Helpful advice on using the workers in CivIV Warlords

[singletonmj]

Concerning the city management screen, should I disable the citizen automation control button and control it myself? Also, When I am using a city to specialize in a certain area(such as commerce) should I enable the commerce button? These may sound like silly questons, but I need to ask.

singletonmj

 

[JimT]

Concerning the city management screen, should I disable the citizen automation control button and control it myself?
singletonmj

My God, YES!

Citizen automatic is my main bug bear, I particularly hate it when they add specialists after your city grows. I mean I have five artists and caste system running why on earth would I want an engineer added?

Hitting the commerce button (or which ever you want) is a good idea as it means any new citizen is put where you probably want him, but its not full proof. Generally its best to cycle through your cities every time they grow to make sure they are doing what you want, invasions also have a habit of reallocating your citizens.

In a nut shell specialisation involves

- working out how much food you need
- maximising the city's speciality (whether its commerce, specialists, production or the whip)
- buildings that boost the speciality (there is no point putting a bank in your production city)

A production city needs a few farms/plantations allowing it to work some mined hills/resources

 

[ParadigmShifter]

I agree, but Banks and Universities are faster to build in production cities which often means that you can start building Oxford and Wall Street earlier. Theatres it doesn't matter, they are cheap hammer wise anyway and most cities need them so you can combat war weariness with the culture slider.

Of course having high commerce, switching to Universal Suffrage and buying the buildings tends to be best though!

 

[amaterasu]

My god, make sure you choose each build yourself! And do try to micro the worked tiles, otherwise you cant get past noble.

 

[singletonmj]

My god, make sure you choose each build yourself! And do try to micro the worked tiles, otherwise you cant get past noble.

Yes, I will try to micro work each tile. The reason for me playing on Noble is because I like a good challenge. As a matter of fact I have won a few games at the Noble level(Space Race Victories), and it is because I did try as you said to micro work each tile. I did automate one or two workers to strictly build the trade networks, to try and save me some time to work on the improvemnts and city management, doing these manually. I did have the governor control the citizen automation control at times.

singletonmj

 

[AnitaGaribaldi]

You can assign a list of tasks to a worker using the shift key. Something like, farm, move to, mine, move to, cottage...

 

[JimT]

You can assign a list of tasks to a worker using the shift key. Something like, farm, move to, mine, move to, cottage...

This works well and often giving two or more the same order works brilliantly
i.e. cottage road move cottage road etc.

the difference is when moving on to a 2 move tile (hill/forest) only move one worker on to it until a road is built

 

[Hero]

It may waste turns but it saves me time to group my workers. Maybe on higher levels it's an issue, but I play on Prince. Unless I'm playing on a small map I don't wanna spend half of my gametime telling workers what to do. Grouping them in threes cut that boring worker management time down.

 

[JackOfClubs]

I find that most worker actions take some multiple of 2 turns so grouping by 2 or 4 is more efficient. There are exceptions but when I have 3 in a group almost always one is left over with nothing to do.