What does production and laborers do?

[john_zero]

Do they decrease the amount of turns it take to build a building, unit or wonder? I'm not exactly sure what they do.

Also what does the city effiency do as well?

[centrifuge]

Yep that's the basics of the system. Laborers will increase production. The more production a city has, the quicker it will build improvements.

[Tamerlin]

I suppose that efficiency is the ratio of the city resources you are collecting.

In a size 10 city, if you have 2 workers the efficiency rating tells you you are only exploiting 80% of the resources available for a size 10 city.

[hexagonian]

Specialists are generally for cities that might not have terrain to exploit a particular resource (food, production, gold). Use farmers in a city that is in mountains, for example.

And if you have a city that has a lot of production-based tile improvements, it may be better to keep the workers out in the fields rather than making them into specialists. Check your numbers when you reallocate them.

[XGX_Stealth]

Right, your city efficiency is not too fantastic a bar to watch, it is often wrong, so use your judgement.

If a city has a tile, (say plains, the yellow ones) the tile has a little food, a little gold, and a little production. If a worker is "working" that tile, then he gathers that many of each resource per turn. Then you add up the total for all the city's workers, and subtract crime and waste and such, and you get the total amount of res. for that city.

If you aren't gathering enough food for a city out in the plains, with no other tiles, then convert some of your workers into farmers, now your city makes more food, but doesn't gather the production or commerce that it would have otherwise attained had the worker stayed in the field, which is what lowers your "efficiency".

I like to have a few farmers in the waste cities that are out in the middle of harsh terrain, like deserts and tundras, so that the city can grow past size three. I use almost only specialists in those cities, because otherwise they would produce nothing per turn. The "efficiency" is down, even though the city is producing more.

[XGX_Stealth]

Another awesome way to increase total empire resource production is to change the empire settings on the main control tab.

After you add up all the resources gathered by all the cities, then you subtract from it the amount you are spending per turn, your citizens are paid, and science is researched, and PW are accumulated, people work long/ short hours, things like that. If you want to rush production in a city that is building say, the Pyramids, then increase the workday to max, set PW to nill, and disband a couple units. Of course, terrain improvments like mines are the best way to increase output, although a stack of all these factors together makes the largest difference.