mostly come in 3 forms - flat, per pop, and % bonus. Only a few buildings and terrain give a (small) amount of flat, and % bonus works on what you have, so that after early game the majority of FIDS originates from workers.



Unfortunately, managing workers is pretty boring, and doesn't add a lot of choices to the game. Start with food, then choose whichever resource you need, and then place your workers in it. Besides some early game micro, there really never is a reason to split what your workers are doing. This always breaks immersion for me - that I can instantly order all my artisans to become researchers, or my farmers to become diplomats.



If workers (fids / population assigned) is meant to be the main source of , then there definitely needs to be more choices and interactions.











My idea

Why is it that we can have every citizen on an empire instantly switch from being a farmer to a sage? No doubt it would be possible, but it should also be highly efficient.



This can be represented in game by having a diversity bonus on citizens - if workers are doing different tasks, presumably the best farmers are farming while the best merchants are making dust, while if everyone is farming, our poor merchants may be struggling along to barely produce any food.



How it would work: Each point of population in a category would receive a bonus based on the number of other other categories that have at least that much population.



Ex 1 : we have 4 population, and a /pop value of 10 for all. If we assigned everyone to , we would have 40 food. However, if we assigned one worker each to , , , and , we would gain a diversity bonus of 20%, producing 48 total at the cost of not focusing on any on resource.



Ex 2 : we have 11 population, and a /pop value of 10 for all. 5 workers on , 3 on , 2 on , 1 on .

Our first worker in each would receive a 20% (4 resource) bonus and produce 12. The next worker in , , and would receive a 10%(3 resource) bonus. The third worker in and would receive a 5% (2 resource), while the remaining food workers would produce no bonus.

Interesting idea! I think a simpler way of presenting it would be to have tiers of workers that would be filled before moving to the next tier, and the tiers would have diminishing effects. So for example, tier 1 holds one worker and produces 4, the second tier holds 2 workers and each produces 3, tier 3 holds 3 workers and each produces 2, tier four is unlimited and each worker provides 1. No need to mess around with extra math micro.

Personally, I think that workers would be made more interesting if they weren't always specifically tied to flat FIDSI boosts. For instance, what if workers could be made to say, decrease the cost of building units, or increase the % of HP regenerated on units in the city per turn? In addition, maybe workers could change what you gain from terrain, possibly at the expense of other resources you might gain from it (eg. get more from tiles at the expense of , or some such thing).

@Seek, essentially your idea sounds like you want to use a flat bonus rather than a %? That would work as well.



@Lulz!, I agree that workers definitely need something more interesting. My idea, more options, whatever, but currently they make economy bland.

Interesting. So, the push here is for worker diversity within a city.



I think I'd actually oppose that, because I'd prefer to see diversity between cities, and worker diversity within a city is likely to homogenize cities even more than we already see happening.

Agree that the "worker placement game" feels like a chore. If I'm not "optimizing" my workers every turn, in every city, I'm not playing to my best.



A simple solution would be to "lock" a worker into a slot once they are put there (maybe start them as "farmers" /Food until moved). This way we are making tough decisions when we assign workers.



Another idea is to have worker slots based on Empire Plan and Techs. New techs could open up more slots and Empire Plan would allow you to shift workers (just not every turn.). This could be an interesting dynamic where if you grow population too fast without making worker slots, you will have population doing nothing but consuming food...