Workers
Workers in Build and Conquer: where they come from, which buildings consume them, and how to balance an industrial district against the population that pays.
Workers come out of your population and gate what your production buildings can do. Every worker in a factory is one not paying shop income — balance the two districts and expand whichever is currently holding you back.
Workers are the hidden cost of every factory in Build and Conquer. The population counter goes up when you build housing, but a share of those people are needed by your industry, and a city that ignores that split eventually stops growing.
The trade-off
| Where workers go | What you get |
|---|---|
| Housing and shops | Shop income scaled by population |
| Industry | Refineries, steel works, factories running |
| Military production | Missiles, vehicles, rockets |
Every production line you add pulls workers away from earning. That is not a bug — it is the game's main economic decision, and the answer changes with your goal. Building toward a war? Staff the factories. Recovering from one? Staff the shops.
Keeping it balanced
- Expand housing before industry. More population gives you more of both — workers to spend and income to pay for it.
- Do not build production you cannot staff. A factory running at half strength is worse than the housing that would have paid for a full one.
- Re-check after every big build. The moment your income graph flattens, the cause is usually a district of new industry eating population power you had budgeted for shops.
- Use the mainland bonus. A held sector's +30% population lifts your worker pool as well as your income, which is why holding ground accelerates everything you do at home.
See population for the housing side, factories for the consumer side.
