Getting the Most Out of Your Workers

[TeddyNinja]

Your workers are meant to be the perfect employees, but it still takes some management tricks to get the most out of them. I've discovered some things that help out and am curious what other people have been doing to increase efficiency.

I have a video talking through my tricks if you want to watch it: https://youtu.be/InUdko-xGt8

Tip 1: Get more workers through upgrading the company HQ and building conversion centers. It honestly took me a bit to figure out this one to be able to expand my labor force when I was in the late game with my first company.

Tip 2: Optimize your workers efforts through constructing a road network, getting a transportation center, and letting them drive deliveries of resources to and from your warehouses. Transportation centers are great because they just supply trucks everywhere on the road system, the workers don't have to use the center to pick up and drop off the trucks so they just mean you get higher carrying capacity for your little dudes for all the buildings you connect to the road network.

Tip 3: Keep our warehouses centralized. Your workers have to travel back and forth to move resources between processing plants and storage. Keep their travel distance short to see faster progress. You can kind of mitigate this with keeping local storage in your factories, but it seems like the AI does better with a centralized stock pile.

Tip 4: Optimize the job priorities your workers have through the job tab. Understanding which jobs they will do over others will keep you from creating a bottle neck of work orders. If you see some jobs not being done at the pace you want you can assign full time workers to the jobs, or rearrange your workers priorities to better suit your needs. Trash pick up is what I always end up needing more guys assigned to in a full time capacity, though I don't really want to change it's priority.

Tip 5: Always be ready to expand your workforce by keeping a stock of red artifacts on hand. There have been plenty of times where I thought I was don't needing to get more artifacts, but as I had to keep adding crews to ships, replacing dead crews (embarrassing), and wanting to expand my work force in general I kept on needing more red artifacts.

[Roderick]

I have such a need for employees, I played my last run without ships just to don't need any crew. Organizing your employees efficiently is the most important thing in this game! Have an award! ^^

[Despell]

One way to speed up dismantling of things is to build a temporary warehouse so your workers have shorter travel times. This is only worth it if you dismantle many ruins at once or rebuild entire city blocks. After your done just disable the warhouse and no more resources will be stored there and everything left will be moved to another location.

Its also very important to have proportional to your city size a cleanup crew. early in the game 2-3 worker cleaning and 1-2 bringing the waste to the smoke stack will prevent the pilling up of trash and you will not have to dedicate more worker to it when otherwise you would have to assign way more to remove the trash quickly.

A fully manned level 3 smoke stack with a warehouse that only stores waste right next to it will be enough for the first few hours in the game.