Micromanagement of cities

[Nigel_Tufnel2]

@ShakaKhan, you describe some risks very well. My play-style usually involves roading up my border hexes, especially hills 1-2 tiles back, so I usually get quite a few shots in before city bombardment can even happen. If I decide to go on the offensive I am all set to kill units in the frontier. I pay gpt, of course, and can still get swarmed by melee UUs, but the AI doesn't seem to handle wounded units/retreats well. I have almost no experience with MP, so can't really comment.

 

[MightySpice]

Reading this thread i am surprised that most emphasis the early game. Chopping forrest and jungle because it is more worth while in the early is really not optimal in my opinion. In the later game you regret it because you are missing out on a boost in hammers and/or beakers.

My rule of thumb is: if you don't need to work a tile, leave it (you don't need more tiles than citizens, so being one ahead is fine) and i pretty much allways choose for the highest yield (some improvements result in 3 'things' and some in 4 or more). If there is a lot of jungle/forrest i chop some, but only when there are no other tiles to work.

 

[fyar]

Reading this thread i am surprised that most emphasis the early game. Chopping forrest and jungle because it is more worth while in the early is really not optimal in my opinion. In the later game you regret it because you are missing out on a boost in hammers and/or beakers.

My rule of thumb is: if you don't need to work a tile, leave it (you don't need more tiles than citizens, so being one ahead is fine) and i pretty much allways choose for the highest yield (some improvements result in 3 'things' and some in 4 or more). If there is a lot of jungle/forrest i chop some, but only when there are no other tiles to work.

MightySpice, I think the logic behind chopping is that early game hammers are much more valuable than later game hammers. I'd rather take 40 hammers on turn 20 than 100 hammers on turn 250. The effects of those early 40 hammers adds up over the course of the game. Maybe those early 40 hammers got you a shrine that helped you claim a pantheon that led to a religion. Maybe those early 40 hammers got your settler out in time to claim a juicy location for your city before someone else claimed it. Maybe those 40 early hammers made the difference between Petra and fail-gold. Maybe those 40 early hammers just speeds up your production queue, so that you get your archer, caravan, and granary each a few turns earlier. Any of those will have a much greater effect than having 100 hammers late.

Not to mention, if the result of chopping a forest is grassland or plains, the result is more food, which you need in the early game. Any riverside forests, you should chop without hesitation.

 

[MightySpice]

Why rush a religion? The output per city will be lower if you chop wood. No need for that imo.
You are trading over time: that is you bring productionpower up front and loose production later. More hammers i might add.
Why not buy the shrine?

Chopping forrest will only provider more growth if you have enough citizins to work the tile.

 

[gobbledydook]

The biggest reason why you want to chop forests early is as follows:
Earlier on, your cities don't have much production, but you need to build a lot of things. Granaries, libraries, settlers, workers, shrines, maybe an early wonder, military units, and so on. They all take a significant amount of time to build, but you want to finish up all those early builds to line up with Philosophy and National College. Especially if early production is lacking, you don't really want to be waiting for buildings to finish so you can build the next critical one, so chopping forests is the way to go.

Later on, hammers are generally not as important as science, because it takes longer to reach the next tech (e.g. Education, Scientific Theory, Plastics) than it takes to build the buildings, and also buying the buildings becomes easier with more gold.

 

[MightySpice]

I honoustly don't understand why hammers aren't important in the late game.

 

[claudiupb]

Why rush a religion? The output per city will be lower if you chop wood. No need for that imo.
You are trading over time: that is you bring productionpower up front and loose production later. More hammers i might add.
Why not buy the shrine?

You rush the religion because this is how the game mechanic is. Early pantheon gets first pick and is a lot cheaper. Later on not only you might lose the pantheon you want, but you might not even get a pantheon at all. The same with religion, there is a race to get one so that you can have a decent shot of keeping your pantheon in your cities, and so that you get some useful beliefs out of it (If you manage to get last religion, and there already are some enhanced religions there is not much to choose from the follower beliefs). The shrine is just one example of how important timing is, and thus how important early hammers are. And you can't just buy the shrine because gold is not that easy to come by early game. You do get some gold from exploring, but maybe buying a tile or a library in a late expo is a lot better than using it to buy the shrine?

