Worker : an alternative use

[Gothmog]

I should try the 'wall of foreign workers' trick. I had read about that before but have never used it myself. But again since I am not a warmonger and like to be in a Democracy I rarely have that many workers, also if I do get more than I feel I need I join my homegrown workers (like after my railnet is complete). I do not 'milk' at the end of games, but I do see how lots o' workers would be useful for that.

I did get a smile from: "move them to their home border and execute them" as suggested by Allemand - sometimes the AI really pisses me off too.

 

[Sultan Bhargash]

I don't really think of any of the techniques described in the first post as an exploit, anyone I hope when we go multiplayer nobody is going to try and tell me not to do something which it is within the mechanics to do.

There are lots of uses for captured workers. Usually I give them a short speech and send them to clear jungle, but I will also put foreing workers in harm's way, as the AI will go out of the way to round them up and it is possible to thus isolate their cavalry/tank units.

 

[civ007]

Sometimes to help avoid cultural assimilation I build a couple workers in a newly captured city. That gets rid of some of the foreign nationals, and workers are fairly cheap to buy. I suppose you could then add to the city with your own workers to build up the city size. That way you can get more foreign workers. Even if you play a peaceful game you can get workers this way if you capture the city though culture. (But then you are not as likely to be in a situation of fearing assimilation).
One word of caution. If your city grows before you build a worker it will be a domestic worker. You can always build more workers and then put the domestic back into the city, but this seems like a waste of time.

 

[Yndy]

On the number of workers issue.

I, too considered that had hundreds of workers as they were not automated and took a long time to manipulate every turn. I even took a poll asking for the no of workers per city and confidently said: about 5. I later checked that at home and the truth was that on a large map i have about 20 native and 50- 60 slaves before railroads. Railroads make me build some 50 even 80 workers but then my treasury goes down rapidly (100 gpt for workers only).

Now considering about 20 - 30 towns which is an average after taking down one civ, it comes up to something between 2 and 3 workers per city. It could even be around two as you get more cities.

On the uses issues.

Just read a Cartouche B message about feeding settler factories with workers.

Last month read Cracker's article on Forestry. Now if you read that you understand that you could use hundreds of workers for hundreds of turns and still have something to do. For an example, Cracker describes how to build a forest, cut it and replacing the irrigation/mine. It takes about 26 slaves to do it in one turn. Consider 1000 tiles on a large map that could be worked that way. That is 100 turns for 260 slave workers.

For early uses build roads all over your kingdom. You will use them later.

 

[XOVER]

My skill set is now to the point where I also accumulate scads of foreign workers during the course of the game.

In my current game I've definitely got 100+, and so I take my indigenous workers (that cost money) and join them back into new or captured cities to get those cities to plateau levels (6 or 12). I really don't like to use workers anymore who actually expect to be paid.

Though I don't use all of my foreign workers every move anymore (my cities are generally 12+), I don't see the strategy of joining free workers back into cities. I have been just letting many of them lolly-gag around on fortified stacks for ages. Is this a flawed strategy?

I anticipate using most of them in the near future to transform my mined land to irrigated land as improvements become scarce and population rises, but this won't take but a turn or two or three. After that point should I add them back into cities? Feedback appreciated.

One other thing: I am positive that earlier in the game when I was conquering my own continent I lost a stack of indigenous workers to foreign attack. I immediately recaptured my stack of erstwhile indigenous workers from the nefarious enemy. But a strange thing had happened. My indigenous workers were suddenly transformed into free, foreign workers via the capture process. It was great. A stack of free, if slower, workers. Anybody else notice this or am I just dreaming?

 

[Yndy]

Xover,

1. Read crackers guide on forestry operations (it's under strategy from civfanatics main page) to see what you could do with the workers.

2. Why not keep workers fortified? For score! Population adds up to score every turn. So theoretically, if your cities can feed them the difference between keeping 30 workers fortified for 50 turns or had them join cities is 1,500 points (if the workers would be content or specialists in the town you add them to).

In practice if your cities were growing they would get that population and score anyway with a little delay. So you may not gain that much score.