railroads?

[deuskid]

Thanks all for your help.

I was mistaking my iron for coal [as a number of you figured out].

As far as roads go, I generally link each city to the next and ultimately to the capital w/ roads right away. Then I put my workers to clearing swamps and jungles since they can have 'disease' impacts upon the cities as they grow. When I begin building factories and causing pollution i carpet the ground w/ roads to make clean up easier. I usually only build rail roads around the perimeter and across the continent to be efficient and use for strategic defensive movements.

I usually don't bother w/ Knights as I go as fast as I can to get to replacement parts and build infantry and artillery. That seems to be a 'sweet spot' of military superiority.

Thanks again,

 

[Lanzelot]

As far as roads go, I generally link each city to the next and ultimately to the capital w/ roads right away. Then I put my workers to clearing swamps and jungles since they can have 'disease' impacts upon the cities as they grow. When I begin building factories and causing pollution i carpet the ground w/ roads to make clean up easier. I usually only build rail roads around the perimeter and across the continent to be efficient and use for strategic defensive movements.

Another tip: you are losing a lot of potential that way. Every road adds +1 commerce to your income (under Republic even +2, if that tile did not yet have commerce of its own!) Run this through the multipliers like library/marketplace/university/bank, and you'll see that you are probably losing 50% of your empire's income by improper worker-management.

In the ancient age, the worker priorities should be as follows:

1. Irrigate every food bonus within reach (cow, wheat, floodplain, wine)
2. Put a road on any worked tile.
3. Connect luxury resources and horses/iron, if available.
4. Irrigate plains, build mines on grassland.
5. Build mines on hills. (This really only pays off, after you have a non-despotic government.)
6. Don't even touch swamps and jungle until the industrial age! As long as no citizen is working them, they don't cause disease. It just takes too long to make these tiles productive. Your workers have more important stuff to do... As long as you don't have hospitals, your cities should have enough other tiles they can work. No need to waste your precious early worker turns on swamp & jungle.

Same goes lateron for railroads: as soon as you discover steam, put a rail on every worked tile! It adds +1 shield to every mine and +1 food to every irrigation. By railroading everything and then changing half of the irrigations to mines (which can be done at that point, because you'll have too much food-overrun anyway), you can basically double each city's production! Just imagine building everything twice as fast! And as you get other multipliers (like factories, power plants, stock exchanges, research labs, wonders) twice as early, all this adds up exponentially!

What I describe here probably makes all the difference between "just barely scraping together a victory in 2050 AD" and "cruising to an easy spaceship launch in 1400AD"...

 

[Aabraxan]

Just to add one small item to Lanzelot's list:
7. No worker should ever leave a tile without building a road, unless threatened by enemy forces.