This article is intended to determine the optimum strategy for maximizing production in the first 40 turns of the game. My intention is to quantify the advantages of chopping down forest and to compare different tactical paths in the early game. Tactics to be discussed include the relative advantages of growing your initial city, building workers, improvements, founding your second city, chop-rushing, and queue shuffling. I chose a 40 turn window because in this time it is possible to have two solid cities, with workers improving both, and to be in position to develop a third city if you desire. Over longer periods the mix of tiles, external threats, and other priorities (such as road building and military development) complicate the situation. I’ll contend that the following general conclusions apply for normal speed games:
1. Building worker/worker/settler is optimal for early growth.
2. If you can either build a mine or farm a special resource before chopping you end up equal to straight chopping at turn 40. This implies that you do not need to research Bronze Working first (but do need to have it completed by turn 20).
3. Limited chopping (3 trees) is a key to getting your initial cities set up.
4. Growing your city to size 2 before building a worker carries a significant production penalty.
5. Queue switching will be discussed in a followup post, as will the develop-one-big-city first approach.

Commerce is omitted here, but I contend that is actually reasonable, since significant commerce usually requires worker improvements and thus typically takes off later than this period. As you will see below, any commerce advantage from early growth would have to be balanced against the rather substantial production disadvantage.

I’ll begin with some basics. A size one city has 3 free production and each additional population point (PP) can generate 3 more production (if there are forests or flood plains) before improvements. Each PP uses 2F. Before improvements, this means that

A size 1 city has 4 production
Growing a city by one PP adds 1 production

Chopping trees yields 30P (at normal) and takes 4 turns including travel time.
Costs for a warrior, worker, and settler are 15, 60, and 100 respectively. I’ll discuss epic speed separately, but tree-chopping is even more favored there (45 yield for a forest, workers and settlers are 75 and 125 respectively).

Farms and mines improve basic production, and building them takes a minimum of 5 turns including travel time.
Wheat and corn (with agriculture) and copper (with BW) add 3 production.
Mines add 2 production, as do deer camps (but the base is low on tundra and build times are longer). However, mines clear forests, so the maximum production from a mined tile without a special resource is 4 (gain of +1 over a forest or flood plain).
Normal farms add 1 production - but only on base 2 production sites or flood plains. Creating a farm on a flood plain also takes longer. For this reason I’ll only include the +1P (floodplain+farm and grass/hills+mine) and +3P cases for improvements.

You can already see from the above that starting a second city adds much more production than growing the first city, and that the best improvements are almost as valuable in the short run as founding a second city. Normal improvements increase total production modestly, but only on certain tiles.

No growth cases: in this model the first city build is a worker, usually coupled with researching bronze working. On turn 15 the first worker appears. I then compared the following strategies, all ending with 2 workers, and one settler. I also compared the lucky +3 production improvements and the more typical +1 production improvements. Here are the cases:

A. Chop worker 2, both workers chop settler, improve
B. Chop settler, chop worker2, improve
C. Improve city(+3), chop worker 2, chop settler
D. Improve city (+1), chop worker 2, chop settler
E. Improve city (+3), settler with no chop, worker 2 with no chop.
F. Improve city (+1), settler with no chop, worker 2 with no chop.

Here are the results. Worker turns is the number of turns that you would have workers available to do things by turn 40 other than chop settlers/workers and build the first improvement:
EDIT: Overflow was incorrectly calculated, thanks to junior7 for catching this. Was 16, should be 8.
Case A: Worker2 T23, Settler T27, Imp T32, 21 worker turns, 8 overflow
(12 x 4P + 120 from 4 trees = 168)
Case B: Settler T25, Worker2 T31, Imp T36, 13 worker turns, 24 overflow
(16 x 4P + 120 from 4 trees = 184)
Case C: Imp T20, Worker2 T24, Settler T28, 24 worker turns, 6 overflow
(5 x 4P + 8 x 7P + 90 from 3 trees = 166)
Case D: Imp T20, Worker2 T24, Settler T30, 24 worker turns
(5 x 4P + 10 x 5P + 90 from 3 trees = 160)
Case E: Imp T20, Settler T32, Worker2 T40, 15 worker turns
(5 x 4P + 20 x 7P = 160)
Case F: Imp T20, Settler T36, Worker2 T48, 7 worker turns
(5 x 4P + 28 x 5P = 160)

Now, to put these all onto a common metric:
The earliest completion of all workers and settlers is T27. After this point the main city can grow. Later starts are penalized 10P per turn of delay (4P in direct cost and 2P in delayed production from population points 2,3,4 each). Beyond that point the happiness and health limits can be relevant.
The earliest settler is T25. Later starting cities are penalized 10P per turn of delay for the same reason.
Every worker turn that is available after the base tasks above are completed is worth 7.5P (chopping trees; could also be improving for future growth, but that is tile-dependent).
Production overflow is credited to each case as available.

EDIT: Corrected yield for Case A
Case A: +145.5 (4 trees)
Case B: +81.5 (4 trees)
Case C: +146 (3 trees)
Case D: +100 (3 trees)
Case E: -87.5 ( 0 trees)
Case F: -307.5 (0 trees)

EDIT: There is also a difference in the improved city production
after the workers and settlers are produced. This is significant
for cases A, B, C, E (where there is a good special available).
These cases get stronger production released after turns
32, 36, 28, 40. When this effect is accounted for, Case C
(improve a +3P special before chopping) saves a tree and
gets the highest yield. Cases A and C are thus very close).

Chopping is strongly favored, and building a second worker before a settler is favored. Improving a special resource is a wash with chopping first, and building a 4 production tile before chopping is disfavored. You don’t need to clearcut for a solid start.

What about growing first? If you have the right tiles available you can grow to size 2 and put out a warrior by turn 10. How does this compare with building a worker first? We’ll focus on Case A above (worker/worker/settler), as it doesn’t rely on a handy wheat or corn. In this case:

Size 2 turn 10, worker 1 T22, worker 2 T28, Settler T34, Imp T37, 10 worker turns, 20 overflow. In all the other cases we assumed the city would start growing on turn 27, while in this case 10 turns of early growth went to the city+unit and it is free to grow again after turn 34. As a result, I give this case 30 extra production for a growth head start (it gets 10 turns of growth by turn 34 while the other cities get 7), and add 24 for the extra production in turns 11 through 34. In effect, the worker-first cities catch up in size while the grow-first city is catching up in workers and settlers. This setup has a rating of +36, e.g. significantly worse than the build-worker first case. In terms of the land grab, it also postpones founding the second city by a potentially crucial 9 turns.

An early delay in building workers (without growing to size 2) costs 25 production/turn: a one turn delay in founding a city and two lost worker turns chopping trees. I hope this is useful; comments/questions most welcome.

Queue swapping is an interesting tactic to combine early growth and tree-chopping. It starts the same as the worker-first strategy, producing a worker on turn 15. On turns 16, 17, 18 the city grows and builds a warrior. On turn 19 the city switches to a worker, with 34 production (4 basic plus 30 from chopping a forest). The second worker appears on turn 23, both chop on turn 27, and one chops on turn 31 while the other produces an improvement on turn 32 (6 overflow). Relative to case A, the founding of the second city is delayed 4 turns, and 4 turns of worker action are lost; this is a 70 production penalty. However, the main city has had 12 extra turns of growth (a 120 production edge.) As a result, queue swapping is a net +193.5 on the original scale, but does burn 5 forests. There is some opportunity cost in losing resources that could be used later (for wonders, barracks, granaries, etc.)

There is also a trick to use only the chopped timber for settlers and workers (extreme queue swapping). Essentially, you set production to settler on the turn the chop is due, manually make the worker chop, and then set production back to warrior. This is more competitive at epic speed, but is an expensive idea on normal speed: settlers cost 100 and forests yield 30, so you would have to chop 6 forests (with 20 overflow) by turn 31 to get out the settler. Relative to normal queue swapping, this method loses 4 worker turns (30 penalty) and gains 4 turns of growth (40 benefit) with 14 extra overflow. The overall net is +217.5, so it scores highest on an absolute scale. If you subtract the opportunity cost of the forests used, however, the relative rankings are different:

No queue swapping +63.5
Normal queue swapping +43.5
Aggressive queue swapping +37.5

Whether you use this technique or not therefore depends in part on how many forests you can use and what else you might do with them.

An alternate approach is to build a large city first and then use the enhanced production to churn out units later. An additional advantage is that such a city produces more early commerce. However, this strategy is significantly weaker in production (and, over the long term, not as strong in commerce as it might appear) because of the power of chopping and improvements. Assume the most favorable case for growth, namely 5 good food resources or flood plains on a river. In this case the capital will grow to size 2,3,4,5 after 8, 14, 19, and 24 turns respectively. By occasionally swapping in some grass/hills/forest it is possible to build 2 warriors and grow to the prince capital happiness limit (5) in 25 turns. The larger city will have 8 production, and if you follow up with worker/worker/settler then you can have worker1(33 turns), worker2(37 turns), and settler (42 turns). There is a commerce edge until the initially smaller capital catches up in size (108), and a production edge (95), assuming the growth pattern is the same. However, there is a 16 turn delay in founding city 2 and you need 9 worker turns past turn 40 to finish the initial builds. The net effect is -132.5 on the original scale, or almost 300 production behind emphasizing settlers and workers early. If anything, this understates the disadvantage of growing onto unimproved tiles. A size 1 city working an improved wheat has almost the same production (7) as a size 5 city working 5 unimproved tiles (8). By the time the big city has produced its first settler, you could have had two medium cities (size 2-3) working improved tiles and could have even founded a third city with supporting worker. Even the commerce edge (roughly one good tech) has to be kept in perspective; a single gold mine has a much bigger long-term yield.

You could get better results by building two workers and then using them to improve tiles while letting the city grow to the happiness limit, then building a settler. The exact results are more complicated to compute because they depend on what tiles are available. In my view, this actually confirms the idea that building a worker first is optimal for a variety of play styles.

Different game speeds can significantly change the benefits of different strategies. The key thing to understand is the different way that units and tech/forests/growth/production scale with speed. As you go from Quick-Normal-Epic-Marathon (Q-N-E-M) the costs for a unit scale as
Q 4/5 - N 1 - E 5/4 - M 2
(for example, the respective costs for a settler are 80, 100, 125, 200).

However, tech costs, city growth, improvement builds, and forests change more quickly with speed. They scale as
Q 2/3 - N 1 - E 3/2 - M 3
(for example, the respective yields for forests and the turns to clear including travel are
Q 20 (3) - N 30 (4) - E 45 (5) - M 90 (9)
This means that Stonehenge always can be gotten with 4 forest (2 with stone) at all speeds,
but the cost in forests for a settler is
Q=4 N=3.33 E=2.78 M=2.22
and the time to build a settler with the basic 4 production of a city is
Q=20 N=25 E=32 M=50

With an important exception for technology speed at high difficulty levels and marathon, you can therefore expect the following
relative trends. I'll post details for other speeds if people are interested.

