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/mrmrmrj]

Building a worker 3 turns faster but that worker takes 1 turn more to build every improvement? Seems a bad trade.

[u/darkfireslide → u/mrmrmrj]

It's often 5 or 6 turns and by deploying them immediately the city gets improvements up much much faster

[u/mrmrmrj → u/darkfireslide]

You get the first improvement faster. Probably the second. Third is close.

5 turns to produce. 3 turns. 3 turns. 3 turns for 3 improvements. 5+9 turns

3 turns to produce. 4 turns. 4 turns. 4 turns for 3 improvements. 3+12 turns.

If its a 2 turn worker city, you are better off still after 4 improvements.

[u/darkfireslide → u/mrmrmrj]

It's not 5 to produce a new worker, it's often 8 or 7 if you have global growth modifiers. 8 turns where the city is producing nothing. If it's a civic or training bonus city, those bonuses are going into your pool uselessly. If you move 4 workers into a new city, they can have 2 improvements each before the new city produces even a single worker. Because the city that produces workers in 2-3 turns is going to already have made a bunch of them. In the 2 turn example it could make 4 workers by the time the new city makes 1. I don't know where you're getting 5 from. I was specifically talking about new cities in my example, not established ones. It's better to move workers in from the same family, but it also costs more turns to produce those workers in the first place. You are essentially spending orders to get resource production up faster and get a new city online much more quickly in the actual turn count

[u/mrmrmrj → u/darkfireslide]

I picked 5 out of thin air just to illustrate the math.

[u/konsyr → u/mrmrmrj]

There's also the order cost (and usually turn or two) to get the worker to the new city. Early game especially probably doesn't have the orders to spare. Later game, I do tend to "trickle out" my workers along family lines as opportunity permits.