Help! I can't bring myself to chopping forests to build city improvements!

Hi all,

I don't know if it's the inner hippie inside me or not, but I just can't bring myself to chop forests unless it's not within my city radius, and won't contribute to forest growth inside the BFC's of my cities! There's just so much potential with the Lumbermill!

I always just leave tiles unimproved and hope for forests to spread there. And God forbid if I build cottages! It's as if there's a force field around the Build Cottage button!

I am trying to run an SE in my current Prince game with Peter, by the way, so I think the Health Bonus will help? Or, is it better to turn them into Cottages? Thanks!

P.S. For an SE, do you guys tend to me manually pull people from working in the field to be used as specialists? Or am I supposed to wait until I hit the happiness threshold?

Run State Property and Caste System and build workshops. You'll never go back to those wimpy lumbermills again.

farms or cottages is the way to go. Raw forests seldom help much as the health bonus is insignificant most of the time give the wast amount of health resources you can get.

Forests on river corners don't get commerce from the lumbermill, so chop those first.

Forests on river corners don't get commerce from the lumbermill, so chop those first.

Lumber mills are only good for the bonus health they provide.

Let's look at some basics:
Towns with the right civics are stronger than lumbermills. Given that you do actually have the time to work all your cottages up before RP, you should look into cottaging. Chopping a forest yields 20 (30) now (note these are modded by resources, IND trait, OR, etc.); by the time your lumbermill comes online you should have compounded that investment to handily suprass lumbermill output. Lastly forests mean that when the AI camps next to your city he gets a bonus to his defense if you need to counterattack.

As far as curing yourself; play a game with either a wonderwhore or a someone who begs for an early rush (Ramases can do either); just clear cut from the very beginning and see what those hammers will get you.

Health bonus isn't worth it for SE (particularly a priest driven SE) The health bonus is roughly 2 forests = 1 ; on two former forests you can run + 2 food pre-biology and and +4 afterwards. In the long run, cottages tend to be better. If you are running a HR SE/ then just farm the place over. If not I'd consider mines/ws; but cottages are rarely a bad thing to have.

If I'm running a "pure" SE I tend to work enough food to give me a strong whip cycle and pull people from the field until I reach a point where I need to increase my food surplus to retain respectable growth.

mirthadir said:

Lumber mills are only good for the bonus health they provide.

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mirthadir,

A Lumbermill receives a +1 production bonus once you slap a railroad on the tile. For the late game, a Lumber Mill is superior to a Mine or a Workshop due to the flexability of civics, though the health is a minor note as well.

If a city's got plenty of forest, I always try to leave one tile for a Lumbermill. But it's not writ in stone. And chopping forest outside a city's radius gives a little one time production bonus as well, so I have no qualms about that - unless my workers have better things to do..

Don't chop. You don't have to and at the end whoever gets the UN always votes for Environmentalism anyway. By not chopping you - 1. forgoe useless wonders 2. Gain speed by roading to the enemy 3. Get lumbermills and good defensive terrain. 4. The map looks better and you don't have to worry about acronym game styles.

I would just close your eye and press that little chop button. It is just a game!!! no forests were hurt in the making of this game. Unless the developer had his desk imported.

troytheface said:

Don't chop. You don't have to and at the end whoever gets the UN always votes for Environmentalism anyway. By not chopping you - 1. forgoe useless wonders 2. Gain speed by roading to the enemy 3. Get lumbermills and good defensive terrain. 4. The map looks better and you don't have to worry about acronym game styles.

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.

I wonder, wouldn't using Slavery be worse than chopping? I mean, you're whipping those people to work harder, also killing them in the process! Oh, the horror...

Just do it.

It is the hippie in you that's stopping the chopping It's just a game, they aren't real trees and chopping them won't affect climate change ...

I do chop carefully and don't clear fell vast tracts just for a quick hammer boost. If your city will run into health problems, then a pair of forests is worth 1 health and that can be equivalent to 1 food per turn which can over time be worth more than the 60 hammers chopping is worth. So try to keep an even number of forests if possible. As others have said you need you need to chop forests if the tile underneath is significantly better with an improvement, that means hills and riverside tiles in most cases are better cleared and improved.

So it's a trade off, in some cities that won't have a health problem then the forests are only a source of free hammers and might block access to a tile you want an improvement on (farm, cottage or mine). In other cities that have good food and other good tiles to work it's important to preserve every health point to allow growth. That often happens in my capital and other cities that will eventually grow to size 20 and beyond. They usually end up with 2 or 4 lumbermills.

Depends, Most of the time i try to leave a pair of forests that aren't riverside for additional hammers that I might not of gotten. But then again my problem is I'm not into the habit of running state property nearly as much as I should due to a combination of consistent health problems making Environmentalism (at least until after future tech when I'm playing a score game) more attractive, so I tend to prefer forests.

But I also have a habit of wanting a pristine nice and neat empire (At least when I'm not trying to be a serious kick ass and doing as best I can) so you probably shouldn't take my advice.