1) In quick games cities grow rapidly and the yield from tree-cutting is smaller. The rapid pace of technology also means that workers are more flexible - it is very likely that you can improve special resources immediately upon founding a new city. This makes improvements more powerful, and dramatically reduces the differential impact of chopping on early production. If you start with good special resources you can do better by improving the first one (after you have a worker) than you can by focusing on tree-cutting (an improved wheat has a higher return than a forest cut after 7 turns). Worker-worker-settler is still the preferred sequence, but clearcutters will quickly run out of forests. Building a big city before a settler still fares worse than building a worker first, since once the tiles are improved the capital will grow to the happiness/health limit almost immediately. Note that because cities grow very fast (as quickly as three turns per population), having extra workers in the early game will have a large impact on production; you'll benefit from hooking up special resources to raise the health and happiness caps. Peaceful builders and tree-huggers will probably like this speed.

2) In epic games the technology speed is still fast enough that it doesn't play the huge role that it will at marathon. Worker-worker-settler is strongly preferred to other build sequences. Trees provide so many hammers that queue swapping is extremely effective, and can be used to put out early warriors, etc. without a large production penalty. You may even want to do a reverse queue swap, putting a warrior in the build queue when you want to get it out quickly and then crediting the overflow to the worker or settler. Remember that the costs are not exact multiples of timber yields, so that you want 200 production going to your second worker+settler, not the 180 you'd get just from cutting four trees (so you will want to have 5 turns of native production applied to units, not growth, to avoid using up too many of your valuable forests.)

3) In principle you might expect marathon games to be a simple extension of the above trends, and a theoretical analysis supports that. But the glacial pace of research has interesting consequences - especially at high difficulty levels. When you found your first city and choose your first tech on a normal start, you'll see something like the following for bronzeworking (BW) and a Worker(W) at Prince:
Quick BW=9,W=12 turns
Normal BW=13, W=15 turns
Epic BW=21, W=19 turns
Marathon BW=49, W=30 turns. At Marathon/Deity, it take 67 turns to get bronzeworking....
(If you have a special start tile the worker time will be less, and if you have commerce on your second tile the tech time will be less. You can usually shuffle the worked tile in that case so that the arrival of the first worker and getting BW happens at the same time on epic).

What this means is that unless you either prioritize commerce or are extremely careful you will have extended stretches where your workers, and cities, have absolutely nothing useful to do. It is entirely plausible that it will take you 150+ turns before you can actually use that pig next to your starting city, and even improvement build times are long (15 turns for farm, etc.) As a result, financial leaders have a significant production edge, and coastal production, specials with commerce, etc. will dramatically speed up city development.
Timber is useful for a lot of things, and you should think carefully about how you want to spend it. The AIs don't tend to use it for wonders, for instance, and it does save a lot of time for buildings as well. Unless you can speed up the tech, there is no gain in starting with a worker until you can time their arrival to coincide with a useful task - you might as well spend the first 20 turns getting a warrior out, unless there is a lovely gold mine next door.

Good stuff.

When growing first, growing to size 2 requires 22 food, so, you'll either hit it on turn 12 (w/ 2F surplus), or turn 9 (w/ 3F).

Of course, I'll bet it's even more superior to queue-swap.

You might want to make a little clearer that the "production" you refer to in the earlier part of the post is food plus hammers.

On higher difficulty levels especially, not having a warrior escort for that first settler can be extremely dangerous. I guess you could use your inital unit (which is a scout for some civs) for that purpose, but then you are potentially giving up lots of gold or techs from goody huts. (And guaranteeing increased barbarian activity).

I'm not saying that growing to size 2 while building a warrior is a good idea, just that building a warrior should be considered as a pre-req to building the first settler, and the calculations adjusted accordingly. My initial build order is usually worker, worker, warrior, settler or worker, warrior, worker, settler depending on how many forests are protected from animals by my cultural boundary.

On higher difficulty levels especially, not having a warrior escort for that first settler can be extremely dangerous. I guess you could use your inital unit (which is a scout for some civs) for that purpose, but then you are potentially giving up lots of gold or techs from goody huts. (And guaranteeing increased barbarian activity).

I'm not saying that growing to size 2 while building a warrior is a good idea, just that building a warrior should be considered as a pre-req to building the first settler, and the calculations adjusted accordingly. My initial build order is usually worker, worker, warrior, settler or worker, warrior, worker, settler depending on how many forests are protected from animals by my cultural boundary.

That's a good point - I did implicitly assume that the first warrior would have to swing around to escort the first settler, and there are other costs to that (as well as the risk of death during exploration.) For worker/worker/settler you could modify it by a reverse queue swap, switching to warrior on turn 27 and completing the settler on turn 28 with the overflow from the warrior. This would delay the founding of a second city by 3 extra turns (the slow warrior has to escort the faster settler), but would free up the first warrior to go exploring. If you do this, it reduces the yield by about 30-40 production depending on how quickly the warrior and settler can get to the new site.

Would you say that for a civ starting with fishing and at least one sea food tile, it's better to make a work boat first? Intuitively, that's what i'd think. You'd need to calculate with a fish and alternately with a clam/crab.

Personally, i always like to start with a warrior/scout or two while growing to size two and sending them all out to explore, granting me more hut prizes.

The problem with growing to size 2 city at the start is that it is slower to get a worker which could be chopping. Also on higher levels you get less good stuff from huts. You more often get barbs.

The whole stratagy really comes down to the amount of trees you have near your capital and the terrain they are on. The more you have the more workers you should build strait away. Once you start running out of trees (or decide to stop chopping soon) I then build a warrior and 2 settlers. A worker, the new warrior and the first new settler go off together to build city 2. The worker chops there for a warrior while the former escort returns to city 1 to pick up the settler which should be about ready and another warrior. The 3 units go off to city site 3.

I then build a few more workers and warriors followed by buildings (libary mainly). I spend a while (probrably too long) at this stage with 3 cities because I do not have the cash to fund a 4th while maintaining a high research percentage.

Good article I just thought I would add my lot. Hope it helps someone.

I am now trying to build the 2nd and 3rd cities a bit closer to the capital to get lower upkeep fees. This is helping me get the 4th city earlier.

Once I hit the 4 city barrier I am good because I have heaps of cottages growing rapidly giving me tons of gold to fund expansion and then on to advanced military (around about when I get Civil Service so I can build macemen)

Good article!:goodjob: Would you compare the the early growth for the Marathon game speed too? I usually do worker/worker/settler at normal game speed and warrior/warrior/worker/worker/settler at the marathon game speed with very little chopping and some queue swapping. The reason for this is because there are usually too many barbarians in my game and I need to save the forests for swordman rush.

As for building the early fishing boat, I do not build a fishing boat until after I have conquered around 30% of the world. The reason for this is simple: it takes too much time to research sailing and building ships. On top of this, seafood is the AI favorite target. Even when they are dying, they would still try to rush a ship to go after my seafoods. Therefore, I think acquiring seafoods is a waste of time and because I can't really protect my seafoods in time of war. With enough swords and axes, I could easily claim another food source on land. Plus I need a strong military early to deal with the barbarians too. Of course, I could be wrong about this; there is still much about Civ4 that I don't know (probably because I'm still playing Civ3 and very little of Civ4 so far).

One more thing to consider is the possibility to choose a hills plain (or even a resource tile) for the initial city site. A normal city gets 4 net production of food+resources to start with. On a hills/plain, that will be 5. It will speed the initial worker build from 15 turns to 12. Thus, it should be worthwhile to spend at least three turns at game start searching for a hill to put your city on. And probably more - the extra shields keep coming after turn 15.

There is no downside here if we assume that the map is uniform in terms of city-site quality. However, if the initial location of the settler is being enhanced by the program to be a superior city site, then it may not be worthwhile to search for a better. Still... in my (limited) experience, it often is.

I generally play on Epic or Marathon, and am currently still at Noble diff.

One thing that should be factored in here is time it will take to research Bronze Working, as you cannot cut until you have BW. On Epic and Marathon settings, research time is increased, and I am sure that in some cases it may not be possible to have BW researched before 30 turns or more have gone by. Also, at Noble difficulty and higher it can be suicide to avoid building a military unit for any length of time. If your Civ starts with a warrior, you can place it in your first city to avoid losing it to barbs, but you will need to build another before you build your first settler. The problem with this though, is that you do not get to explore much, and this can reduce your options when trying to find a suitable spot for your 2nd city, and increase the number of barbs that harass you.

I quite often play civs that start with a scout though, so exploration is not a problem. The other good thing about starting with a scout at higher difficulty is that they always obtain positive results from huts, you won't have to worry about them turning into barbs. The bad thing is this means that I need to produce a warrior first to defend my capital, or if starting with a warrior, I need to research Hunting first to get scouts quickly enough to start exploring. In the latter case, this delays Bronze Working even more.

My normal progression at the start of the game is this:
Warrior, worker, warrior, settler, worker

Or you can play a custom game and turn off barbs, so that you don't have to worry about your military at the outset.

I tend to avoid cutting, except when improving a tile, this may be a result of the amount of time I spent playing the previous Civ games, and Alpha Centauri, in which clearcutting your natural surroundings seemed to be more detrimental in the long run. Of course, if you only cut early in the game, don't improve the tiles, and leave a few forests around, your forests can grow back over time. This can be effective, and I have used it in situations where I have alot of forest/tundra tiles on the extreme borders of my civ. I avoid planting any cities in the area, unless I need a certain resource there, and cut every other tile before leaving the area alone for a good long time. Once I return a few of the previously cut tiles have grown back, and I can cut them again.

Would you say that for a civ starting with fishing and at least one sea food tile, it's better to make a work boat first? Intuitively, that's what i'd think. You'd need to calculate with a fish and alternately with a clam/crab.

Personally, i always like to start with a warrior/scout or two while growing to size two and sending them all out to explore, granting me more hut prizes.

The calculations for fish are decent, and would benefit from queue swapping (since population growth would be rapid). Boats cost 30, and if you maximized hammers (hills/plain/forest) you could get a boat in 8 turns. Assuming no lighthouse, worker 1 shows up on turn 19 and worker 2 on turn 23, with a settler on turn 30, 25 worker turns, 4 overflow, 3 trees. The net figure of merit is +122.5. Since you could chop an extra tree, queue swapping would help here: you'd gain five turns of rapid growth and trade it for 4 lost worker turns, for a net of +142.5. If you choose to use the first worker to chop the boat, the net is better (worker 2 on turn 23, settler on turn 28; 26 worker turns). The net without queue swapping is +155. The extra production power of the first workers is so large that even a substantial benefit, such as fish, turns out to be only roughly equal to just making a worker.

Nice work, however optimal start has to do a lot with game settings.
Some examples :
Marathon game : Chop is less valuable, Fishing is a an alternative.
Easy AI level : Sacking the closest AI capital is an alternative.
3 prod square, e.g plains stone hill : Settler first is an alternative.

I generally play on Epic or Marathon, and am currently still at Noble diff.

