worker priorities

[criminiminal]

If you are at an early stage where you only have one or two workers & 2or3+ towns, do you think it is more important to work the tiles around one town or to connect the distant town(s) by road to you Capital?

just wondering what everyone's priorities here are...

sometimes i'm not in a position to build more workers & this question always comes up in my head when it does.

Most times i will work the Capital tiles thoroughly before connecting to my other town but i still like to link everyone up pretty early. one of my biggest pet peeves is having towns/cities or metros unconnected.

 

[Sweetchuck]

If you are at an early stage where you only have one or two workers & 2or3+ towns, do you think it is more important to work the tiles around one town or to connect the distant town(s) by road to you Capital?

just wondering what everyone's priorities here are...

sometimes i'm not in a position to build more workers & this question always comes up in my head when it does.

Most times i will work the Capital tiles thoroughly before connecting to my other town but i still like to link everyone up pretty early. one of my biggest pet peeves is having towns/cities or metros unconnected.

I have it down to a science. By the time my capital is at 3 pop, it's cranking out a settler - so I only need 3 improved tiles there. Same for my other couple of cities.

Early in the game, I'm busting out settlers like nobodies business so I don't need a ton of improvements. I try to get 1 worker per city early on and then increase once I get to a half-dozen cities to maybe 1.5 workers per city.

This gives me the opportunity to road and connect my cities and the original capital city worker might become part of a small squad of road-only crew.

I'll circle back and improve my way back to the capital when it's time to grow pop.

 

[undertoad]

Like you I try to connect cities as much as I can, over improving tiles. Partly because, as a CivIII newbie, I'm new to the idea that cities have to be connected to avoid missing out on e.g. new resources being used in them; I hate being caught out by this later on, as you mentioned yourself.

Everything takes so long back then (e.g. building Settlers and getting them anywhere) that, once the capital is built, I immediately start laying a road to the site of my next city; and so on.

Sometimes you can kill two birds with one stone, building a road to somewhere in an equal number of moves (or maybe just 1 more), but in a strange zig-zag that takes in all the used/useable tiles that most need a road for "improvement" purposes. This tactic comes in handy later on with railways as well - my first rail spine is always a very odd shape for this reason.

 

[darski]

I tend to road and improve two or three tiles around my capitol but then I start on the connecting roads for cities. I try to get back to finish the cap's tile needs before or while I am working on a great Wonder.

Generally speaking, my first build in any new city is a worker and that worker improves one tile for its native city before it joins the crews working on overall empire management.

 

[anaxagoras]

Interesting. I generally try to resist the temptation to make the very first unit a worker, because of the production hit you take for keeping the town at size one. I'd rather work an unimproved tile for a short while than get the improvements down but not have the population available to use them. Maybe I should change that, though. I still have tendencies to build too few workers. I constantly have to remind myself that another worker is almost always a good build choice.

 

[darski]

granted I play at nothing higher than Regent but I can have the most settlers out there and the most cities going in most games. I have never noticed any difficulty with starting with a worker build. I just consider the first 10 turns of a town as a donation to the empire... after you pledge your fealty oath, you can do what you want.

even at one worker per town, (generally) I still lag behind on required worker units. I tend to vary anywhere from .9 per city to 1.7 per city.

In some cities, you can't get a worker in 5 or 10 turns. Those are the cities that most often get me off track.

 

[Sweetchuck]

granted I play at nothing higher than Regent but I can have the most settlers out there and the most cities going in most games. I have never noticed any difficulty with starting with a worker build. I just consider the first 10 turns of a town as a donation to the empire... after you pledge your fealty oath, you can do what you want.

even at one worker per town, (generally) I still lag behind on required worker units. I tend to vary anywhere from .9 per city to 1.7 per city.

In some cities, you can't get a worker in 5 or 10 turns. Those are the cities that most often get me off track.

Sometimes you can shift citizens around to build workers quicker, sacrificing pop growth temporarily - but in the long run, having a worker quicker to improve tiles is better IMO.

In the event that this can't be done, I usually build a defensive unit first then a worker.

 

[Hasdrubal Barca]

I tend to love the cities where you get a worker every 5 or 10 turns, you just need to maximize the number of those cities in a ICS system, if you get 10 of those cities in 20 tiles apart, far from your core with 99% corruption you have a 1 worker per turn factory setup, because you´re making 10 workers in 10 turns, its simple math.

 

[chrisman1]

A worker only costs 10 shields (at least in Vanilla), so you can get a worker in 10 turns in every city, no badly how corrupted it is. Getting a worker in 5 turns only requires 2 shields of production.

 

[iambenben]

I usually get two workers, one to improve the tiles around the 3 or 4 cities i have and one to link up the cities together and connect to the neighbours cities as well