Chopping and Balance

My apologies if I say something that has already been said...

I voted not unbalanced when you look at things over the course of the entire game.

Sure, you get a big amount of hammers with chopping, but when you leave the trees, your city can be a lot more productive and healthy. You gain a huge advantage in the beginning, but you sacrifice 2 hammers/turn for the rest of the game when you chop. I would personally opt for an ancient lumbermill, so that forests can be worked in the beginning as well.

I use chopping because I can, not because I must. I left forests one day and I was even better off than when I would have chopped. The start of the game is incredibly boring when you don't chop. Make warrior, city to 2, produce settler (100 hammers ). 25 turns later, found city 2, produce worker (60 hammers), 15 turns later, improve land to city 2. That's 50 turns or so. Chopping reduces this to 25 turns max. Chopping speeds up the darker ages.

I'd say, counter chopping by implementing chopping for the AI as well (maybe on prince and above?) or make chopping a forest take more turns (8 or so)

I'll throw my opinion in on the side that it is overpowered. I don't like the fact that it contributes to a default strategy/ lack of interesting choices in planning your game. I think it should be modified.

There are numerous reasons why chopping is not a balancing issue. Firstly, your start location has a level of randomness to it, meaning the density or sparsity of trees favors no one person by default. Secondly, although early on you can rush the construction of some wonders in this manner, there are other compareable buildings that may be more useful to be rushed instead (depending upon your strategy.) Not to mention that trees within a cities workable areas do also participate to health and therefore can determine a city growing larger if the trees are not chopped down (likely increasing overall per/turn production with more population.) Really this is just a way of speeding certain aspects up and adding some level of randomness to be considered every time you play, just as with any other resource. Sometimes you have iron, sometimes you have horses, sometimes you have uranium... Sometimes you don't. If trees favor no one person by default, then they cannot be a balancing issue. Of course it does kinda suck when you start in a desert and the enemy is in a forest, but hey that's the roll of the die. Prove your greatness by what you do with what you have, even if it does mean losing.

Trees in the city radius should only be chopped for wonders and courthouses, of course, any trees outside the radius are fair games. Rarely do I chop for settler, unless there is a critical resource that I need grab fast or risk losing it to my rival (i.e. iron, copper, horse, maybe stone or marble). I am talking about standard map, on monarch and higher, with standard number of civs, and no cheesy perpetual anarchy exploit allowed. For one thing, each tree provides 0.5 health to your city, in addition, they add hammers to your production (especially with lumber mills). For instance, you can build a forge in city surrounded by trees, you will amazed at how your production soars, and how you can outproduce your competitors. If you have abundance of trees, then chop some on grasslands to make room for cottages. But as a general rule, I would try to keep at least two trees per city. There are some exceptions to the rule, I will chop trees with access to fresh water, so I can build cottages or farms on those plots. In addition, riverside cottage provides +1 commerce. Also, I will chop the trees in the first ring on my border cities, that way there is less defensible terrain for my enemy to siege my cities from. Finally, if you are getting rushed in early game, then feel free to chop all trees in sight to get your units out faster, afterall, you have to do whatever it takes to survive.

Researching bronze working as your 1st tech(or 2nd if you don't start with mining), then chopping out a small nation (settlers, workers, military) is HUGELY imbalanced, especially on higher lvl difficulties...as it is a guaranteed way to very very quickly achieve at least parity or more often than not a lead over the AI nations.

If the AIs used a chopping strat, and by this I mean chopping a forest purely for the production, and not to improve the land underneath, then there would be no balance issue to be discussed.

But they don't. Ever. Therefore to use a harsh term , I consider it more of an exploit than a strategy.

Some will agree, others won't - enough said.


Edit:- on a side point, a huge percentage of the world's timber supply comes from rainforests (i.e. jungle in CIV terms), in fact just about 100% of all the dark hardwood comes from rainforests, therefore as things stand, shouldn't you get a bonus from clearing jungles?, or is all that mahogany just left to rot...

Realism or not it is well balanced IMO. If u dont like it dont play maps with much trees.