One thing that should be factored in here is time it will take to research Bronze Working, as you cannot cut until you have BW. On Epic and Marathon settings, research time is increased, and I am sure that in some cases it may not be possible to have BW researched before 30 turns or more have gone by. Also, at Noble difficulty and higher it can be suicide to avoid building a military unit for any length of time. If your Civ starts with a warrior, you can place it in your first city to avoid losing it to barbs, but you will need to build another before you build your first settler. The problem with this though, is that you do not get to explore much, and this can reduce your options when trying to find a suitable spot for your 2nd city, and increase the number of barbs that harass you.

I quite often play civs that start with a scout though, so exploration is not a problem. The other good thing about starting with a scout at higher difficulty is that they always obtain positive results from huts, you won't have to worry about them turning into barbs. The bad thing is this means that I need to produce a warrior first to defend my capital, or if starting with a warrior, I need to research Hunting first to get scouts quickly enough to start exploring. In the latter case, this delays Bronze Working even more.

My normal progression at the start of the game is this:
Warrior, worker, warrior, settler, worker

Or you can play a custom game and turn off barbs, so that you don't have to worry about your military at the outset.

I tend to avoid cutting, except when improving a tile, this may be a result of the amount of time I spent playing the previous Civ games, and Alpha Centauri, in which clearcutting your natural surroundings seemed to be more detrimental in the long run. Of course, if you only cut early in the game, don't improve the tiles, and leave a few forests around, your forests can grow back over time. This can be effective, and I have used it in situations where I have alot of forest/tundra tiles on the extreme borders of my civ. I avoid planting any cities in the area, unless I need a certain resource there, and cut every other tile before leaving the area alone for a good long time. Once I return a few of the previously cut tiles have grown back, and I can cut them again.

At least on epic speed, the first worker and bronze working appear at about the same time. If you have a good special resource (wheat or corn) you could just improve it for the extra +3 production while you're waiting for bronzeworking, and you do about as well as you would with chopping. I don't ever recall having barbarian problems much before 2000 BC (my usual game is prince/epic, which is getting too easy). But I sometimes do wish I had a guard for my worker when animals attack in the early game.

A good question to ask about early military units is to determine what you're gaining. Every turn you delay the worker you're delaying permanent improvements, a second city with 4 free production (and the extra production when it grows), and you're losing the option of +7.5 burst production/turn from chopping trees. All of these are long-term losses that are significant when you only start with 4 production. Would you rather have an extra early warrior (4 turns of pure production minimum, no growth) or one of 1) stonehenge, even without stone; 2) two barracks chopped by the workers; 3) two developed special resources and 4 warriors later? The tradeoff really is that dramatic when you compare a position with an early worker with a position where the worker is delayed (although the delayed position could eventually build these things, the other position will in turn have had a chance to add 2 granaries, etc.).

The cost from making warriors after the first worker is much smaller, since you're already getting the production boost, e.g. you could get 2 warriors by turn 19 with a modest production penalty with queue swapping.

You might be overrating the value of extra worker turns. You give 7.5P, which I supposed is based on 30P divided by 4 turns per chop. That's fine as long as the trees are available, but in cases like C with 24 worker turns, you're implicitly assuming that you have 6 forests available in addition to the 3 you already chopped down.

Nine forests is a lot. Not every start has that. Nine forests that don't cost you a single extra turn of movement to get there is even more rare.

How can you ignore commerce when commerce is the only thing thats going to allow you to settle more cities? This becomes more apparent in the higher difficulties but ultimately its determines your expansion rate in all of them.

You might be overrating the value of extra worker turns. You give 7.5P, which I supposed is based on 30P divided by 4 turns per chop. That's fine as long as the trees are available, but in cases like C with 24 worker turns, you're implicitly assuming that you have 6 forests available in addition to the 3 you already chopped down.

Nine forests is a lot. Not every start has that. Nine forests that don't cost you a single extra turn of movement to get there is even more rare.

Thanks; this is an interesting point. I'm considering the difference between build orders rather than the absolute production, so travel time doesn't matter. If it takes me 3 turns to get to the next tree, and I get a four turn head start in one case, then I'll still have 30 extra hammers (even though there won't be any yield for a seven turn gap in both cases). However, given that there are a limited number of forests, I will eventually chop all of the ones that I want to and therefore the choice is whether I get them sooner or later.

There are two other ways of looking at it. One is that every worker turn is translated into earlier improvements. Assume that a worker can build the first improvement on turn 20, second on 25, third on 30, fourth on 35 (and that the city can use these tiles!) This isn't actually a bad approximation after a city is freed from worker/settler building and is growing to the happiness limit. The second case has a worker making the same builds one turn later. If one is a special tile (+3), another is a slightly worse special tile (+2), and the last two are mines or floodplain/farms (+1) then I will have gotten +7 extra production because I gained the added production one turn earlier in each case. This doesn't go on indefinitely because cities don't grow indefinitely, and because the speed at which I can improve tiles exceeds the speed of city growth.

The second case is that even though I will eventually chop a given forest, I get compound return because I used it to get anther settler or worker earlier.
Again, take a single worker who is chopping a settler at a new city. I start on turn 30, chop 34, chop 38, settler turn 40. If I arrive one turn later, then everything is the same but delayed one turn. I'll therefore found my third city one turn later and will get a permanent production loss as a result (4P at the start, 1-4P every time the population grows depending on improvements up to the happiness limit). In this case worker turns could be worth even more than 7.5/turn. Similar considerations would apply to chopping a granary (or other building), although the yields would vary.

You could also use workers for roads, which have advantages that are tougher to quantify (military defence and health/happy bonuses from resources). You're correct that the yield depends on how you use the worker, but it is substantial for a lot of different strategies.

Just wanted to note that this really doesn't hold if you are playing raging barbs because your early improvements will all be destroyed and your workers will often be forced off of a task by a wandering barb.

if your playing raging barbs try ganhdi for fast workers, on fast games not much difference, but normal+ you will really notice the difference, gotta love gandhi for chopping cities really fast, on small maps, on standard+ though id rather have financel, since costs will start killing after a while, only recommend gandhi on standard+ if your playing a team game.

Good article!:goodjob: Would you compare the the early growth for the Marathon game speed too? I usually do worker/worker/settler at normal game speed and warrior/warrior/worker/worker/settler at the marathon game speed with very little chopping and some queue swapping. The reason for this is because there are usually too many barbarians in my game and I need to save the forests for swordman rush.

As for building the early fishing boat, I do not build a fishing boat until after I have conquered around 30% of the world. The reason for this is simple: it takes too much time to research sailing and building ships. On top of this, seafood is the AI favorite target. Even when they are dying, they would still try to rush a ship to go after my seafoods. Therefore, I think acquiring seafoods is a waste of time and because I can't really protect my seafoods in time of war. With enough swords and axes, I could easily claim another food source on land. Plus I need a strong military early to deal with the barbarians too. Of course, I could be wrong about this; there is still much about Civ4 that I don't know (probably because I'm still playing Civ3 and very little of Civ4 so far).

The build orders that you describe are optimal at high difficulty levels because of the slow pace of technology research at marathon, with a couple of possible exceptions. If you start next to a commerce resource (gold or grassland/gems are ideal) then your worker can build a mine and the early tech game will go much faster. This translates directly into increased production. Because of the long build times, you can also benefit from making it a priority to build on top of a plains/hill (4 base production), since this shaves a lot of turns off the early units. It is less important to have animals/quarries in the fat cross because they will not be developed for many turns. Financial civs can also swap worked tiles (alternating a forest and lake, for instance) to accelerate tech development. In general, you'll come out ahead if you can move forward the first usable worker turn.

How can you ignore commerce when commerce is the only thing thats going to allow you to settle more cities? This becomes more apparent in the higher difficulties but ultimately its determines your expansion rate in all of them.

I should have worded that a bit more carefully. My real point was that the choices you make at the very start of the game have limited impact on commerce. You have to have workers and cities before you can build cottages, the important buildings, gold mines, etc. Yes, it does matter tremendously outside the time frame that I'm describing here. You'll have more of everything, including commerce, if you focus on workers early and take advantage of the stored hammers in your trees.

You are obviously a great player: but as for communication and clarity :confused: . Am a good player of civ3 and starting on civ4. Was looking for a good sound strategy to follow for my early days, on civ 4. Obviously lots of thoughts and research on yours , but for the ordinary player who enjoys the game , your essay is heavy to say the least. would it be possible for you to make your strategy less technical , and just simply say what is required at the start without the techno bable. As i understand , Chop wood (forest), and build up workers ( for resources; pig, cattles, horsesetc) for them to develop before expanding (with settler) would be a simpler advice and the numbers are less important when you just want to enjoy the game. And what about when you face constant harrasement from barbarians, who destroy your improvements??? That should be included as well...
If your advices where met for advanced players who wouldn't need these starting pointers, ok but if its for the beginners at civ4, you should be more to the point. :(

You are obviously a great player: but as for communication and clarity :confused: . Am a good player of civ3 and starting on civ4. Was looking for a good sound strategy to follow for my early days, on civ 4. Obviously lots of thoughts and research on yours , but for the ordinary player who enjoys the game , your essay is heavy to say the least. would it be possible for you to make your strategy less technical , and just simply say what is required at the start without the techno bable. As i understand , Chop wood (forest), and build up workers ( for resources; pig, cattles, horsesetc) for them to develop before expanding (with settler) would be a simpler advice and the numbers are less important when you just want to enjoy the game. And what about when you face constant harrasement from barbarians, who destroy your improvements??? That should be included as well...
If your advices where met for advanced players who wouldn't need these starting pointers, ok but if its for the beginners at civ4, you should be more to the point. :(

The main point is that workers are extremely valuable for the start of your game, followed by settlers, and that city growth is a distant third. For a newer player I'd recommend starting with the following:

1) make your first city build a worker and your first tech bronze-working. Choose a civilization that starts with mining. Qin is a good choice (mining and agriculture, plus financial=faster technology and productive=faster wonders and forges).

2) After your first worker comes out, have them improve something while you build a warrior. Pick other technologies according to the type of game that you want; agriculture and the wheel are pretty important first off; writing is also important for a lot of other reasons.

3) Send the warrior out to your second city site. This should be close, ideally along a river that your first city shares, and a spot with 2 or more resources within two tiles.

4) Have your first worker chop a tree to build a second worker. Have both of them chop a tree to build a settler. You can cut trees up to three tiles away from your capital without penalty; just be careful of animals if you go outside the cultural boundaries.

5) Send the settler to the new city and send one of the workers with them. Have the other worker stick around the main city and develop it. At the second city, have the worker chop a tree for another worker. You'll want to found later cities with the same pattern - send a military unit, settler, and worker together and have the first thing that the worker does be to make another worker as long as there is a usable tree there.

6) Leave one worker around each city. Extra workers can be put to work connecting cities with roads. Once the core cities are fully developed switch their workers to roadbuilding and assisting the new cities.

