Forestry Operations in Civ3

Here's a link to the much anticipated article on how to get the most out of Forest Terrain squares and how to conduct Forestry Operations throughout the ages with your workers and settlers.

Forestry Operations for Civ3



This is the followup article to Improving Your Opening Play Sequences and between these two articles there are enough tactics and skills to take any player and boost their abilities up the ladder by at least two difficulty levels.

If you are still automating your workers, Stop !! and take some time to read these two articles because they will improve your ability to play the game in every stage.

1) Thunderfall has the front page link going to the wrong thread

2) Resources first appear on whatever map tile the map generator placed them. Resources which appear during the game (having disappeared from somewhere else) show up based on the current state of the tile. If you don't own a lot of land, and remove all your forests and jungle, you may loose out uranium or coal movements (rubber doesn't disapper).

Cheers,
Shawn

Grey Knight,

Welcome. The thread pointer was mostly my fault because I got so discombobulated by the down time this bast weekend and I had some other things I had to get done this week that were time critical. The web pages interanlly point to that other thread as well. But hey, we're pretty darned hi-tech because most strategy articles don't even attempt to link to a discussion or support forum.

I thought about the disappearing resource issue as well and tested a few possible situations just to make sure we would not be doing something stupid by clearing forests and jungles. And the tests revealed:

Uranium and Coal might have there locations effected by clearing forests and jungles.

The question would be if this redistribution would cause you to risk losing the resource.

If no jungles existed, then the disappearing coal would reappear on mountains or hills.

If no forests existed, then the disappearing uranium would reappear on mountains.

The AI automated workers will clear their jungles and forests as well. Its just that the automated workers will not take advantage of the bonuses in about 50% of the cases. I also do not see AI workers replant large acreages of forest.

In the test cases played on Emporer level I never lost a disappearring resource because the territory holding ratio was always in my favor. I often had two or three extra copies of these resources that were not even hooked up. Uranium is one of those resources I never have connected. NEVER in the sense that if I need it I hook it up, set the build queues, and then pillage it back to disconnected all in the same turn. I have never seen a disconnected resource vanish on me.

I thought disconnected or not-connected resources did not reappear. Therefore my strategy - if I bothered - included "saving" of resources - meaning that I left one of each resource unconnected. However most of the time - there would be a city next to the resource icon - and I would hook it up & improve the tile.

Clearing of forests and jungles does not seem to have any effect on appearance of rubber, coal and uranium in my games. As Cracker stated - they reappear on mountains and such if no forest and/or jungle tiles are available.

Fascinating reading BTW. Perhaps a more careful use of workers are in order. I never was much in favor of automation anyway.
I never cared much for this timing part of "forestry operations" - will check the possible impact it could have on my game results from now on.

Great work - as always

Cracker you missed a fairly obvious use of forestry operations. On the discovery of sanitation there are, what, eight squares per city or so going unworked. That's a lot of forest that can be planted up to rush hospitals and quickly converted to irrigation to get up to 20 pop. I found your earlier articles far more useful than your recent few where you are "teaching granny to suck eggs". In rather extravagant detail.

I rarely use forestry late in the game, but in a recent game while engaged in a Space Race I did utilize it extensively in my corrupt cities. I noticed that after a couple of rounds I no longer got any shields from harvesting forests. It seemed to me that some tiles could be harvested more times than others (although I didn't do a systimatic study).

How many times can an individual tile be planted and harvested before you no longer get the shield benefit?

Originally posted by Gothmog
How many times can an individual tile be planted and harvested before you no longer get the shield benefit?

Click to expand...

If I remember correctly, after patch 1.21f or something, we can no longer plant the trees for the purpose of harvesting them for shields.

Originally posted by Gothmog
I rarely use forestry late in the game, but in a recent game while engaged in a Space Race I did utilize it extensively in my corrupt cities. I noticed that after a couple of rounds I no longer got any shields from harvesting forests. It seemed to me that some tiles could be harvested more times than others (although I didn't do a systimatic study).

How many times can an individual tile be planted and harvested before you no longer get the shield benefit?

Click to expand...

Only once, and if it started with a forest - none!

Re: CB

So the answer is: harvested once. Planted if needed

Re: bbaws

cracker said that you could plant and harvest in the late game all the tiles and within one turn (he even gave the no of slaves U need). It's your option when you do it and what for.

Man, I must have been fooling myself. I could have sworn that I got shields at least twice from a couple of tiles. I guess my mind was on other things (like worying about a sneek attack from the evil X-man).

Originally posted by Gothmog
Man, I must have been fooling myself. I could have sworn that I got shields at least twice from a couple of tiles.

Click to expand...

Are you sure that you get the latest patch?

Yes I play with 1.29f, I think it was a major improvement (esp tech wize). I am sure cracker, and you, are right as he did an exhaustive study. I do science in my RL and his study could go to a peer reviewed journal!

The game in question was in the modern era and it was me and the X-man left. We were very equal in power and I was just trying to end it without aother major war. With all those cities (I had 50 or so) it is sometimes hard to see those quick messages about what happened between turns (e.g. 10 shields returned to ...). In fact this is also a problem for me with WLT*Ds in my corrupt cities. I often have to look over 20-30 corrupt cities to make sure they have fireworks because I know a couple WLT*Ds ended but I don't know which ones. The advisor screen doesn't work so well when you have 20+ citizens, trying to count the little heads, argh.

