Help with workers...

[schizerbone]

I always automate my workers, but I can see that won't work past Warlord. How do you guys know what to improve and where with each worker?

 

[Invisible Rhino]

1) Build roads connecting your cities
2) Build roads connecting luxuries and resources to your nextwork
3) Improve the tiles your citizens are working, the general rule rule for newbies is to "mine green irrigate brown"

 

[Masrim]

I just try to make sure that each tile produces at least 1 food and 1 shield each.
Generally following the rule, if it already has a shield irrigate it.
Leave mountains for last unless they have a resource you need then limit to just roading until everything else is done.
Early on I focus on food while after I have some cities established I try to get production running full tilt.

 

[Stumpy123]

Generally, the rule I've heard the most is to have 2 workers per city if you are not industrious, or 1.5 if you are (one native worker and one foreign). And as Invisible Rhino said, the "mine green water brown" strategy often works. However, I sometimes irrigate grassland after I have get out of despotism. This allows for some 3 food tiles, and that allows for fast growth of cities. The rest of the grassland you can mine. And have roads, and eventually railroads, on every square that is worked.

Some cities will have a fairly large amount of hills and/or mountains. In these cases, you want to irrigate every flat square that will support it. Hills and mountains provide 3 shields every turn (out of despotism, that is ), which makes them good for industrial production, but won't do much good if you don't have people to work the squares.

As for the worker micromanagement, it will be tedious at first, but soon you'll find it results in more productive land. Or at least you'll get used to it after awhile and it won't bother you much anymore .

 

[vmxa]

I always automate my workers, but I can see that won't work past Warlord. How do you guys know what to improve and where with each worker?

If we ignore variant games and just consider were you have some space and time to grow, I would say you first want to look in the capitol. What is the best tile and is your starting citizen working it?

If not move it to that tile and have the worker improve that tile. You have to check that the tile is needing a mine or irrigation and do which ever is best.

You want to keep an eye out to get roads to the next town or site. You want to have tiles that are being worked improved first thing.

You want to get lux and resources connected.

You check on the towns to see if they are growing or not and can you do anything to get them growing.

 

[schizerbone]

Ok, I'm going to give it a shot, thanks guys.

 

[Invisible Rhino]

I agree with Stumpy. I still irrigate grasslands a lot, at this point I'm not sure if its just a bad habit or an alternate playing style

Also, if you have a city on a flood plain surrounded by deserts, mine the deserts, you don't need to irrgate them when you'll have irrigated floodplains and you'll need the production.

 

[Dreadnought]

My tip: mine every square that makes two food and irrigate everything else, then once your out of Despotism, irrigate everything that can be irrigated. Do not do the 'mine this irrigate that' rule. It helps in the long run (You'll get 25+ population cities, maybe even 30+).

 

[dwarrior]

I always control workers for the first part of the game then stick them on automate once my core group of cities is setup how I like. After that when I start taking enemy cities i'll use em to build road/rails quickly if they arent already up or leave em on automate if they are. I usually play large/huge maps and have over 50 workers later on so manually controlling them is no fun at that point. It does get annoying though when they auto move to border tiles and get taken out by the enemy ( you'd think they'd stay clear of enemy land even if there are no units visible, but oh well )