7) Don't expand indefinitely. When your empire gets too large the maintenance costs get high - the point where this happens depends on the difficulty level. At Prince, it starts to kick in around 4 cities. Make getting Code of Laws and courthouses a priority. If your tech is dropping below 60-70% it is time to stop building new cities and make your existing ones better.

Hope that helps!

I think the optimal build depends on if you are playing on what the game speed is. On quick, I would go right into worker/settler with a warrior building inbetween chops on the settler so the warrior could defend a second city from barbs. On slower speeds, the worker seems to pop out way before bronze working is done, so its probably better to do something else.

The extra production power of the first workers is so large that even a substantial benefit, such as fish, turns out to be only roughly equal to just making a worker.

If it's roughly equivalent in terms of food and production, then i'd say it's certainly worth doing, if only for the extra commerce from the tile with the fish.

I think the optimal build depends on if you are playing on what the game speed is. On quick, I would go right into worker/settler with a warrior building inbetween chops on the settler so the warrior could defend a second city from barbs. On slower speeds, the worker seems to pop out way before bronze working is done, so its probably better to do something else.

Your starting position also matters. At longer speeds and high difficulties it may be most efficient to focus on commerce improvements, so that when you make the workers they have something to do. I've been messing around with archepelago (preparing for a run up to deity). There aren't nearly as many forests as a normal start, and hammers are precious. Improving a gold, grassland/gem, or ivory first speeds tech up so much that you end up with faster early production. A similar comment applies to fish; clams/crabs are less critical. If you're financial you can juggle the worked tiles to get bronze-working and the first worker timed to appear at the same time (switch off working a 2P/3C tile and a 3P tile). Similarly, although you lose theoretical production, at higher difficulties you can do well with a modified build sequence:

Worker/BW
Worker does an improvement, city puts out a warrior
chop worker 2
double chop settler

Many of us play with random leaders (prefer the challenge of adapting to a situation rather than playing game with known and rehearsed strategy). Thus won't be able to pick and choose leader traits to match this tactic.

Many play with roaming barbarians (already discussed the damages they can do with unprotected improvements and workers).

On mid-range difficulty levels (where many people still playing), the goodie huts can be very valauable and are generally missed out on if you don't get a couple units looking around right away.

Not actively exploring may also prevent locating the best location for cities to stake your claim to an important resource (copper, iron, etc.)

And of course finances are a concern if you continue this strategy to expand and build too many cities early on.

Then there's the thought of saving trees for "critical" production of a key wonder when their value chopped may be 60 or more due to civics, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea has great merit and is obviously well researched and documented. I just think there are sometimes more elements to consider that may or may not outweigh the 2 worker chop rush strategy.

Many of us play with random leaders (prefer the challenge of adapting to a situation rather than playing game with known and rehearsed strategy). Thus won't be able to pick and choose leader traits to match this tactic.

Many play with roaming barbarians (already discussed the damages they can do with unprotected improvements and workers).

On mid-range difficulty levels (where many people still playing), the goodie huts can be very valauable and are generally missed out on if you don't get a couple units looking around right away.

Not actively exploring may also prevent locating the best location for cities to stake your claim to an important resource (copper, iron, etc.)

And of course finances are a concern if you continue this strategy to expand and build too many cities early on.

Then there's the thought of saving trees for "critical" production of a key wonder when their value chopped may be 60 or more due to civics, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea has great merit and is obviously well researched and documented. I just think there are sometimes more elements to consider that may or may not outweigh the 2 worker chop rush strategy.

There isn't really a contradiction - of course, you're correct. What an exercise like this does is to quantify the tradeoff. If you can get away with it, the sequence of productive things to do is well-defined (workers, settler, then grow). If you have a nifty special resource, improving it first also yields good production. There has been a lot of discussion about tree-chopping; this exercise confirms that the benefits are real. Ditto for queue-swapping, although I think this is really a short vs long term payoff question.

More generally, it suggests that on average you are better off if you can send a worker/settler pair to found a new city. Chopping trees to accelerate the process is economically very efficient - enough so that you might gain enough production later to more than make up for not having the trees later. I stopped after 2 cities because, again, you're correct - you want to expand to the appropriate number of cities for the difficulty level. Beyond that point, you need Code of Laws and courthouses - or enough gold mines, etc. that you simply don't care much.

If you are running with raging barbarians, or you're running at Emperor+, you can't as easily follow the strategy that gives you the most production. In effect, this represents the handicap that you're taking with those choices.
I hope this helps!

I think I understand this, but I wonder whether your conclusions still hold when we complicate the analysis to include commerce.

Consider my current game as a case study. I'm playing as the Americans on Noble level at Normal speed, with Washington as the leader. Washington (the city) is in a lovely spot, on a plains hill by a river bend. Playable resources include Wheat, Gold, Ivory and three flood plains squares. It's 3480BC, and I've just completed my first worker.

As I understand it, your strategy would have me start a Settler next, while my worker irrigates the Wheat and then chops forest to speed production. That seems like it would be effective. But my intuition tells me that I should push out a Warrior and wait until my city grows to size 2, in order to get a bloke working the gold mine before I start Settlers. It'll take 7 turns to grow the city, but the gold square will be worth a whopping 9 commerce and 3 production once the mine is built.

Once again, I think I understand your point about the importance of making Settlers early, but I wonder if it's worth the opportunity cost of missing that gold square in this case. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.

I think I understand this, but I wonder whether your conclusions still hold when we complicate the analysis to include commerce.

Consider my current game as a case study. I'm playing as the Americans on Noble level at Normal speed, with Washington as the leader. Washington (the city) is in a lovely spot, on a plains hill by a river bend. Playable resources include Wheat, Gold, Ivory and three flood plains squares. It's 3480BC, and I've just completed my first worker.

As I understand it, your strategy would have me start a Settler next, while my worker irrigates the Wheat and then chops forest to speed production. That seems like it would be effective. But my intuition tells me that I should push out a Warrior and wait until my city grows to size 2, in order to get a bloke working the gold mine before I start Settlers. It'll take 7 turns to grow the city, but the gold square will be worth a whopping 9 commerce and 3 production once the mine is built.

Once again, I think I understand your point about the importance of making Settlers early, but I wonder if it's worth the opportunity cost of missing that gold square in this case. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.

In this case, chop-rushing actually has the nice benefit of accelerating early commerce as well as production, with a modest change to the cycle. Here is how it would work:

If you wait until the city grows to size 2, you usually have to work some tile other than the gold mine for the population to have excess food. Before the worker improves a tile, this growth will be slow - 3 food/turn on an unimproved wheat. You therefore have to wait 8 turns on normal before you have a spare person to work the gold mine, plus the lag time to build a worker who can build the mine.

In the worker-worker-settler setup, your first action is to build a worker and improve the gold mine. Once it is improved, have the city work the gold mine and pump out early commerce. You don't get growth anyway when you're building workers and settlers, so you might as well pick a tile with nice commerce. Then you chop a second worker. Have the second worker chop for a settler and then improve the wheat. (Improving the wheat first doesn't help, because your city can only use one tile at size 1, and you want that tile to be the gold mine). Now you have an improved gold and wheat and you set the city to grow, working the wheat tile. Since you're now at +6 food, growth will be quick (4 turns). More details:

Work the wheat turns 1-15 (make worker) and turns 16-20 (building gold mine). Worker1 chops on turns 24, 28. Worker2 appears on turn 24 and chops turn 28. Settler appears turn 31, wheat is improved on turn 33.
Work the gold turns 21-33, then work the wheat turns 34-37, followed by wheat+gold. You get 13 turns of high commerce out of the first 37. The mathematic maximum if you never grew and only worked a developed gold mine is 17. Everything is a bit faster with extra production from a starting hills/plain, but the principle is the same.

If you improve the wheat first, followed by the gold, grow to 2:
Work wheat turns 1-25 (1-15 for worker, 16-20 to farm wheat, 21-25 to mine gold). Growth to size 2 will occur on Turn 24. Turns 25+ you work gold and wheat. Worker1 chops turns 29, 33. Worker2 appears turn 29, chops turn 33. Settler appears turn 34. By turn 37 you've had 12 turns of high commerce, one fewer than the other approach. You've also delayed your new city by three turns (but gained one turn of growth on your home city), for another small net negative.

In either case you have the ingredients for a very, very solid start.

Very good analysis and discussion. I can't wait to see the followup article: what the tradeoffs are for various courses of action at turns 40-100. Also, what do you think of the idea of looking around for a plains/hill to settle on? I thought that was an interesting point. Again, it neglects commerce because you can't research until you found that city, but you'll certainly get some production, and will have some extra scouting (from the hilltop) for a future city location.

The reason you can ignore commerce is because the commerce from your
palace (8) will overwhelm any additional commerce due to city size (e.g. +1).

And remember that building a second city, especially along a river, is a
bigger commerce boost, since you get +2 for the two squares it works
and +2 for the two trade routes.

The one case where I think it DOES make a difference, is with gold. With
a gold start, I will often mine the gold and switch the city to "max commerce"
while I am chopping. This can provide a quite significant commerce boost,
allowing for fast early research.

Great article! On prince now, on standard, and this is useful knowledge - might enable me to progress to monarch!

I could follow most of the numbers/scores in first post but cannot reconcile Case A (Worker,Worker,Settler,Improve). You quote:
Case A: Worker2 T23, Settler T27, Imp T32, 21 worker turns, 16 overflow, Score=+153.5, chopped=3 trees
The numbers I have trouble with are overflow (and that element of score) plus number of chopped trees. If Worker1 chops T19+T23+T27 and Worker2 chops T27 then this is 4 trees and production is 27x4 + 30x4 = 228 less 220 (settler+worker+worker) which leaves overflow=8.
Sorry if I missed something but I cannot see it.

Also does your score take into account that early improvements in Case C & D provide additional production (after workers and settler) over Case A which does not have improvement available until T32?

Great article! On prince now, on standard, and this is useful knowledge - might enable me to progress to monarch!

I could follow most of the numbers/scores in first post but cannot reconcile Case A (Worker,Worker,Settler,Improve). You quote:
Case A: Worker2 T23, Settler T27, Imp T32, 21 worker turns, 16 overflow, Score=+153.5, chopped=3 trees
The numbers I have trouble with are overflow (and that element of score) plus number of chopped trees. If Worker1 chops T19+T23+T27 and Worker2 chops T27 then this is 4 trees and production is 27x4 + 30x4 = 228 less 220 (settler+worker+worker) which leaves overflow=8.
Sorry if I missed something but I cannot see it.

Also does your score take into account that early improvements in Case C & D provide additional production (after workers and settler) over Case A which does not have improvement available until T32?

