I think I'm starting to appreciate the specialist economy much more.

Background: I'm playing a marathon tectonics game, 60% water, as Lenin (phi/chm) of the Russians (WolfRev mod that I just downloaded, which is totally sweet, btw!). My starting area is a temperate region with not too many hills, a few food specials, and lots of luscious forests.

I decide to try a specialist economy for at least the early part of the game. At first I was intending to be more flexible and hybrid about this, but as the game has gone on, I haven't had occasion to put down a single cottage! It has turned out to be completely unnecessary so far. Even after expanding past 10 cities, courthouses and specialists took care of the finances and research rate just fine (Snagging the Pyramids and getting representation helped...and the forests, in turn, helped with that, as I discuss below). So what instead did I do with all that land?

First, I chopped out Stonehenge at my capital. I had enough forest such that I could pick the best forest tiles to chop so as to get maximum regrowth (2, 3, or even 4 forest tiles bordering the chopped tile). I had been intending to develop some of the tiles (this was before I had settled on the idea of a strict early SE + forest harvesting model), but then I had other more urgent things for my workers to do, so they never got a chance to develop this land, aside from the food specials and like 2 mines.

By the time I got back to my capital with my workers, most of the tiles had re-forested. So, I chop the same tiles again, by now for 90 hammers a piece after getting mathematics, while working on the Pyramids. I was still thinking about then developing some of those tiles, but then once again more urgent things come up for my workers to do (hooking up food specials at new city sites, etc.), so that I once again left the tiles as they were.

By the time my workers got back to the capital for a third round of development (~1 AD), the forests had mostly regrown once more. I realized that my capital didn't need the tiles developed anyways because it was working 2 food specials + a grassland farm + two grassland mines, and then running 2 or 3 specialists (this is why the forest harvesting strategy is suited more to a specialist economy than a cottage one--in the latter you need the land for the cottages, but with the SE your citizens work in the city so you can let the countryside go wild for a little longer), so I finally settled on just continuing this trend of harvesting select forest tiles. This same process occurred at most of my other cities as well.

How sustainable has this strategy been? On average it seems like a worker will chop a forest for 9 turns (and get 90 hammers), and then will run off somewhere else to hook up new cities and whatnot, and after about 50 turns the forest will have grown back, and my worker comes back, repeats, etc. It seems like it's almost every turn that I have a forest growing back somewhere in my territory...I've even had 2 grow back on the same turn on occasion.

So in general, I'm getting 90 renewable hammers per harvested tile per every 60 turns or so. In a marathon game, there are 1500 turns, so, discounting the first 60 turns or so, that still leaves 24 renewable chops throughout the game (and that's not even counting the power of forest reserves later, although I'm not sure if different priorities would become imperative for this land to not make it worth it. I need to play this current game through to the late game before I make a judgment on that). That's potentially 24*90 renewable hammers throughout the game (let's round it to 20*90 since some of those chops will be 60-hammer chops)...so we're looking, per harvested tile throughout the game, at 1800 hammers for an investment of 120 hammers + (9+1)*20=200 worker turns (1 turn to enter the tile). Pretty good investment, I say! To give a sense of scale when applied to my whole territory: so far I've had 3 wonders almost entirely fueled by this wonderful renewable fuel.

And the limiting factor to my early game always seems to be hammers, so finding a way to boost that helps a lot. With all the hammers, I can build out infrastructure really quickly, and then maybe later in the game I can transition into actually improving those tiles and have it count for more with all of the multipliers. Or, I could keep it going with forest preserves (and for once I could put the national park in one of my better well-developed cities...maybe even my national epic city...). Or I could go the lumbermill route en masse. It will depend on the needs of my economy. Once I start expanding into Ragnar's jungle up north, it's possible I could devote those cities to a CE and keep the specialist economy + forest harvesting going in my other cities for the rest of the game.

Note that this is not a very worker-intensive strategy, surprisingly. That's because your workers are doing only three things: hooking up new cities, minimally improving new cities (specials, etc.), and chopping at old and new cities.

Now, of course, for this strategy to work, you need to start off with a nice, thick expanse of forest in the first place so that you can afford to selectively chop, keeping 3 or preferably 4 forest tiles surrounding the chopped tile. There are perhaps 2 other conditions that help facilitate the specialist-economy end of the deal in general: playing a philosophical leader (to make the SE worth it), and if possible, getting the Pyramids.

In Soviet Russia, SE leverages you!

