How many workers do you use?

[Grey Knight]

Foreign workers are free, so keep them! The tradeoff is they work at half rate. So when counting up workers, only count them as half - for example, if you have 100 cities, and want 100 workers you could have:

• 100 of your own at a cost of $100 per turn, or
• 200 foreign workers at a cost of $0 per turn, or
• 50 of your own, and 100 foreign at a cost of $50 a turn

The real downside to foreign workers is the increased micromanagement. The worker automation sucks (there needs to be a way to control how much mining versus irrigation they do, and how many squares the improve per city - a size 6 town can't work more than 6 squares!), so I do the initial buildout by hand, and then turn them loose with Shift-A. If something important comes up, I grab a few of my "own" workers and do the job myself.

Cheers,
Shawn

 

[brody]

foreigners are okay for the cost, again. But what I had a problem with was that I was industrious and the captured workers were not. So captured workers were REALLY slow at doing anything, and I was in desperate need of roads to connect my newly acquired cities (maybe next time I'll pillage and bombard improvements less )... I accidentally used a bunch of foreigners and boy oh boy did it cause problems!

I HORDE workers, right now I have about 3 per city, and most sit around doing nothing. AND I'm industrious. Yes, it's a huge waste of money, yes I could do fine without so many workers, but as I said before, when the enemy is nearby and has 5-6 bombers + ships bombarding, those extra workers come in handy. Of course, if I were smart, I'd just horde foreigners and make sure I horded a TON of them (like 6 per city) to make up for their slowness. Oh well, you live and learn. But it is nice to have my newly acquired cities get a transport full of workers to up their pop (unless they're starving from enemy pop-rushing) or connect RRs to next enemy city