Good catch; you're correct that the overflow is only 8 for the base case and it uses 4 trees. Blame a complex Excel spreadsheet :0 I also did not count production differences after the workers and settler are made. For the best case (wheat/corn, or the lucky copper mine) you'd get
24 excess production (case A, worker/worker/settler/good special)
8 excess production (case A, worker/worker/settler/mine)
12 excess production (case B, worker/settler/worker/good special)
4 excess production (case B, worker/settler/worker/mine)
36 excess production (case C, worker, improve special, worker. settler)
10 excess production (case D, worker, mine, worker, settler)

These changes make improving a special resource the best choice, also saving a tree. Note that this can only really be done with one nation (China), which starts with agriculture and mining. However, it does open up some interesting production choices for nations that start with agriculture but no mining (US, France, Persia, Inca, Egypt). If they have the right starting position they can research mining and bronze-working and get essentially the same production as the nations that start with mining.
Interesting side note...

Very good analysis and discussion. I can't wait to see the followup article: what the tradeoffs are for various courses of action at turns 40-100. Also, what do you think of the idea of looking around for a plains/hill to settle on? I thought that was an interesting point. Again, it neglects commerce because you can't research until you found that city, but you'll certainly get some production, and will have some extra scouting (from the hilltop) for a future city location.

This depends a lot on game speed. At normal, you're trading off one turn of technology research for enhanced early production. For a worker/worker/settler starting approach, the stats for base +5 production are improved quite a bit. Here is what they look like:

Worker after 13 turns (one turn delay in start)
Worker2 on turn 19 (chop on turn 17)
Chop on 21, 23, 25, settler on turn 25, improve on turn 28, 20 overflow
for four trees. This accelerates everything relative
to the usual timetable. The advantage is even bigger at marathon.
You also have a game-long production advantage in the home city. The cost
is more subtle: there may be a sweet set of resources that you could
reach at the first city site that are out of reach if you move. Commerce development will also be better longer term (the odds that you'll be able to use a commerce resource at one of your first two cities are pretty good).

Forgive me if you've mentioned this, but I didn't see it addressed when skimming the thread.


Your analysis seems to completely ignore anything but the shortest-term considerations.

Forests are (roughly) a fixed resource -- when you chop them, they are gone forever. Each chop should have a penalty attached to reflect this fact.

However, you do exactly the opposite of what you should: your score significantly rewards burning through your forests in lieu of building sustainable improvements.


I'm aware that you said you only wanted to analyze the first 40 turns, but because of its short-sightedness, I think it's only relevance is for the person who has already decided they are going to clear cut, and is only interested in how fast he can do it.

It seems so easy to account for your "long"-term potential: simply eliminate the 7.5 hammer per turn bonus for worker-turns, and introduce a -30 hammer penalty for each chop. The only question is how to properly account for a city-turn. (I guess it's not that hard on emporer -- I imagine each city-turn is worth exactly what the city could produce at its happiness limit... say, 8 hammers per city-turn for a good second city?)

Forgive me if you've mentioned this, but I didn't see it addressed when skimming the thread.


Your analysis seems to completely ignore anything but the shortest-term considerations.

Forests are (roughly) a fixed resource -- when you chop them, they are gone forever. Each chop should have a penalty attached to reflect this fact.

However, you do exactly the opposite of what you should: your score significantly rewards burning through your forests in lieu of building sustainable improvements.


I'm aware that you said you only wanted to analyze the first 40 turns, but because of its short-sightedness, I think it's only relevance is for the person who has already decided they are going to clear cut, and is only interested in how fast he can do it.

It seems so easy to account for your "long"-term potential: simply eliminate the 7.5 hammer per turn bonus for worker-turns, and introduce a -30 hammer penalty for each chop. The only question is how to properly account for a city-turn. (I guess it's not that hard on emporer -- I imagine each city-turn is worth exactly what the city could produce at its happiness limit... say, 8 hammers per city-turn for a good second city?)

That is a good point, especially applicable to queue-switching (trading extra trees for units and growth while building workers and settlers).
It has been a very good discussion on this thread, and I did touch on this in posts 2 and 19. Even after docking the tree-cutting strategies for the opportunity cost of the trees, they still come out well ahead of cutting no trees because you get an earlier head start on the improvements in your capital and the start of your second city.

Worker turns are still very valuable because you can use them to develop improvements earlier or to start a city earlier, so that aspect of the calculation isn't affected by the early (as opposed to late) usage of trees. The trick is to compare two scenarios where you do everything the same, differing only in what the worker can do. Here is an example that might be useful. Imagine that we both found our second city on the same turn, but I have a worker there the turn it is founded and yours comes five turns later.
There is an irrigated corn there. I improve it five turns later when your worker arrives. If you look at my city when you've improved the corn,
I've gained 15 + 30 = 45 food directly from the corn. I grew to size 2 after seven turns and with one extra food I could be size 3, for a total of 49. I just improved a second resource. You gained 32 production (growing to size 2 on turn 8, but only getting one extra production because it is unimproved.) But now my city is working the second tile for the next five turns until you catch up, and this pattern will repeat for every population point that I add. It's therefore fair to count the benefit of one turn of 4-5 improved tile for a worker turn, and similar comments apply to getting the third city out.

This also has intereting implications for what you do with your workers - the yield from being efficient is pretty high. Not overimproving a city that won't work extra tiles for many turns and not obsessing about roads will have a surprisingly large yield, as will having improvements in place when a city grows into them...

Your analysis seems to completely ignore anything but the shortest-term considerations.

Long-term considerations are not very important ! I see this fault in thinking so often here on the boards, what you gain in short terms will multiply over the years and overgrow the longterm penalties by far.

People often talk about saving their forests for later chops, but this is pointless. The forest gives you the same amount of hammers each time. If you have a production bonus that is applied to the forest it's also applied to your city's production, so you're cutting the amount of time that your city gets the bonus and not getting anything extra from the forest.
The only reason to save forests if you know you're going to cut them is if you're going to be behind or level in tech. and you need some extra speed on a wonder once the tech. has been discovered: in any other situation you could be building whatever it is however many turns earlier by chopping early.
So, imagine you chop a settler, and then a library, and 50 turns later you build some units because you see a barbarian threat. If you saved the library forests the library would take longer, so saving those forests doesn't get you the units more quickly; it just enables you to respond to the threat quickly if you hadn't anticipated it.
In fact, saving your forests loses you turns because as your city's production increases the number of turns that the forest stops you having to use decreases, so that a forest's effect is greatest early on. This is the whole point of forest chopping.
So saving forests for later chopping is only useful for wonder races, and even then you're sacrificing some of their benefit by saving them.

People often talk about saving their forests for later chops, but this is pointless. The forest gives you the same amount of hammers each time. If you have a production bonus that is applied to the forest it's also applied to your city's production, so you're cutting the amount of time that your city gets the bonus and not getting anything extra from the forest.
The only reason to save forests if you know you're going to cut them is if you're going to be behind or level in tech. and you need some extra speed on a wonder once the tech. has been discovered: in any other situation you could be building whatever it is however many turns earlier by chopping early.
So, imagine you chop a settler, and then a library, and 50 turns later you build some units because you see a barbarian threat. If you saved the library forests the library would take longer, so saving those forests doesn't get you the units more quickly; it just enables you to respond to the threat quickly if you hadn't anticipated it.
In fact, saving your forests loses you turns because as your city's production increases the number of turns that the forest stops you having to use decreases, so that a forest's effect is greatest early on. This is the whole point of forest chopping.
So saving forests for later chopping is only useful for wonder races, and even then you're sacrificing some of their benefit by saving them.

I agree with most of what you say, but you forget, that not chopping forest is a choice if there is a very good alternativ for the worker to improve instead.

ohioastronomy's analysis for example shows, that after 40 turns improving a +3 resource prior chopping ends up with ~+145 and 3 forest chopped while chopping first gives ~+157 and 4 forest chopped. Assuming that the safed forest is chopped soon afterwards, the first +3 improvement strategy is better than chopping immiediately.

Stone/marble/copper/iron/happy/health can be better to improve than chopping, if not many roads have to be built and the resource is needed. Then the added production of special resource + effect from resource + safed forest can outweigh earlier chopping.

But if workers got nothing useful to do chopping is always recomended.

Carn

Edit to add: A further benefit of having the worker building some productive or usefull resource enabling improvement is, that non chopped forest have a chance to grow new forests. But i think this only adds a little in the long run, but could make a difference for a close contest, like sheep vs chop.

ohioastronomy is it much work to check whether for civs, that start without mining, but with agriculture and/or hunting and with pig/cow and hunting/agri resource and without mining reource in city radius, its better to go animal husbandry first and improve/grow to the special resources while mining+copper is researched?
Could this be advantagous to research mining+copper, as then the worker is without useful things to do?

Carn

First off, the long term is the only term of importance, because that's when the end of the game happens. :p It doesn't matter if your first 40 turns are better if you fall behind at the 100 turn mark!

Surely y'all are referring to the principle that 30 hammers now is better than 30 hammers later. But that's not what we're really comparing! As Carn said, the choice is between 30 hammers now, improvements later vs improvements now, 30 hammers later.

As a concrete example, let's suppose that you quickly chop three more forests than I do, with the net effect that you get your second city 8 turns before I do. However, we're playing emporer, and we have no happiness resources. So, it plateaus at 3 happiness, making, say, 8 hammers per turn. Overall, your city will have produced 64 hammers more than my city.

Overall, the net effect of your early chopping is to convert three forests into 64 hammers. I still have the opportunity to convert my three forests into 90 hammers! As long as I do so in a reasonable timeframe, I come out ahead.

3 chops is 90 shields. Unless your city has 11 surplus shields + food, chopping a settler will speed the second city more than 8 turns. Most early game cities have four net production: the center center gives 2F+1P, and the one pop works a tile with net production 3, eating 2 food. This city will take 25 turns to make a settler; chopping, you do it in 12. So the time saved is 13 turns.

If the second city grows to developing 8P/turn, then chopping nets you 104 hammers, for a cost of 90. So it's positive even viewed with no time-cost for resources.

In reality, there is time-value for resources, and what you get from speed doesn't arbitrarity stop after 13 turns of advantage. Instead, you buy a city earlier, which gets new resources earlier and builds stuff earlier, which increases your happiness limit and commerce output earlier, which keeps feeding back into the economy.

What rate of growth do people actually achieve in CivIV? If we take the starting position in terms of its unit values, you start with 115P in "capital", and invest it as best you are allowed, producing a stream of just 2P/turn, initially. 4P/turn if we allow food==hammer. 600 turns later, you've "compounded" that initial stream into say 20 cities, each producing 50P/turn or more. Net of 1000P/turn. So, we've achieved a multiplier of 250 times our initial outlay. Per turn, the growth rate achieved here is thus .92% - less than 1%/turn! Still, 13 turns here means achieving a 12.7% increase in your economy, on average.

3 chops is 90 shields. Unless your city has 11 surplus shields + food, chopping a settler will speed the second city more than 8 turns. Most early game cities have four net production: the center center gives 2F+1P, and the one pop works a tile with net production 3, eating 2 food. This city will take 25 turns to make a settler; chopping, you do it in 12. So the time saved is 13 turns.
You're comparing an unimproved city with chopping to an unimproved city without chopping. The point is that's the wrong comparison!