I have used this chopping + regrowth strategy in a few cities with low food and hammers, like in the tundra. The city was founded to grab some resource from the cold lands but I want to make it at least break even, so a granary and courthouse are chopped. That chopping is done in a methodical way as you suggest, best described as a checkerboard pattern, and no roads are built on the cleared tiles. Then I've found at a later time some of the 3 or 4 forests have regrown. Those forests can be chopped again as there is not enough food to work them. Sometimes the city makes a good site for the National Park and its early start on development is useful.

However, I am less convinced this strategy works in better lands (grassland and plains) where the tiles can be irrigated. I find that a SE should work these tiles as farms with second rate junk cities that are used to whip and draft out the army. The main cities, meanwhile, run specialists and build wonders and infrastructure. These better tiles are more productive when farmed rather than taking a chance on a forest regrowing, and even more so when Biology arrives. I still keep a few spare forests near my main cities in case I need to chop to grab a wonder and sometimes I get lucky and another forest regrows, but I don't rely on that, it's just a small bit of good luck gratefully accepted.

Forest regrowth is more frequent on marathon because of the way the game calculates regrowth rate. This will be harder to do on faster speeds.

If you have stumbled upon this strategy there is only one thing I can say: build more workers so you can improve those tiles!

Forest regrowth is more frequent on marathon because of the way the game calculates regrowth rate. This will be harder to do on faster speeds.

Yeah, I was about to say, on epic speed I'm lucky if I get more than 1 or 2 regrows, even in a checkerboard pattern. I basically have to plan that anything I chop WON'T grow back rather than hang hopes on it.

@DaveMcW

Sorry mate, wrong forum :-)

If you have stumbled upon this strategy there is only one thing I can say: build more workers so you can improve those tiles!

Well, I was also using the whip quite a bit for about the first third of the game, so I usually didn't have the population to work any more farms even if I were to have had them. (And getting all the infrastructure out early meant that I never had to switch out of slavery for caste system. I had plenty of slots in all of my cities from libraries, markets, forges, and temples). Most of my cities were ~size 7, usually working something like 2 food specials, two farms, and running three specialists. Any larger, and I'd usually find an excuse to whip. Except for my two main GP farms, which I let grow up to ~size 12 and ~size 16, respectively. But in any case, I was very rarely ever *working* unimproved forest tiles, if that's what you are worried about. I did start out with a small deficit of workers...that's why I stumbled into this, I guess. But I did build some more, especially after civil service when I really started plowing over the forests (see below).

That said, about 1/3 of the way through the game, once I had all of my infrastructure in place and all of my specialist slots opened up, I did end up finding it logical to start putting down more farms and to start being more selective about which forests I left. Now that I'm halfway through the game, I have like two small checkerboard areas remaining near cities that are still small and getting their infrastructure up, but mostly I've pruned the trees down to what I normally like to keep just for health/lumbermill purposes, and I've filled in the rest with farms (actually, civil service was kind of the turning point in my strategy, because before that I wouldn't have been able to farm most of my tiles anyways without chain irrigation, and I was thinking that it wouldn't make much sense to put down a bunch of cottages if I'm just going to plow them over with farms shortly thereafter.)

So I think I ended up striking a balance. If you've got lots and lots of forests, and you are doing a specialist economy, you can do some harvesting until civil service, after which it makes sense to really push the farmed-SE full-bore.

Also, I don't doubt that this would only work on marathon.

Also, applying this especially to low-food tundra cities sounds like a great idea!

Also, I forgot to mention, it helps if you settle your cities somewhat far apart with lots of forested land between the cities that's outside of the BFC (that you won't be getting worked anyways, so no reason to totally chop it all down unless you're doing a strategic series of chops to rush a wonder...but even then, if you have enough forest, if you just leave the chopped tiles blank with 2 or 3 forests surrounding them, I found that there's a decent chance (on marathon) that they will regrow eventually. I went through a full 3 strategic chop cycles in the land in and around my capital's BFC in building wonders before I started to deplete my forests unsustainably). I wouldn't base my settlement decisions on this, per se (settlement almost always depends on food specials and strategic resources, IMO), but if you've found that the map naturally lends itself to wide city spacing (if you've got a huge plain of forests with no food specials, as I sort of did in the interior of my territory), then you might think about jumping on the forest harvesting idea, chop strategically in a checkerboard pattern, and maybe temper your rate of forest chopping just slightly from what you would if you were playing a momentum game where you are chopping trees like mad to get a slim early advantage for an axe rush or something. Tree harvesting, on the other hand, strikes me as a very long-term builder strategy. In the end, you'll have more forests to chop, and that means more infrastructure.

nm is too short, stupid char limit