It looks like the
original concern was that people were
pop-rushing and avoiding the resulting unhappiness, since a size-1 town can be made an entertainer, or a larger town can be left to starve.
Those in the conversation linked to by DaveMcW didn't seem to think it was wrong to join workers for the purpose of pop-rushing as long as the player had to deal with the resulting unhappiness (this was before the rule in question was put in place). There were also concerns about the dogpile exploit (which I've never tried or taken the time to understand
).
I'd prefer something like the following rule to address that concern:
Players should have to bear the unhappiness cost of pop-rushing, and should not take advantage of the dog-pile exploit. In particular,
- no joining workers to cities that are starving or that have to starve to prevent rioting, and
- no joining workers to cities that require an entertainer to not riot at size 1.
Of course, the above rule would be hard to enforce. (But we can't really enforce the current rule well, either.)
I agree that it
appears that the spirit of the current rule would extend to joining workers for pop-rushing buildings or drafting, not just to units. But since the original concern was the creation of "throwaway" cities that would always be at size one and "absorb" the pop-rush unhappiness
without penalty, the analogy doesn't really extend to either buildings or drafting.
- Buildings are built once and kept in the town; you can't pop-rush 5 libraries in a town to get five times the culture.
- Drafting requires a town of at least size 7, so the unhappiness effects have to be dealt with.
In sum, mad-bax's interpretation of the current rule is certainly plausible, but not the only one. I'd prefer a different interpretation, or, better yet, a different rule altogether.
More thoughts (in case anyone is still curious
) -
- Not allowing the conversion of unneeded workers into shields doesn't make sense as long as it's fine to disband units, especially drafted units, in order to hurry production. I would be extremely surprised if any of the fast finishes in the current SGOTM didn't make extensive use of drafting and disbanding (as well as a huge amount of pop-rushing of native citizens.) Yes, workers can be disbanded for 2 shields - but part of the cost of a worker is the pop-point, and I think that should be able to be recovered instead of the shields at the player's discretion.
- The restrictions in GOTM are generally there to avoid exploiting what players have decided is a "bug" in the game that messes with the built-in limitations/challenges of the game. Size 1 towns being able to absorb "infinite" unhappiness is one such bug. Moving a pop-point from one town to another at the cost of 10 shields is not.
- Drafting at size 7 seems to me to be as much of an exploit as building a worker for the purpose of pop-rushing it in another town. (Growth from size 6 to 7 uses the small, town-sized granary and can often be done in one turn, but growth takes much longer from size 7 and up.) I don't think there's anything wrong with taking advantage of this "window of opportunity". But I don't see how this is much different than building a worker in a town with 1-turn growth and 10 shields. In one case, there is unhappiness to deal with eventually; in the other, there have to be 10 shields available.
).
.
) I'll be looking forward to reading your thread once we (Xteam) finish to try and figure out your secrets. 