If I'm not chopping right from the start, that usually means I have a 5 or 6 production tile, and maybe a second 4 production tile. A pop 1 city with an improved cow produces a settler in 15 turns, and only 10 turns if I opt to make a single chop! You can't shave 13 turns off of that via chopping. :p


In reality, there is time-value for resources, and what you get from speed doesn't arbitrarity stop after 13 turns of advantage. Instead, you buy a city earlier, which gets new resources earlier and builds stuff earlier, which increases your happiness limit and commerce output earlier, which keeps feeding back into the economy.
You're right -- it doesn't arbitrarily stop; it stops because you hit a plateau. :p

In reality, if you build a city 13 turns before me, it will always have at most a 13 turn advantage over mine. The compounding effect you describe is explained by the fact that as the city grows, each city-turn becomes more valuable. If our cities could grow indefinitely, then your advantage keeps growing and growing.

Actually, that turn advantage shrinks over time, because you generally will not have new options 13 turns before I get those options. E.G. we both might start building markets right when we get currency -- I'm not going to wait 13 more turns just because my city was built later!

Or even better, I might use my leftover trees to chop rush a growth-improving building! So, even though you might have gotten your city up and running 13 turns earlier, I could potentially catch up or even surpass your city because I built my granary and marketplace before you did!


However, our cities don't grow indefinitely. They might hit a harsh 3 happiness cap, which puts growth to a halt. We might build all the buildings faster than we can research techs to make new buildings available. In this case, your 13 turn advantage is entirely reduced to however many extra units you can make in your extra 13 turns at the plateau and whatever extra commerce it produced. Then, our cities become exactly equal.


As a practical example of a reason this matters...

I've recently been playing a lot of Emporer opening games to refine my strategy, and I've had several opportunities to grab 6-8 cities without AI interference... but in such circumstances, I simply run out of trees to fuel my expansion somewhere around 3-4 cities, since there simply aren't enough trees to build all the workers I need, all the warrior escorts necessary, and stonehenge (more tree-efficient than obelisks)... not to mention that I might need barracks and real military units before I'm done expanding!

Clearcutting might get me to 4 cities the fastest, but during most of these turns, I would have a hollow shell of an empire that desperately needs improvement.

However, if I improve tiles, then start cutting, much of those first 4 cities will be built on the merits of the tiles themselves. Those tiles will continue to fuel further expansion, as well as all the trees I've not yet cut down. I'm tentatively convinced that improving tiles before chopping will surely get me to 6-8 cities quicker.

(And this ignores how essential it is during such a long growth phase to build commerce-generating improvements, and to hook up happiness and strategic resources)

You're comparing an unimproved city with chopping to an unimproved city without chopping. The point is that's the wrong comparison!

If I'm not chopping right from the start, that usually means I have a 5 or 6 production tile, and maybe a second 4 production tile. A pop 1 city with an improved cow produces a settler in 15 turns, and only 10 turns if I opt to make a single chop! You can't shave 13 turns off of that via chopping. :p



You're right -- it doesn't arbitrarily stop; it stops because you hit a plateau. :p

In reality, if you build a city 13 turns before me, it will always have at most a 13 turn advantage over mine. The compounding effect you describe is explained by the fact that as the city grows, each city-turn becomes more valuable. If our cities could grow indefinitely, then your advantage keeps growing and growing.

Actually, that turn advantage shrinks over time, because you generally will not have new options 13 turns before I get those options. E.G. we both might start building markets right when we get currency -- I'm not going to wait 13 more turns just because my city was built later!

Or even better, I might use my leftover trees to chop rush a growth-improving building! So, even though you might have gotten your city up and running 13 turns earlier, I could potentially catch up or even surpass your city because I built my granary and marketplace before you did!


However, our cities don't grow indefinitely. They might hit a harsh 3 happiness cap, which puts growth to a halt. We might build all the buildings faster than we can research techs to make new buildings available. In this case, your 13 turn advantage is entirely reduced to however many extra units you can make in your extra 13 turns at the plateau and whatever extra commerce it produced. Then, our cities become exactly equal.


As a practical example of a reason this matters...

I've recently been playing a lot of Emporer opening games to refine my strategy, and I've had several opportunities to grab 6-8 cities without AI interference... but in such circumstances, I simply run out of trees to fuel my expansion somewhere around 3-4 cities, since there simply aren't enough trees to build all the workers I need, all the warrior escorts necessary, and stonehenge (more tree-efficient than obelisks)... not to mention that I might need barracks and real military units before I'm done expanding!

Clearcutting might get me to 4 cities the fastest, but during most of these turns, I would have a hollow shell of an empire that desperately needs improvement.

However, if I improve tiles, then start cutting, much of those first 4 cities will be built on the merits of the tiles themselves. Those tiles will continue to fuel further expansion, as well as all the trees I've not yet cut down. I'm tentatively convinced that improving tiles before chopping will surely get me to 6-8 cities quicker.

(And this ignores how essential it is during such a long growth phase to build commerce-generating improvements, and to hook up happiness and strategic resources)

I have to confess to being puzzled, since I did exactly the comparisons that you're talking about. Remember that I was only talking about making the first settler, not something that you have to do for every single subsequent city.
This is important - once you have workers, there are other ways to get settlers and workers out besides chopping trees. But you don't at the start, which is why they are so handy. The start also definitely lends itself to quantitative analysis. I do agree that there are alternatives to chopping once you have some workers and a second city.

I compared growing to size 2 and then going for workers, going to size 5, and building a worker at size 1 and then improving without cutting trees. In every case, you are unconditionally better off investing your trees in the first two workers and settler. The reason why the first builds are special is that you need workers to make growth useful, and your city is stalled until you're done with workers and settlers.

In this comparison (worker, build best improvement, then use normal production for another worker and a settler) you have a 5 turn delay in the settler and an 18 turn delay in the second worker. (Yes, you save turns spent chopping trees - but after the first improvement nothing you can do affects your production in the near term). Your primary city gets to start growing on turn 28 if you chop 4 trees, while your initial city growth is delayed until turn 41 if you don't. If you do everything else the same, this means delayed improvements, delayed growth, and a delayed start. Of course, you could have the second city stall out while it builds a worker - but that is just moving the production loss to another city where it will take longer. You can quantify these things, and they do matter for the very first city.

More to the point,building more than one improvement doesn't help you until your city grows to use the new improvements...you'd get a much better yield from having workers building improvements just before the cities can use them e.g. one improvement each around two size 1 cities is more productive than 2 improvements around one size 1 city.
Connecting health/happy improvements only helps you when your cities are big enough for them to matter; connecting cities and general resources is more useful but time-intensive.

For subsequent settlers and workers, a size 2 city with two good specials (e.g. corn and pigs) can put out workers and settlers faster than the best lumberjacks. Note also that forest depreciate as the game progresses because cities have more production. A unimproved starting capital has, at most, 4 hammers (5 on a plains/hills). A fully improved size 5 city, before forges, can have 16 hammers (plains/hill city, 4 grass/hill/mines, cow). A forest is 7.5 turns of maximal production at the start and less than 2 later.
They do have real uses (especially wonders), and they are very valuable around hammer-poor cities to get out essential commerce/science buildings in a sane time. But your capital usually isn't hammer-poor, and other cities can fill that role.

I have to confess to being puzzled, since I did exactly the comparisons that you're talking about.
Sorry, that was my response to Wreck, not to you. :(

More to the point,building more than one improvement doesn't help you until your city grows to use the new improvements...you'd get a much better yield from having workers building improvements just before the cities can use them e.g. one improvement each around two size 1 cities is more productive than 2 improvements around one size 1 city.
Connecting health/happy improvements only helps you when your cities are big enough for them to matter; connecting cities and general resources is more useful but time-intensive.

This is true, but only to a point. There -is- some strategic value to having more improvements than citizens to work them: flexibility. A size 3 city with 3 fish and 3 mines has a lot more options than a comparable city that only improved 3 of those 6 plots. You can maximize growth, maximize production while starving, or mix the two to taste.

Does this flexibility outweigh the efficiency achieved by "just in time" improvement? That's hard to say.

On a related note, I frequently keep my first two workers together in order to chop or improve at double speed. I generally play on the Marathon setting, though. At faster speeds, a solo worker might be fast enough.

Most early game cities have four net production: the center center gives 2F+1P, and the one pop works a tile with net production 3, eating 2 food. This city will take 25 turns to make a settler; chopping, you do it in 12. So the time saved is 13 turns.

Most early-game cities of mine have a lot more production than that. The citizen isn't working an unimproved tile; it's working a pig/pasture, or a corn/farm, or a deer/camp/forest, etc. Your logic is circular, because it's based on the assumption that you rush to bronze working first, rather than researching technologies that give useful improvements first (or even starting with them!).

I do, nevertheless, agree that rushing to bronze working and chop rushing is very effective. That's too bad. I avoid playing that way, even though it does work.

Most early-game cities of mine have a lot more production than that. The citizen isn't working an unimproved tile; it's working a pig/pasture, or a corn/farm, or a deer/camp/forest, etc. Your logic is circular, because it's based on the assumption that you rush to bronze working first, rather than researching technologies that give useful improvements first (or even starting with them!).

I do, nevertheless, agree that rushing to bronze working and chop rushing is very effective. That's too bad. I avoid playing that way, even though it does work.

I think it's useful to distinguish between what you do at the very start and what you do later. When you start with no worker, your city is very limited in production; that's why building a worker first is so useful. Your city is also stuck in neutral (for growth) until the first settler is produced; that is a big reason why chopping trees to accelerate the process works so well. You can only get the benefit of a single improved tile until your city grows, and you can't found new cities without stopping that process.

For later cities you can start with a worker, and that changes the calculus in interesting ways. A size 2 city working 2 food resources can have as much as 11P, which gets a worker/settler pair out the door only slightly slower than chopping 4 trees (16 turns vs 12). This doesn't require 4 trees per city, which isn't even always possible, and it's handy if you want to build wonders, barracks, libraries, granaries, etc. Since you're not burning 12 worker turns to get out the worker/settler, the production loss from delaying subsequent cities isn't that bad (although your settler farm city isn't growing, that isn't actually such a bad factor - you can prebuild the improvements that it will grow into, and with a big food surplus it'll grow quickly once you let it).

So worker/bronzeworking/chop,chop,chop is very advantageous at the very start, and it can be useful for later cities as well. But once you have workers, there are reasonable alternatives.

I think it's useful to distinguish between what you do at the very start and what you do later. When you start with no worker, your city is very limited in production; that's why building a worker first is so useful.

Well, of course. But this seems to ignore the question, which is comparing worker/bronze working/chop/chop/chop to worker/agriculture/farm/animal husbandry/pasture/bronze working.

As I said, I'm not questioning that the former does work quite well. I'm just saying that leaving the alternative out of your comparison and discussion entirely (as when you implicitly assume that a size-1 city only has net food+hammers of 4/turn) makes the discussion very incomplete.

