Workers & Wages

How many workers you have, depends on the difficulty setting (lower difficulty = more workers) and the wage rate (higher wages = more workers). Be careful with setting the wages lower than normal: your people are easily annoyed.

Only people living in common housing work. Occupants of elite housing rather spend their days at the theatre pavilion or clothing themselves in the finest silk and thus have 'no time' to work.

It is interesting to note that you do not pay for workers that are unemployed.

The following table shows which percentage of your common people is available for work. In the last row is what you pay your people (in cash) per worker per year.

Wage rate Difficulty level Cost per worker per year
Very easy Easy Normal Hard Very hard
None 42 37 32 29 27 0
Very low 46 41 36 33 31 2.0
Low 49 44 39 36 34 2.6
Normal 52 47 42 39 37 3.0
High 55 50 45 42 40 3.4
Very high 57 52 47 44 42 4.0

Example

You have a city with 1500 people, you're playing on hard and you set your wage level on low.

Number of workers:
Look at the table: you have 36% of 1500 people available for work, and that is:
0.36*1500 = 540 workers.

Yearly wage bill:
You pay 2.6 cash per worker per year. If we assume that ALL workers available have jobs (i.e. no unemployment), your yearly wage bill is:
2.6*540 = 1404 cash