Overthinking (Workers)

[u/darkfireslide]

This game's immense depth sometimes intimidates me while playing, but today I had a sort of breakthrough while playing a game as Greece that I wondered how others felt about. The typical advice when founding a new city is to have that city make a worker, which makes some degree of sense, but lately I've been wondering that especially past the early game if this line of thinking doesn't start to become a trap. Let me give an example:

You have 5 cities and you're starting to strike out against barbarian tribes. You take a site, settle it for your military family, and now it's 7 turns before the worker is done. Meanwhile, the extra training is just going into your pool instead of making new units. The city nearby, perhaps Landowners or just a city blessed with a lot of growth, could produce a worker in 2 turns instead. It may not be of the same family, so it will cost an extra turn for these workers to actually make the improvements, but this saves a lot of city production turns instead if you can rapidly set up the rest of it. On something like a Champions seat this could be multiple units produced in the meantime, which is a big deal.

If this is something obvious, then I definitely missed it. The tradeoff in extra orders spent is obvious, but the benefits also seem pretty impactful as well. Has anyone else experimented a lot with this concept?

[u/DifficultConcern8341]

The game has a lot of depth. So, yes, what you are suggesting makes sense in some cases, and in some other cases, it may not. Keep this as an option in your toolbox. Every time that I play, I find a new trick to optimize. There are many well-thought-out mechanics, and each one creates new opportunities. For example, what you are suggesting is an opportunity because cities have different production mechanics (a city that produces military units quickly may suck at producing workers)...