Noob Worker Question

[JoshH]

What should I be doing with my workers at the end of the game?? I have everything railroaded and all tiles improved. I am pretty new to Civilization as a whole, and I feel like I am wasting turn with them. Should I be railroading into neighboring cities?

 

[vmxa]

Do you have cities that have need of food that you may convert some mills/mines to farms? Or the reverse? All used tiles have something on them?

 

[JoshH]

I could look a little closer, but all of my cities are growing. I think 2 may be stagnant, but if I were to start making them grow now, they would be producing at a very low rate. I am at war right now, so I thought producing some more military units would be better than growing those cities. Am I correct in this thinking? Thanks for the quick response!

 

[Byrath]

This would happen often in Civ3, except there you still needed them to clean up pollution... like vxma said you can do some dirty micromanagement work and see if any cities could use optimising, or you could just fortify them somewhere, in case you conquer some new cities or need to replace pillaged improvements. Or possibly disband them if they are costing you gpt to upkeep, though I would be loath to resort to that unless I had a *lot* of them.

 

[JoshH]

Well I don't have that many, so they aren't costing me anything. Right now I have a couple on a transport to go work some land I just conquered. However, this leads me to another question. I took over a city and figured I qould keep it, since it's coastal, and on an island inhabited only by the Egyptians who I am currently wiping up. When I took over the city though, it's just one square and I am producing no culture to grow it any more than that. How do I expand cities I take over so that they are actually useful? If I had known it was just going to be the one square, I would have razed it along with the first city I destroyed.

 

[quail]

I put mine on automatic improvements (but make sure you have the option set where they don't change your current improvements; it's off by default! the idiots turn your farms into cottages!). I wasn't paying too much attention, but they seemed to build me a railroad network and then sleep until something got pillaged or I got new improvements from technology. Takes a lot of tedium out of it.

 

[Samson]

If you are at war, it is very important to have roads / rails up to the front. If you have loads of workers, you can get the road / rail head that much closer to the front because you can risk them getting caught by the enemy.

 

[Gufnork]

Conquered cities have a few turns of uprisings before they become productive. Once that's over they'll get a normal city grid and start producing culture.

 

[petey]

Well I don't have that many, so they aren't costing me anything. Right now I have a couple on a transport to go work some land I just conquered. However, this leads me to another question. I took over a city and figured I qould keep it, since it's coastal, and on an island inhabited only by the Egyptians who I am currently wiping up. When I took over the city though, it's just one square and I am producing no culture to grow it any more than that. How do I expand cities I take over so that they are actually useful? If I had known it was just going to be the one square, I would have razed it along with the first city I destroyed.

I believe a city needs 10 culture points in order to expand its borders and I think all the revolts have to die down first. Build a temple of something in it and it should soon expand. The downside to that is that newly conquered cities can't build at any speed whatsoever, which is why the civics that let you spend gold/population to speed them up are good for conquest strategies.

 

[oopsy poopsy]

Everyone's right about the conquered city thing. There should be a red fist with a number beside it on the right part under the city name telling you how long the uprisings/resistance will last. I would add that if you've got extra worker turns the one bit of micromanagement that isn't gone from this game is that I would check all the cities and make sure when they get to where they won't grow another size or you don't want them to grow another size that you have even numbers of excess food. The new health system can complicate it a bit, but basically all I mean is that you don't want a city that is producing one excess food until it grows and then starving with one shortage until it shrinks and then repeating itself ad infinitum. If you can either take away one food or add one food by altering the terrain so that you can get a balance (stagnant) population, because a shrinking city is an unhappy city. It doesn't take much to fix it, but usually unless you've planned for it from the very beginning (and even then) by the later game stages this could be happening in a few cities. Just a thought for how to keep your workers busy with a specific goal in mind.

 

[snepp]

the idiots turn your farms into cottages!)

Unless you're specializing for great people or have a city with alot of low food producing tiles, cottages are a superior upgrade, imho. So I could see why workers on automate tend to do that.

 

[quail]

oopsy: I think there's a button on the city screen to stop city growth if you want to?

snepp: Yeah, but they were doing it on my tiny cities which weren't growing. I think one ever built over a pasture.