Friday, August 17, 2012

Pure Worker Build Strategy

1:39 AM    

Hello and Welcome again to CivWorld Philippines! After playing about 4 or 5 games of CivWorld, I am now making a major change in my game strategy. If I were to start a new CivWorld game, either alone or with a team, I will now be using a Pure Worker Build Strategy, instead of my usual basic farmer build. Why?

"There are exactly two ways to increase the amount of resources built by harvesting: increase population or increase citizen productivity. The first is straightforward, but the latter has several non-obvious principles." (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=430544)


Why not start with farmers anymore? Well for one, when you start a game in CivWorld, you cannot possibly fully maximize all your farmer efficiency due to limited hammers and limited spots for orchard placing. Also each farmer will be needing 1 granary per orchard to be efficient. Because of this, you will be forced to build five cornfields just to have a single food resource of 30 value.

Compared to a Forest Workers, who depending on forests chunks, can be four workers per lumber mill, with +2 to +3 happiness. That's the maximum amount of workers you can have at a Mill, four. Of course you can have more workers per lumber mill but then they will start working the same forest or a forest further away and that worker then becomes way too inefficient.


The next question to consider would be, what type of Production resource is the best for Workers.Would it be Forest, Stone, or Iron? What would be the best Drop Off building for workers? Lumber Mill, Stone Mason, or Iron Forge? Let me share to you Lionel G's wisdom about this topic.

Again, the maximum amount of workers you can have at a mill is 4, so that's 600 hammers spent on a Ginormous Mill to get max productivity from 4 workers. When you build a  Ginormous forge, you will spend 750 prod. Max amount of workers to a forge is 3 but never happens because land is never good enough to have more than one ecstatic forge worker working their own iron spot on same forge. So in essence, you're building a bunch more forges for less workers. 


On top of that, it is very hard to locate a good iron spot with surrounding trees,  wall or water tile to affect worker happiness. Lumber mills are really the only thing to go with for early battles, unless you have say one forge so everyone's gonna hit you up for dowries.

And yes, stone mason is the most useless building there is. You get no extra productivity for stone mason than you would a mill but it acts like a forge in that it is very difficult to put efficient workers to it, AND you pay more for mason than a mill. All a stone mason is good for, really, is claiming Interior Minister spot to pass out harvests.

So in conclusion, Lumber Mills would be the best Drop Off building for Workers.