Just don't chop on tundra, those forests are the only worthwile ones, don't road on tundra either, don't do anything but watch the forests grow. Forests anywhere else deserve the axe to fuel your empire.

Kesshi said:

mirthadir,

A Lumbermill receives a +1 production bonus once you slap a railroad on the tile. For the late game, a Lumber Mill is superior to a Mine or a Workshop due to the flexability of civics, though the health is a minor note as well.

Click to expand...

I think he knows that, Captain Obvious.

I only wish there was something I could do to either plant forests, or encourage them to spread more. Even if I wouldn't get the bonus for chopping it a second time, it'd be great to have the option later on to plant a few forests to keep healthy and productive.

Kesshi:

Thanks for the update, I never would have guessed that a railroad adds a to lumbermills just like does to mines. The fact of the matter is that I have to wait hundreds of turns before I get that bonus. In the meantime I can spend the 20(30 or more) on things that will give me much better rates of return.

For instance chopping out settlers normally let's me claim land for an additional 2 cities (minimum) than if I just settled working basic tiles (starts with massive food resources being excepted). Alternatively chopping out War Chariots increases the odds that I will hit with a civilization destroying blow before the enemy hooks up metal and gets spears online.

Late game, health is the only thing that makes forests worth keeping. Take 3 non-hill forest tiles. If I can't reach the health cap (say I'm running PS, Rep, or US) before the happy cap what are my options? WS under SP/Caste are superior; cottages under US/FS are superior (rushbuy has ~3:1 efficiency without Kremlin); under slavery until size ~15 (memory escapes me because if I'm still slaving then I tend to be running the Kremlin) I believe biology farms are better; with nationalism farms give better production of cannon fodder, and under rep pure biology farms give you a better trade out (it is a bit harder to convert to ; but I will take a 2 3 or some if I have AW over 3 most days). Unless health enters into the equation lumber mills lose under all but the most esoteric combinations of civics (i.e. serfdom is worthless except for religious civs going through micro hell).

With health concerns, lumber mills can be competitive, but they are not that much stronger. 5 forests now give +2 and + 15 ; in order to match that you need SP and caste giving you +2 and + 16 with a farm and four WS. With US/FS/Kremlin you can beat it with a farm and 4 towns. With slavery I think you win with farms up to ~size 12. Drafting still works better using farms than lumber mills.

At the end of the day, I still maintain that you have essentially 2 choices for your main economic base:

Cottages/farms under US/FS.
Farms/WS/Watermills under SP.

Very few things can compete with ganked towns late game and lumbermills without SP are not one of them.

Lumbermilled forests are not as bad as some here claim.

Mithradir's analysis for building a farm in a happy-capped city fails to take into account that you need two citizens to get one bio-farm and one specialist; so one specialist equals two grassland forest lumbermills worked.
Two lumbermills beat a specialist anywhere outside a GP farm (even with representation).

It is true that state property and caste system workshops outproduce lumbermills (+1H), but having to run SP denies you the access to corporations benefits. Non-SP, caste workshops are -1F +1H regards to lumbermills, and then I normally prefer the food (you need 3 grasslands to work 1 bio-farm and 2 workshops, giving 8H, while 3 lumbermills would give 9H). Without caste system your SP workshops are as good as lumbermills, and without either CS or SP you simply lose out. Remember moreover that running CS often becomes impossible in later stages of the game due to emancipation unhappiness.

Finally cottages; they provide (as town) 7C1H running universal suffrage and free speech. Establishing a good transfer rate for commerce to hammers is a highly non-trivial task, but assuming we will actually use the extra commerce to rush-buy production, and we have maximal production and gold bonuses, both gold and production is doubled, so the rate is a factor 3 (without Kremlin). 7C would thus translate to 2 1/3 H, and a town would give 3 1/3H. However getting this extra bit of production requires a lot of conditions to be met: 2 civics, and the building of all commerce multipliers in a city, which might not really need them. Losing any of the gold/research multiplier buildings though reduce the value of the commerce, changing a civic either makes the transfer of gold to hammers impossible, or reduces the production of a tile to 5C1H = 2 2/3H<3H.

In short the lumbermill will be surpassed by different other improvements given the right conditions, but since its output is independent of any civics it is a pretty good tile in all conditions, while the contrary options might sometime be completely doomed (i.e. ever tried going out of state property?).

Now I realize that I am not helping the OP by showing that lumbermills are actually pretty good in the late game. Indeed I would think that in almost all cases having the hammers earlier will provide a boost which will translate in a much bigger advantage than being able to work a lumbermill in the late game provides. However if you happen to have some forests left in your BFCs in the modern age, you should seriously consider lumbermilling them instead of chopping the forest and building another improvement instead.

I pretty much just leave the forests on plains tiles... I mean everyone says not to touch those before biology anyway, right? Grassland or hill forests though, those don't last very long.