Watermilling and Workers

[joer]

Being fairly new to Civ, I just recently stumbled upon this site. While traversing the site I came upon the "Balancing Growth and Warfare" link on the Empire Management page. I read through that and figured I would try the strategy suggested there, which is:
Get machinery, and build watermills on all river possible tiles. Reap the benefits of this industrial powerhouse improvement.

Now my question is, because it only give +1 production to begin with, should I wait until I have State Property up, along with Replaceable Parts and Electricity researched? Or should I build them up the second I get machinery?

Any extra opinions on if I should even do this at all, and if so, what should I do instead would be appreciated too. I am trying to read all the threads I can and read all the helpful things that people post to try and get better, but any comments on this specific strategy would be really inciteful as I am experimenting with it.

I have tried it once on Noble, and it worked with pretty good success (for my standards), but later on in the game I got lazy and just automated my workers.

Which brings me to my next question:
Any tips on how to manage my workers? I get to a point in the game where I feel like I've improved everything I can, and I feel like my workers are useless. If anyone has any tips on worker management that would be awesome as well.

Thanks,
Joe R

 

[Bei1052]

If I'm going to use them, I start building them around the time I'm researching SM.

And if your workers have everything built you can use at the moment, then just have them build roads. That's what I do, at least.

 

[Woodreaux]

Any tips on how to manage my workers? I get to a point in the game where I feel like I've improved everything I can, and I feel like my workers are useless. If anyone has any tips on worker management that would be awesome as well.

Yes. Manage them directly, do not automate them. If you have a specific land usage strategy (cottages, heavy, heavy, city specialization) you'll want to direct them yourself. For forest spreading purposes, you'll need to keep workers away from certain tiles.

How to do this effectively, some of my main techniques include:

• Build workers early and often, after you've got your core homeland improved and railed you probably have enough. Mileage may vary with expansion through conquest.
• Group workers into stacks of height a multiple of the number of turns they'll be setting up certain improvements. Try to have these stacks always work on things such that they finish all at once, so you don't have to check to see of some of them are done.
• Consider pre-chomping forests around cities in which you plan to build certain wonders.
• If you have a city with stacked whip and you're at your cap, building workers is a good way avoid growth while still using productively.
• If you have idle workers with no useful improvements to build, consider erecting forts in garbage tiles. I resource may spring up there. Plus, forts are always potentially helpful.

About watermills, they're great at full power. But so is almost every other improvement, especially Towns. Some may disagree, but I would not chop grassland forest to make room for a +1 +1 watermill. A cottage, yes, but not a baseline watermill.

 

[FlyinJohnnyL]

You need to consider what you want that city to do, and what that city needs. If you have a hammer city, you may want to watermill riverside tiles, especially if you don't need another farm. Afterall, you don't really want to cottage your riverside Hammer City tiles. If it's not a hammer city though, I'd just cottage most of your riverside tiles.

And what to do with idle workers? It may be inneficient, but when I run out of things for them to do, I send a couple to each city (from biggest to smallest) and just put them to sleep. Then, when I need them to do something (like I just got SP), then they are on the ready to start changing my tiles as needed. I used to just have them automate trade network, but I try to get spontaneous forest regrowth so I don't want roads on every tile. Besides, my empire looks better without roads on every tile. Looks DO count for something in my book

 

[mboettcher]

I find watermills to be supplemental. I usually have an army of workers and If Im going hammer economy then they can be useful whether or not I get the benefits of the corps. However, never more than in small numbers and not much thought is put into them.

Cottages are another story. They have certainly fallen from grace so to speak with the dozens of more flexible economies that have been developed but I still find them useful to be built in numbers in older cities. I tend to build very few in newer cities as its easier to make those cities very productive far more quickly with workshops, farms, mines and a few watermills, and perhaps windmills as opposed to cottages.

Either way a large number of workers is always necessary to facilitate the smooth transition between economic types. Just cause you improve a tile doesn't mean you have to keep it all game. You can build a ton of farms early and replace them with workshops and whatnot as the game goes on

 

[mboettcher]

You gotta take what the game gives you. If conquest and expansion are not an option then perhaps tanking with cottages has to be the call of the day. Make the most use of the little land you have. Takes a lot longer to develop but its all you can do while you wait trade techs and wait for an opportunity. This can also be true if you happen to be on a continent with just super crap land. Lots of plains, hills, deserts etc. we've all had these crap lands. In such cases strategies and improvements that are supposed to quickly use a lot of land may not be the best. Make use of the few grasslands you can.

Also improvement decisions are highly dependent on leaders and civs, what their strengths and weakness' are and what your victory goals are. These lead to type of economy and obviously improvements from there.

For example, If I'm a Financial or Phi leader then Im not necessarily going to look to expand. If I'm Expansionist, Imperialistic, Organized, Agg, Ind (yes I believe its an expansion/whip trait) or some other land grabbing trait then I'm going to expand, build lots of farms and whip. If Im Bismark (Ind/Exp = best whipping leader) I build very few cottages, take as many food resources as I can, build lots of farms and an army of cheap workers and whip almost all the way to Mining corp. If I'm Willem this probably isn't a good strategy.

 

[joer]

Cool, thanks everyone. You gave me some really useful information there, I'm going to try use my workers to do what I want them to do (instead of doing what it suggests I do, or automating them) and I'm also going to try and implement city specialization into my game. I'm going to read up on a couple different things and I should be well on my way to building improvements with the best of them. Thank you again everyone.