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Chapter 5: Controlling Your Empire

With the fundamentals of running your empire firmly in your grasp, you must now venture forth and tackle the subtle details of governing. While the computer is fairly adept at managing your resources and infrastructure, it pales in comparison to how a human touch can squeeze more productivity from the process. The following chapter will guide you through two critical aspects of a successful city - specifically, monitoring and reassigning your workforce and tweaking the elements of social engineering. By managing these two aspects efficiently, you will turn your empire into an amalgamation of strong cities, ultimately leading you down the road of victory.

City Government
You're only as good as the amount of resources you're bringing in from each city under your control. Without a stable supply of nutrients, minerals, and energy, your growth will be stunted, your construction of military units will be minimal, and research will take forever. Ultimately, Alpha Centauri is about speed and efficiency. Without either, your empire will be squashed like a bug. With this sobering thought in mind, let's take a look at how to tweak each city in your arsenal for optimum performance.

Workers: Hard at Work or Hardly Working?
Every new turn should find you opening the detailed city screen and monitoring the activity of your workforce at each city. By way of example, let's assume you have a level 4 city, translating into four available workers to gather resources. Optimally, you should be getting as much output from these four workers as possible. Reasons for why you wouldn't be getting this desired output have to do with which terrain tiles the computer assigns each worker to work on. As the game develops and your formers terraform the land around your city, the computer is not overly efficient at assigning your workforce. This could lead to underused farms and mines just sitting around gathering dust while your workforce is placed on unproductive tiles generating half the resources they could be.

To streamline your workers, move them to terrain tiles that have been terraformed for one purpose or another. To your great surprise, you will find your surplus ratios rising, in turn leading to faster growth, research, and unit construction.

Next: Drone Control
 
 

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