Unless you build your city on a plains/hill (which is quite worth spending time to do), or possibly a resource tile, you are very likely to have net F+P=4 for your city in the time before you build a worker. There are almost no tiles that the terrain generator creates that have F+P=4. The only exceptions would be tiles combining a forest with a resource, and there are only two of those I think I've seen: forest/deer, and forest/elephant. (In theory many resource tiles could be forested and thus get to F+P=4 unimproved, but I don't think the terrain generator will put forests on most resource tiles.)

So, your initial city is going to have net food+hammers of 4/turn usually, unless you find a plains/hill for it (or a resource), in which case, 5/turn. If you are really lucky, you can find a plains/hill next to a deer/forest and get 6/turn.

Unless you build your city on a plains/hill (which is quite worth spending time to do), or possibly a resource tile, you are very likely to have net F+P=4 for your city in the time before you build a worker.

Of course. But so what? Before you build a worker, you don't have any choice as to whether to chop or to improve tiles. The question is what happens after you build the worker, and that's when the comparison of improving tiles (thus making the city more productive) to chopping (generating production directly) becomes relevant. And that's why counting a 30-hammer chop as 7.5 turns of city production at 4/turn (post #45) is wrong and misleading---if you weren't chopping, you would be improving the tiles you are working, and your city would be generating more than 4/turn.

Well, of course. But this seems to ignore the question, which is comparing worker/bronze working/chop/chop/chop to worker/agriculture/farm/animal husbandry/pasture/bronze working.

As I said, I'm not questioning that the former does work quite well. I'm just saying that leaving the alternative out of your comparison and discussion entirely (as when you implicitly assume that a size-1 city only has net food+hammers of 4/turn) makes the discussion very incomplete.

I did look at that; it is the last two cases (best = +3P from improvement, worst = +1P from a mine or floodplain/farm). You lose a lot of early production potential. Ditto if you improve and grow to the limit first; you're postponing the founding of your second city. There are certainly a lot of ways to make up for a slower start, but not beelining for bronzeworking and chopping trees does mean that you're choosing a slower start. The other things you get can make that worth the tradeoff, and all that I'm doing here is quantifying what that tradeoff is.

Yes I see what you are saying; certainly should be doing something productive with the worker. You are correct to criticize my assumptions in #45. However, the more general point I was hoping to make there - that time value is real - still applies.

If you do have specific resources in your starting city, then going for the tech to improve them instead of bronze might make more sense. Indeed, in a sense bronze-working itself might be seen as a particular strategy, only appropriate when you have trees around. It's just that it's a lot more common to have trees in your city than it is to have wheat/corn (and next to water), or fish, or cows/pigs; and that the correct technological means to exploit these (or other combos with two resource tiles).

But let us assume your 6 unit tile - cows, say. Assume that a settler is desired for the second build, and assume you can have either bronze-working that early, or animal husbandry. Thus you can either chop the settler, or you can improve the cows (then do other things, perhaps, but not chop, because of lack of tech). We can see already a problem here - if you've improved the one tile you can work, and you can't chop yet, the worker is more or less idle. It may be making improvements that you'll use soon, but it is producing nothing immediately profitable.

Is it possible to get Animal Husbandry (cost: 100) and Bronze Working (cost: 120) with a size-1 city in the first ~30 turns? I don't know. I 'd guess so, for a civ which starts with Mining (cost: 50) and one of the prereqs for Animal Husbandry (Hunting (cost: 40) or Agriculture (cost: 50)). I'd think not otherwise, although obviously having a floodplain tile will be helpful.

Anyway, back to the question. With chopping, the settler is created using two chops (60P), plus the city's production during those 8 turns, which is 32P, plus two more turns (8P). Total time 10 turns, and the last two are not wasted for the worker. (If you get Animal Husbandry during the time building the settler, it can start on the pasture and almost be done. Or it can just keep chopping.)

With cows, the settler spends the first 3 turns making the pasture, then does other stuff (perhaps irrigation of other tiles). So the city gets 3 turns at 4 each, for 12. Then its net production rises to 7/turn, so it takes 13 more turns to finish the settler. Total time 16 turns.

Since it took 15 turns to build the worker, its idle time starts at turn ~19. If you can get Bronze Working after Animal Husbandry in that time, then you can do one chop during the settler build, reducing the time by 4 turns to 12 turns. This would be ideal, I'd think. China can probably do it, given a floodplain and a cows. I don't think it's generally doable.

In the more general case, you're looking at a tradeoff. The 6 turns you gain by chopping cost the two forests, plus a bit during the delay until you get the cows online.

What do 6 turns gain you? To start with, it gets the 2nd city 6 turns earlier. Then it gets what that city produces for six turns... and then everything gained early by that extra production, and so on. Basically your growth should be exponential early on, so the advantage remains until at least you stop growing horizontally. How much is this likely to be? Hard for me to calculate.

But do let me correct one misunderstanding of the game, posted previously by MyOtherName in #46: "In reality, if you build a city 13 turns before me, it will always have at most a 13 turn advantage over mine."

This statement is only true if there are no events which are symmetry breaking - that is, events which are possible 13 turns earlier (but not later), or events that are only possible later, but not earlier. Events which are possible earlier (but not later) tend to bias for an early lead, expanding it. Events which are possible later (but not earlier) will naturally shrink a lead.

Now, what sort of events do we have in Civ4 of either type? There is only one event of the second type; all events in the game are keyed to earlier prerequisites, not to absolute time. The fixed game-end is the one exception.

On the other hand, there are many sorts of symmetry-breakers of the other variety, that is, events that happen once and not again. The clearest example of these are world wonders: one civ gets them; the other civs do not. If you are six turns behind me, you may not get a wonder which I do get. (And the effect of that can compound.)

It is a general property of games, that having opponents and "property" (single-owned things) breaks time-symmetry of what is possible developmentally. This is one of the things that makes Civ addictive.

But there are many other examples besides wonders; the game is in fact interesting in large part because it is a race to so many things, and you must balance them. At the outset, it's a race to goody huts. Second place gets no hut. Early, it's a race for uncontested settlement. If you are six turns delayed, you may miss out on a great city site, or even be unable to block off a region of turf by settling a choke-point. Techwise, the game has a race to religions. You don't get shrines and the benefits of them without winning one or more of these races. And it's a race to certain other techs, too, later in the game, such as Liberalism. Getting it second is not as good as getting it first. Also midgame, with continents, is the race to caravels and then galleons, to explore the world (with possible new huts), and then grab all the good islands. At the end of the game, it's a race to spaceships. Getting yours six turns early may not make a difference. But it might. If an AI opponent launched three turns in, it does. It makes the difference between winning and losing.

Of course, building a second settler six turns early does not translate into a six turn net advantage - the settler represents only a fraction of your net capital, not the totality. The advantage is much smaller (and possibly offset by the still-standing forests). However, assuming it is an advantage... it will last the entire game, so long as you play well. And it may even compound, completely depending on the nitty-gritty details of the who/what/where of the AIs.

I did look at that; it is the last two cases (best = +3P from improvement, worst = +1P from a mine or floodplain/farm).

Where? Not in post #47. You only compare chop-first to chop-never. That's rather a strawman. The real comparison is chop-first to improve-then-chop.

What do 6 turns gain you? To start with, it gets the 2nd city 6 turns earlier. Then it gets what that city produces for six turns... and then everything gained early by that extra production, and so on. Basically your growth should be exponential early on, so the advantage remains until at least you stop growing horizontally.

I think this is very, very wrong. Growth is not at all exponential. Much of your progress is driven by your research rate, and most of your research in the very early game comes from your palace, which you only ever get one of. So additional cities don't speed that at all. Furthermore, each additional city costs more in maintenance than the one before (plus you choose the most desirable locations first, so each subsequent city is also likely to be less favorably placed), so additional growth becomes less and less valuable. Building additional cities also increases your need for defenses. And so on.

In fact, I think early expansion is mostly counterproductive in terms of the effect on your overall production. OFten you would be better off expanding later. The main advantage of early expansion is that you can seize territory; if you don't expand at all, the AIs will grab the available space and then it's hard for you to expand later.

Of course it is exponential.

Yes there is certainly a large initial effect of the palace, and the "drag" of maintenance cost of new cities. These are relatively large effects compared to the initial productivity of land. But they are constant (palace) or linear in the number of cities. (There's a thread around somewhere on the maintenance costs - they are bounded.)

On the other hand, so long as there is land, a sufficiently large city can fork off a new settler and double itself; and (ceteris paribus) the new city will be able to become just as large and productive as the parent. To pay for it you need to put down cottages (hence a worker), but you can do that. How long do you suppose the doubling time is? Perhaps 50 turns? (Much less if there are trees around to chop.)

Keep in mind that I am not only talking about horizontal expansion. I am talking about any and all ways you can invest and grow your economy, including tech, building units, etc. We have been talking about chopping out a settler, so, in that context clearly it is horizontal expansion that is assumed. However, you may be right, that it is better to invest in tech early and not expand. If so, then you are getting superior returns from tech. Therefore it must also be exponential, since it is superior to a known exponential (city spamming with cottages to pay for it).

Is it possible to get Animal Husbandry (cost: 100) and Bronze Working (cost: 120) with a size-1 city in the first ~30 turns? I don't know. I 'd guess so, for a civ which starts with Mining (cost: 50) and one of the prereqs for Animal Husbandry (Hunting (cost: 40) or Agriculture (cost: 50)). I'd think not otherwise, although obviously having a floodplain tile will be helpful.

Anyway, back to the question. With chopping, the settler is created using two chops (60P), plus the city's production during those 8 turns, which is 32P, plus two more turns (8P). Total time 10 turns, and the last two are not wasted for the worker. (If you get Animal Husbandry during the time building the settler, it can start on the pasture and almost be done. Or it can just keep chopping.)

With cows, the settler spends the first 3 turns making the pasture, then does other stuff (perhaps irrigation of other tiles). So the city gets 3 turns at 4 each, for 12. Then its net production rises to 7/turn, so it takes 13 more turns to finish the settler. Total time 16 turns.

Since it took 15 turns to build the worker, its idle time starts at turn ~19. If you can get Bronze Working after Animal Husbandry in that time, then you can do one chop during the settler build, reducing the time by 4 turns to 12 turns. This would be ideal, I'd think. China can probably do it, given a floodplain and a cows. I don't think it's generally doable.

In the more general case, you're looking at a tradeoff. The 6 turns you gain by chopping cost the two forests, plus a bit during the delay until you get the cows online.


8(palace) + 1 city tile + 1 (cow on river) = 10 research(below emporer)
10 turns till husbandry, then 12 turns till BW.
worker produced turn 15, improves animals on 19, starts chopping on 25(after building farm/camp), chop on 28.
Production settler gets till improvement of cows: 12.
After first chopping: 12+9*7+30=105.
Settler built in turn 28, 3 turns after pure chopping, but with only 1 forest used and 1 additional tile improved(camp or farm). The saved forest ensures, that further settlers or wonders can be produced faster compared to pure chopping(though ).
In my eyes superior, i hope i'll find the time to test.
On emporer, non-organized, the -2 on research will improve the situation for chopping first, as cow first takes 28 turns till BW, so settler will be produced normally in turn 32.
Of course assumes either mining/agri or mining/hunting as start.

