Archived from groups: alt.games.civ3 (
More info?)
On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 19:30:20 +0000, burchill <burchill@btinternet.com>
wrote:
>I have read on this group some people stack workers together and use
>them all at the same time instead of using one or two wrokers on a city
>at one time.
>
>I was just wondering what most people thought was the most effective
>strategy ?. If you do stack them then how long do you spend imroving
>the area around one city before moving on to the next ?.
>
Worker handling can get complicated. What I look at is what things
need doing within the range of movement (in one turn) of the worker
(or worker stack) that I'm on. I dislike wasting a worker turn moving
the worker elsewhere, but I will do that if there is something high
priority which is not nearby.
Once I pick the task, I move the workers to do it. I do try to
stack them, but that depends on getting them close enough to make the
stack. Early in the game, each worker is near the city which made it,
and it takes time to move them around, so they'll work separately.
Once they get into a stack, I tend to leave them like that. But big
stacks aren't so efficient either. If I have enough workers to get
the job done in 2 turns, I need to double the stack to change that to
one turn. If I don't have that many, I'll have them work on something
else.
Road building is a special situation for handling workers. On one
turn, move enough workers into an unroaded square to complete the road
in one turn (or two turns, if I can't get enough for one turn). Don't
move more -- any other nearby workers can irrigate or mine. Next
turn, some of those will be free to move onto the newly road-equipped
square, and the road-making stack moves on to another unroaded square
to repeat this process. Another option is to have another road-making
stack, which moves through the newly made road square and on to the
next unroaded square, creating a road by a leapfrog sort of process.
But that could be considered a case of making a stack for road
building only, and using other worker groups for other things. The
thing is, road making takes longer on tougher terrain, and so needs
more workers on the job in order to do it quickly, so a fixed size
stack isn't ideal.
Railroading is a similar process, except that as it is build on top
of roads, the leapfrogging process doesn't require a delay of a turn
in order to keep it going. With enough workers, you can complete any
length of rails on top of an existing road net, with all the workers
starting on the end point.
The early game benefits most from efficient worker use. What you
want to do with the workers is to improve those squares which are in
use actively by your cities first. The only thing which is
competitive with that is grabbing resource squares, even if the city
won't use the square for a while, putting roads in. But until the
city is ready to use it, you need not mine or irrigate those squares.
The wonder race benefits from single high productivity cities. You
get those by improving the city so it grows fast (irrigation) and has
plenty of shields (mine). To maximize this, you need a lot of workers
fixing up that city. If the city can grow above size 6, some of the
workers should be added to the city to speed up its growth.
This type of one-city rush focus isn't so important later on. The
only exception would be a well placed Forbidden Palace city, created
in an undeveloped but strategically useful position. Its lack of
corruption would mean that production enhancements would be most
effective there.
--
*-__Jeffery Jones__________| *Starfire* |____________________-*
** Muskego WI Access Channel 14/25 <http://www.execpc.com/~jeffsj/mach7/>
*Starfire Design Studio* <http://www.starfiredesign.com/>
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram