I've figured out some very interesting ways to manage population with workers. I'm starting this thread because I hope some others have equally interesting things to do with our industrious helpers that I haven't thought of yet.
Essentially what I do is build a worker any time a city is at it's maximum population (6 before aqueduct if not on a river or lake, 12 before hospitals) and the city growth time is close to the worker build time. I end up with a lot of workers and very quickly developed territory.
Now, the reason to do this is to avoid wasting your city's' population growth. You 'store' the population growth in workers. The very nice side benefit is an incredibly well developed nation.
When you are finally able to build an aqueduct you have pop units ready to be stuck in there to instantly bring it up to a 12 pop. Instant and huge increase in production, revenue and research!
