member of the group has no moves it would be different, but it doesnt work that way.

If worker moves werent a big deal, then Gandhis UU would be bottom 5 instead of top 10.

 

[EnlightenmentHK]

Damn. Maybe i've got a bit of OCD with the city thing, but I like my tiles finished and finished quickly. I'll generally engage in alot of worker steals early in the game if I have enemies nearby. And try to have a good 5-6 one way or another by the time I hit my 3rd city. I like leaving alot of forests around on plains for lumbermills, and I like finishing that round of 'working' quickly. So by the time lumbermill tech hits I like to have 28 or so workers (playing total realism mod, improvements cost a bit more) so I can do two lumbermills each turn.

By the time railroad comes around (honestly, there isn't really that much to build thats absolutely necessary by the time railroads hit. And hopefully you have a quality enough army already) its not unheard of for me to pump out 100, even 200 workers to get it taken care of quickly. Really by that point in the game I'm rather sick of micromanagement anyway and the last thing I want to bother with is directing more workers. More than a game has ended early just because I didn't want to bother with fricken railroads, automated workers or not.