How Many Workers?

omglazers

Warlord
Joined
Jan 7, 2008
Messages
126
Location
Orlando, FL
About how many workers does everyone here build?
Early on, workers would be nice but sacrificing growth for workers is sometimes bad.

Later the in game, you have everything improve and an army of workers is annoying [except for when you get Railroad :D]

So whats everyone's rules for ratios of workers to landmass or cities or whatever.

Mine is at least one worker per city, and later on I try and get five or six stacks of three.
 
i get 1-2 workers per city, a couple stacks of workers just to make roads and and an army of workers to chop down jungle.
 
About how many workers does everyone here build?
Early on, workers would be nice but sacrificing growth for workers is sometimes bad.

Later the in game, you have everything improve and an army of workers is annoying [except for when you get Railroad :D]

So whats everyone's rules for ratios of workers to landmass or cities or whatever.

Mine is at least one worker per city, and later on I try and get five or six stacks of three.

I am a "worker-holic". I believe in fully developing my land, regardly which style of economy I play. I like to group workers in stacks of 4 to 6, allowing me to quickly build any improvement.
 
Well, originally when I got BTS I built far too few. Then I went the opposite direction, building too many too soon, and had the "I have 500 workers, now what" situation.

I've come to realize that there's no need to have 2 workers per city, or even one worker, so long as you keep your development of tiles up with the growth of the city. If you're not growing a city above 10, why have more than 10-12 squares developed?

Of course, it's always better to have too many than too few.
 
I usually build one worker per city for the first three, then I build one or two extra to speed things up a little and from then on back to one per city until I get the first 3-5 cities fully developed from then on I only add a worker if I need one, but am usually off taking cities instead of settling them by that point.
 
Depends, but generally 1 worker per city is sufficient. Too many Workers and you'll have trouble supporting a decent-sized army. It's just too expensive.
 
I make about 1 worker per city, up to a certain amount, depending on the size of the area I plan to settle, but generally no more than 10 or so total for a normal sized continent/hemisphere. I also steal workers when possible, especially early in the game, when capturing an AIs worker without any real intention of an immediate war is a double-whammy (reduces his land improvement ability while enhancing my own). I dont go out of my way to do this though, but its a common tactic on more densely packed maps.

Once my workers have basically improved all the tiles I want improved, I start sleeping them in spread out locations (in cities) while I wait for Railroad. Once I get railroad, I go through my city list one by one and wake them all, and get them busy again.

Map choice plays an important role in the amount of workers you need though. Maps with a lot of water dont have as many tiles to improve, so obviously less are needed. Maps with heavy jungle need plenty of workers to hack that crap down and turn those areas into powerful tiles, especially since jungles are likely to have a river or two zig-zagging through it.
 
depends on who i am and what i'm doing.

if i'm a conquering empire i always have a lot of workers (4 per city) so that my new cities don't drag off my economy.

if i'm focusing on another victory (which is extremely rare) well .. i can't even remember what i do then.. bottom line: rome wasn't build in a day, because the dumb ass who built rome didn't have enough workers.
 
I find that the one worker per city rule works pretty well. I'll assign a second worker to a city if it's got a lot of jungle, but that's mostly on a case-by-case basis and after I'm pretty much finished building settlers.

Bleys: When Railroad comes around, you can just click on one of your workers and ALT-click on the "Wake" button to wake all of your workers at once. It's a lot easier than going through each of your cities separately.
 
Ah, thanks Jed, I always forget about that "mass wake" feature. Its not that big a deal though, because I am always going through my city list anyway, swapping tiles, adding to the queues, etc. I enjoy the micromanaging, and often spend a LONG time on each turn, especially later in the game where I have more than 10 cities.
 
An extreme case is this rule of thumb:
"If a city works an unimproved tile, you have not got enough workers."

Rather extreme, and not my style. On the other hand I often lack workers a little. I find that especially forest tiles (that provides .5 :health:) needs no improvement before RP.
 
I don't usually build a lot of them... Maybe 3-4 from my initial (self settled) towns. From there on out, I tend to collect quite a few workers via conquest. To the point where I will often start deleting workers during the 2nd or 3rd major war, once all the roads are built. Of course if I'm in a tight financial spot, I'll often conduct a "salt the earth" campaign while warring, to get all that extra gold from pillaging towns, mines and farms. If I've been scorching the earth, I usually won't be deleting the captured workers for a while.
 
1 worker per city while you're actively expanding. Once you've planted all your initial 5-7 cities, 2 workers per city from then on, capped at 20 workers total.
 
Fast Workers:
1 per city until I have 5-6 cities, then around two FW's per 3 cities thereafter. I always keep all captured workers (which magically morph into FW's once captured), and automate 90% of all workers once I can build Lumbermills. That way, when I conquer a city (and research Railroad (playing, of course, with the Bh patch ;) ), I don't have to micromanage too much.
Go India! :lol:
 
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