The advisor screen doesn't work so well when you have 20+ citizens, trying to count the little heads, argh

Click to expand...

Sounds like you could really use the 'smiley badges' graphics. Makes it ALOT easier to know who is happy and who is not.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10197

I couldn't imagine trying to micromanage hundreds of cities (huge map) for maximum happiness without those smiley badges!

Cracker, GREAT article. I'll need to read once or twice again to properly absorb it all and integrate some of the more advanced concepts into my play.

Maybe I missed it, but there's another use for planting forests.

Prior to Hospitals, one will often have a number of 12 pop cities producing excess food. Certainly one can manually remove citizens and assign them as specialists, but this will forego shield and trade production.

Instead, forest all unshielded grassland, including those with wheat bonuses (to the point where there is no longer any excess food). In a game I just played, this increased shield production from 19 to 29 shields prior to RR.

Cutting down the forests later, as you are by nature post-Rep Parts, is a snap and of course provides the 10 shield bonuses.

HiYa cracker,

Interesting stuff on advanced forestry Ops.

Makes it a real irritant that there is no flag or map marker for "have already had forest harvested here" on a given tile. I usually can't be bothered (simply lazyness) to make and keep screenshots showing where forest have been AND where they've been harvested, so I sometimes find myself wastefully planting and then harvesting forest, to no avail- no 10 pt. bonus- I'd already done it.

In that vein, heres a question for you and the rest of the Sites' Gentle Readers.

So assume you DO keep a set of screeen shot logs for say your continent. What about the far off lands you don't get to until much later in the game? IF a foreign civ has themselves harvested the forest, then you occupy the tile and yourself plant and harvest a forest, do YOU get, or not, the 10 pt. bonus? In other words is the limitation by tile, forever and ever throughout the game, or by a player and tile? IF its simply by tile, and if the AI had already harvested forest, and now You CANNOT, then landing overseas may cause a difference in forest management strategy, overseas vs at home. Every tile planted/harvested overseas could be a potential waste of worker effort, as the AI may have already done so. Now, as I think you noted somewhere, it may well be that the AI does not do forest re-plant/harvest in a systematic fashion, in which case the the chance that any given one is wasted effort is of course reduced. Perhaps an intelligent look at the location relative to other terrain and cities might yeild a clue as to wheither or not its a good idea to plant and harvest.

Any observations available on this issue?

Royfurr,

I only use the screen shot forest locator maps when there are about 30% forests in the locations. So I only have one to three of the of them per game. For early conquest and domination victories these are rarely a concern.

For far off lands, you have to use a form of Gestalt to sort of fill in the blanks.

Industrious civs are far more likely to have cleared forest.
Towns that HAVE NOT popped boundaries out to greater than the 9 square minimum are less likely to have cleared any forest.

The AI rarely (I have never seen it) plants forest expressly for the purpose of clearing it.

Use your knowledge of the terrain layout for your current world map to guestimate if you would expect bands of forest and/or jungle. Areas that have been cleared from jungle will be unlikely to have been harvested for a forest bonus.

Resource locations can help to define early forest patterns. Wheat, Cows, Wine, Horses, and Coal never occur naturally in squares that originally had forests.

I also rarely see the AI harvest forest just to gain the bonus only. If you see a bare plains or grassland square with no improvements you can pretty much bet that the forestry bonus is still available there.

Getting early maps of your enemies and also saving the Embassy sneak peaks can really help to locate the early forests.

Yaa, cracker, thats pretty much what I was thinking- look at nearby terrain (on overseas lands) and the citys to guesstimate if a harvest of forest had been done. Hadn't thought of two of your points, so thanks for mentioning them- Industrious civs have a greater chance to have harvested, and that resource types like Wheat, Cows, Wine, Horses, and Coal never occur naturally in tiles that were originally forests. Good points.

One other question. I was at your "unofficial Tips" (Index for Cracker's Toolbox), and there is only the listing of the "tip", not a hyperlink to a discussion/example of it? Some I haven't seen in your early game skills pages, eg Pop Slamming for religions civs, Short rushing, barb faming, etc etc.

You plan on expounding on those tips or keep us in antipication?

I finally got a chance to finish reading this. It was very informative. One thing puzzles me though. I could have sworn that there are times when slaves are 1/3 the effectiveness of your standard worker. I did not see reference to this. I wasn't sure if:

1) I am mistaken about the 1/3.

2) Things have changed in PTW 1.21 since the article was written.

3) This is off the main topic so not included. I tried to look at the tables to see if I could figure out when it is 1/3, but the slave always seemed to be 1/2, so that didn't work.

4) The article does mention this, but I totally missed it.

So I guess my question is: At what times (if any) are foreign workers at 1/3?

Apologies in advance if this is the wrong place for this. Its just I can get a good number of foreign workers and would like to calculate some foreign-heavy crew compositions for when I try out the forest-and-cut crew concepts.

Me if the answer is 1 or 4 ->

Slaves don't get the Democracy bonus, so if your own workers were 2x as good as your slaves before you switched to Democracy, your own workers will then be 3x as good as slaves, in Democracy.

(I'm not sure if this is true if you are Industrious. Can anyone answer this: if you are Industrious and in Democracy, are your captured slaves 1/2 as good as your own workers, or 1/3 as good?)

Slaves under Democracy (whaat?) have a rounding error if non-Industrious, which is yet another reason to be Industrious.