The case agri or hunting and not mining and cow:

chopping immiediately means researching mining + BW = 17 turns.
1st chop 20, second chop 24. settler build still on turn 25.
researching husbandry first, means BW researched on turn 27, settler therefore turn 30 with a good surplus for next unit. 5 turns behind, chopping first looks better, if only slightly.

same on emporer:

chopping immidiately means BW on turn 22, first chop on 25, second on 29, setller built in 29.
Husbandry first, means husbandry researched in turn 13, BW in turn 35, after settler is built in 32 without chopping. Here husbandry first is far better, because the first chopper will after founding his second city wait very long till husbandry is reasearched due to city upkeep and thereby is relying just on forest, while the other strat is nearly as fast for settler 1 and will be faster for settler 2 and 3, since chop first cannot in near time improve cow.







What do 6 turns gain you? To start with, it gets the 2nd city 6 turns earlier. Then it gets what that city produces for six turns... and then everything gained early by that extra production, and so on. Basically your growth should be exponential early on, so the advantage remains until at least you stop growing horizontally. How much is this likely to be? Hard for me to calculate.

But do let me correct one misunderstanding of the game, posted previously by MyOtherName in #46: "In reality, if you build a city 13 turns before me, it will always have at most a 13 turn advantage over mine."

This statement is only true if there are no events which are symmetry breaking - that is, events which are possible 13 turns earlier (but not later), or events that are only possible later, but not earlier. Events which are possible earlier (but not later) tend to bias for an early lead, expanding it. Events which are possible later (but not earlier) will naturally shrink a lead.

Now, what sort of events do we have in Civ4 of either type? There is only one event of the second type; all events in the game are keyed to earlier prerequisites, not to absolute time. The fixed game-end is the one exception.

On the other hand, there are many sorts of symmetry-breakers of the other variety, that is, events that happen once and not again. The clearest example of these are world wonders: one civ gets them; the other civs do not. If you are six turns behind me, you may not get a wonder which I do get. (And the effect of that can compound.)

But the wonder argument works in favor for the first husbandry, as number of workers and number of avaible forests determine, which wonders are built early and the husbandry first uses 1-2 less forest for 2-6 turns later first settler.
The extreme case is emporer above, agri/hunt, not mining and not organized, chop first is just 3 turns faster, but uses 2 forests more and will have to use further forests to get same expansion as husbandry first, so husbandry first is far more likely to get pyramids and that is far more important than setler 3 turns earlier.

Carn

Long-term considerations are not very important ! I see this fault in thinking so often here on the boards, what you gain in short terms will multiply over the years and overgrow the longterm penalties by far.

I agree that short term gain mulyiply over the years and out do the penalties suffered.

I am an advocate of the early rush and in general will chop aggressively to establish a core or 3 or 4 cities early on. I pulled this off very successfully in my current Monarch, standard map, epic game.

However i failed to capitalise fully on this. I implemented my Praetorian rush to late and failed to overun my nearest neighbour. I still feel that victory can be achieved but I have made it harder than it should be.

The plan was to capture my neighbours 4 cities. The additional maintainence costs are horrific when doing this and one has to suffer the short term penalties of low (40%) research until the newly assimilated cities start to pull their weight. However previous games have shown that taking a substantial economic hit early on pays dividends in the long run. Having double the land and population means that by the mid game my civ is usually unstoppable.

Good advice from ohioastronomy is Bronze Working and chop (if no better alternative).
Following on from previous posts, if you have a special should you improve or chop first?

Some worthwhile specials (assuming reasonable land)
(+3p) Corn(irrigated), Wheat(irrigated), Cow, Pig, Fish & Copper
Improving first better than chopping (and saves 1 tree), if have (or can get) tech quick enough
With this advantage (+3p) I think you can afford a 1-2 turn delay and still be comparable to chop first
(+2p) Deer, Rice(irrigated), Corn, Wheat, Horse, Sheep, Stone, Clam, Crab
Chopping first better slightly but uses 1 more tree so improving reasonable alternative if tech available
(+1p) Mine hill or farm floodplains
Chopping first better noticeably but uses 1 more tree - improving inferior alternative

Research
9 commerce minimum, 10c if floodplain or eg. Spice forest, 12c if oasis + financial
Use research formula from 'Technology Research Explained….' by Requies
Will consider 10c normal, 12c rare, single player, Standard size, Normal speed, Monarch or Emperor
Improving first needs Bronze Working by turn 21/22 or very soon after, chopping needs BW by turn 17, allowing for move into forest
EDIT Updated for effect of Organized trait (or lack of) at Emperor level pointed out by Zombie69
On Emperor upkeep cost for non-Organized civs will cost 2g at start reducing research (unless/until a hut pops gold) meaning minimum is 7c and maximum 12c is very rare (oasis + Washington)

Specials considered
A) Farm resource (eg. Wheat) requiring Agriculture
B) Pasture resource (eg. Cow) requiring Animal Husbandry
Copper requiring mining is ideal but cannot see yet
Stone - Masonry then Bronze Working takes 23 turns at 10c Monarch (24t Emperor) so go BW
and chop unless 11-12c and/or India (Mysticism/Mining reduces Masonry research time)
Fish covered by ohioastronomy but if you need to research fishing, BW can take 18 turns (10c Monarch)

Analysis by starting technologies
1) Mining/Agriculture - China - 1 leader financial, 1 organized
a) Farm - Agriculture start so improve resource first (+3p or even +2p)
b) Pasture - Animal Husbandry then Bronze Working takes:
9c 10c 11c 12c
28t 26t 24t 22t - Monarch <=10c BW/chop, 11c BW/chop probably, 12c AH
29t 27t 25t 23t - Emperor <=11c BW/chop, 12c AH (but 12c almost impossible for China on Emperor)
2) Mining/Hunting - Germany, Russia - 1 leader financial, none organized
a) Farm - Agriculture then BW takes:
9c 10c 11c 12c
24t 22t 21t 19t - Monarch 9c BW/chop probably, >=10c Agriculture/Farm
25t 23t 22t 20t - Emperor <=9c BW/chop, >=10c Agriculture/Farm
b) Pasture - same as 1b
3) Mining/other - England, India, Mali, Rome - 3 leaders financial, 1 organized
a) Farm - same as 2a
b) Pasture - Hunting, Animal Husbandry then BW - takes too long (6+ turns delay) so go BW and chop
4) Agriculture/Hunting - Persia - no leaders financial, 1 organized
a) Farm - same as 1a but see below regarding Mining plus Bronze Working research time
b) Pasture - AH, Mining then BW - 5+ turns delay, Mining then BW - 2+ turns delay (see below)
5) Agriculture/other - America, Egypt, France, Inca - 2 leaders financial, 3 organized (1 both)
a) Farm - same as 4a
b) Pasture - AH, Mining then BW - 7+ turns delay, Mining then BW - 2+ turns delay (see below)
6) Hunting/other - Aztec, Greece, Mongolia - no leaders financial, none organized
a) Farm - Agriculture, Mining then BW - 6+ turns delay, Mining then BW - 2+ turns delay (see below)
b) Pasture - same as 5b
7) other/other - Arab, Japan, Spain - no leaders financial, 1 organized
a) Farm - same as 6a
b) Pasture - same as 5b

Notes
For 4/5/6/7 without Mining, researching Mining then Bronze Working will take following number of turns:
-7c -8c 9c 10c 11c 12c
xxx xxx 23t 21t 20t 18t - Monarch
31t 28t 24t 22t 20t 19t - Emperor
So without Mining you will not be ready to chop unless you start with Agriculture + Farm resource
Without this you can improve a +1p resource, speed up research or insert another build
Tile flipping (eg lake + financial) may be possible to improve research (reducing production)
Meeting civs with tech will reduce research time but probably not significant this early
Building on a commerce resource will give an extra commerce to city helping research
Gold/Gems will help early research but will not be improved inside first 20 turns when BW is needed

This analysis spurred by a recent game of mine - Elizabeth Monarch Standard Normal
London has Cow plus Oasis but without Animal Husbandry prereq I went for Bronze Working.
3 turns later a hut popped Agriculture! I switched to Animal Husbandry and was happy.
Later found Copper in city also!

I have attached a zipped Excel spreadsheet I used in calculating the tech research turn values.
EDIT Oops! Calculator got wrong turn value if beakers exactly divided into cost - new version V1.1 corrects this - sorry.
115596

You might want to also consider the idea of using early slavery at size 2 to enhance speed of production. The idea is you build a warrior until you have grown to size 2, then switch over to a worker until you can slave it. Or, if that isn't effective, perhaps starting with a worker normally and improving a heavy food tile, growing anywhere from size 2 to 4 and slaving 1-3 pops away for the settler. Each population unit should give 30 hammers, so 60 for 2 population and 90 for 3. This method seems like it would be extremely effective on ren era since you start with a free grainary and growth is halved (but is it better than serfdom?!).

Very nice post junior7. Here are a few points to consider though :

You mention the impact of financial leaders but don't mention organized anywhere. Just a short sentence stating that organized leaders on emperor have the same research speed as non-organized leaders on monarch would be nice.

Since 9 total commerce for me is much more common than anything else, it would be nice to include this in the analysis.

Thanks for your comments and observations Zombie69. You are right, of course, the Organized trait (or lack of it) has a major effect on commerce and therefore research at Emperor level, even at the start. I will update my post to reflect this and add some examples of other research levels such as 9c.

Great thread, and i'm thankful for the fantastic analysis by the OP and others.

I've usually grown to size 2 before producing my first worker. On the basis of this thread, i'm believe i am going to try the worker first on my next game.
:goodjob:

Great thread, and i'm thankful for the fantastic analysis by the OP and others.

I've usually grown to size 2 before producing my first worker. On the basis of this thread, i'm believe i am going to try the worker first on my next game.
:goodjob:

Thanks much. I think junior7's last piece is very nice, and fills in a lot of the other information. I'm working now on the question of how many cities you are best off founding in the early going, now that the maintenance costs are known. Or, to be more accurate, how much commerce you have to add to make founding a new city worthwhile..

Are you taking into account the production and new trees to chop that a new city provides? I don't see this analyzed in your article at all, but maybe I am missing it. In the case that you go the worker -> settler route, once the new city is built you are instantly accessing 2 extra tiles for your overall civ. Although not quite as efficient, 2 cities at size 1 is approximately the same as 1 size 3 city or slightly better (if you built the new city on a hills/plains you will have slightly better production). This seems slightly faster than improving a tile near your first city to accelerate that city to size 3, especially since you can immediately start chopping at city 2 once city 1's resources are exhausted. The exception would be if city 1 had an inordinate amount of forests - then you might as well go 2 workers and clearcut asap - but I fin