General rule of thumb for # of workers?

[Silence101]

There's a real opportunity cost associated with building workers - especially in the early game with limited food and production. Workers are very important, but building too many workers can be as bad for your civ as building too few.

 

[LlamaCat]

I see a lot of conflicting advice on how many workers to have on these forums. They say you should have as many workers as you need to avoid working unimproved tiles. But then they say you should have 1 or even 2 per city. But that's ridiculous because city growth is always much too slow to keep up with worker pace.

So I'm inclined to say you need something like 0.75 worker per city in the early game, and more like 0.25 per city in the late game. At the beginning, 1-2 workers will get it all done in a quick enough time for 1 to 3 cities before they grow to any size that is working a lot of tiles. Then at some point later if you are expanding to 4-5 cities, this is the crucial time when you really need a healthy workforce, generally about 4-5 workers total. But the requirement for a higher ratio of wokers later on drops significantly

For a typical game you are adding cities as maintenance and land allow, and generally it's not too fast for a workforce of 4-8 units.

And unless the new city is going to be close enough to an established city, you can't even have workers doing duty ahead of time on the land until the city is settled, because tiles outside your border can't be worked (except roads). So there is often the initial population 1 size that is working an unimproved tile no matter how many workers you have, until they can improve that first tile. And of course this is a very slow growth phase until population 2.

I actually find myself deleting workers in the very late game, realizing I overdid it again. Those builds on workers were probably crucial hammers I could have used elsewhere and they also stop city growth.

 

[Bleys]

So I'm inclined to say you need something like 0.75 worker per city in the early game, and more like 0.25 per city in the late game. At the beginning, 1-2 workers will get it all done in a quick enough time for 1 to 3 cities before they grow to any size that is working a lot of tiles. Then at some point later if you are expanding to 4-5 cities, this is the crucial time when you really need a healthy workforce, generally about 4-5 workers total. But the requirement for a higher ratio of wokers later on drops significantly

Wow, awesome post. Thats a great guideline, for sure.

After I posted "1 per up to 10" I got to thinking to myself "hmm, I never make THAT many, and never have 10 cities for a long time" LOL.