Workers and Workload

Workers

#Workspeed, Workload, Movement Speed, Distance, Min Speed Max Speed….. The idea behind worker efficiency is generally shrouded in a mix of confusing explainations and incorrect labels.

What Do I Need To Consider Before Trying To Maximize My Workers?

There are five pieces of information you need to find to determine what worker is best suited for your node. Two come from the worker and three from the node.

Worker Information:

  • Work Speed
  • Movement Speed

Node Information:

  • Base Workload
  • Maximum Workload
  • Distance To Node

How Do I Find The Base And Max Workloads?

Bddatabase.net now has all of the base workloads available and the maximum workload is simply just double the base workload. How your current workload is determined is based off how many other players are using the node. For now you can assume most good nodes will be near or at the cap (so maximum workload).

If you do not feel like looking it up, here is a list of all the workloads:

How Do These Workloads Explain How Long Each Node Cycle Will Take?

Before we look at anything further we need to see where we pull the actual numbers for our calculations. Simply adding up your workspeed from your workers base workspeed, plus what your abilities say they are adding, will likely give you an incorrect value as the translations are often wrong.

What you need to do is pull up an unused node, have your workers untasked and look for this particular set of data:

With this information we can now begin to calculate your worktime. There are two calculations in order to find this out:

  • Work Speed and Work Load.
    • Work loads for nodes work is what most players will call ticks. Your ticks are calculated by doing Workload/Workspeed and then rounded UP to the nearest whole number (4.1=5). Each tick takes 10 minutes (5 minutes for crates). So for this picture, this worker will require two ticks 150/144.89 = 1.035 which rounds up to 2, so 2 ticks * 10 minutes/tick = 20 minutes to finish the task.
    • From this we have found where 20 minutes of the cycle time has come from.
  • Movement Speed and Distance
    • This is simply determined by (distance/movement speed)*2*Seconds. The reason for the x2 is the worker needs to travel to the node and then travel back to his home base to deposit what he gathered.
    • In our picture this would be (352/7.22)*2*Seconds = 97 seconds.
    • So for this picture 1 minute and 37 seconds are added to the cycle time.
  • The final cycle time is simply these two formulas added up, so 20 minutes + 1 minute 37 seconds = 21 minutes 37 seconds.

What About Luck? Shouldn’t This Be A Factor?

It has no effect on primary and secondary yields. As much as people think it does. It doesn’t. I have an ongoing trial going on right now and numbers don’t lie. I am currently looking at tertiary+ yields to determine if luck affects these.

Mickin and my current test on lucky tool production is also not showing any difference.

Are all the Worker Skills Listed Correct?

For the most part yes, but there are some that are mislabelled/confusing. I’ve made a chart that has the correct numbers and is a little less confusing:

Note: These skills are for artisans. Professional workers have everything but the advanced +3 item skills, instead they have +1 item skills. Lower tier workers have neither of these but do have the other skills.

If I Am Afk Alot, Which Worker Should I Use?

Just because a goblin finishes the job the fastest, doesn’t mean he is the best worker for the job. Goblins have lower stamina than humans and giants and therefore stop working quicker, so if you are afk for long periods of time, then the goblin will be idle.

In order to determine which worker is best suited for your IRL, check out Morrolan’s Tool.

What Should I Take Away From This?

  • There are three important aspects to this section:
    • Workload is dynamic. You cannot look at a workload once and assume it will never change. For the more popular nodes you should just assume maximum workload and try to focus your workers around it. For less popular nodes you can assume closer to base workloads and try to focus your workers around that. If you want to find out how popular a node is, press m in game and click on territory resource information in the top right corner. The green bars correspond to the area’s workload (If a green bar is at 100% then the nodes will be base value. If a green bar is at 0% then the nodes will be at max value.) The issue of course is that each of those green bars is very vague on which nodes they correspond to. I (and probably a few others) am currently working on a user friendly version of this which I will post once it is finished.
    • Your first objective is to minimize worker ticks. If you see a node that has a minimum workload of 100 and is currently near 200 workload, then a 150 workspeed goblin will finish the tick portion of the equation in the same time as a 100 workspeed human, so that goblin would be better used on a node that has a maximum 150 workload or a less popular node that is under 150 workload.
    • Your second objective it to minimize distance. Humans and Giants are quite slow movers. So they benefit from working on nodes close to their home base, but remember, if the human/giant adds additional ticks to a job, then it may be better to use a goblin and put the human/giant on a farther away job where there are no additional ticks added.
  • This may seem confusing and it is. It will likely take you some time thinking about how to maximize your worker efficiency but it is absolutely worth it. If you have an inefficient worker system you could be crippling your maximum output.