By chopping you can get your settlers out 1-2 turns faster. Not only this gives you better odds of settling better spots, but that 1-2 turn advantage scales the entire game. Are those late game forest yields better than being 1-2 turn ahead with all your expos (practically 1-2 turns of late game yields)? If the game goes long enough keeping forests will net better results as a whole, but the point of micromanaging is to get things done fast, and this means games finish fast, and many long term strategies don't start to pay off by then.

By chopping you are not trading that much anyway, are you really going to be working a 1 food 2 hammer tile? And that is after investing a number of turns to improve the tile. With ST it becomes better, but that comes too late to justify losing out on the early hammers. If there is no other source of hammers then you should keep some forests around, but you can still chop some.

Chopping forrest will only provider more growth if you have enough citizins to work the tile.

You don't require to work the tile to get the hammer bonus. Even if you are going to be work that after 10-15 turns, chopping early is better if you put the hammers to good use. Also by chopping river forest you are going to get a 4 yield tile that you will want to work as fast as you can. The jungle is a harder choice to make since you don't get any hammer bonus, and you have plains underneath, so you are transforming a 2food 2science (+ tp bonus) tile into a 3 food one hammer tile, but if hammers are rare (which is often the case in jungle areas) it may be worth it.

 

[MightySpice]

And what if you chopped all your forests and still miss out on a religion? If you play at a challenging level this just might happen.

And why wouldn't i work a 1 food and 2 hammer tile? What's wrong with that? The yield is 3. If i make a farm out of it delivers 3 food (depending).

 

[fyar]

If you chopped all your forests and still miss out on a religion, then your punishment is extra food. As claudiupb suggests, the extra food from a farmed grassland/plains/hill is generally higher priority than the extra hammer from a lumber mill, except in the rare situation where your forests are your only source of hammers.

In fact, if you get to turn 250, I daresay that the player that chopped their forests early will have accumulated MORE hammers over the long haul than the player that worked those lumber mills. The extra food might have allowed your city to grow a few extra citizens over that time. And those extra citizens could've worked a mined hill (worth +3 or +4 hammers per turn), or sat in the workshop/factory (+2 hammers and a great engineer worth thousands of hammers).

But again, the hammer math on turn 250 is actually secondary. Even if you reject that math, the most important reason is because you don't want somebody else's settler to beat you to your spot by 2 turns because you wanted to work a lumber mill. Do you not agree that the consequences of delaying your settler on turn 40 are much more likely to be game-altering than the consequences of delaying your airport on turn 250? That's why 40 hammers on turn 40 are better than 250 hammers on turn 250.

 

[beetle]

@MS. Try a couple games with decent amounts of forest where you make it priority to chop. After luxes and other bonus tile, but before roads and wet farms even. Chop everything, even forests 4/5 hexes away that only give 3 hammers. (Better you than your competition.)

You will be amazed how much this accelerates your early game!

 

[gobbledydook]

I honoustly don't understand why hammers aren't important in the late game.

What are you building in the late game that absolutely needs the extra few hammers? A normal city might contain:

Shrine
Granary
Library
Aqueduct
Water Mill
Market
University
Workshop
Public School
Factory
Research Lab

Apart from the research lab, all the buildings you are really building are in the early to mid game. What are you building late game that absolutely requires those extra couple hammers?

 

[claudiupb]

And what if you chopped all your forests and still miss out on a religion? If you play at a challenging level this just might happen.

The shrine was just an example of how early hammers can net big results. Of course it doesn't guarantee you a religion since all that randomness is involved, but it does increase your odds a lot. Other things like workers, settlers, granaries all require to be built as early as possible. And there is a big advantage to save some turns on them.

And why wouldn't i work a 1 food and 2 hammer tile? What's wrong with that? The yield is 3. If i make a farm out of it delivers 3 food (depending).

Ideally you would only be working 4+ yield tiles, but the terrain is not like that, and you will need to work tiles that give 3 yields eventually. So the 3 yield tiles are not that great from the start, and you should prioritize them last. The problem with this combination is that the tile does not support itself regarding food, it takes 2 food to feed the citizen so you are basically taking 1 food from surplus food just to work this 3 yield tile meaning slowing growth, for the 2 hammers. On the other hand 2food 1 hammer is a much better combination as the tile supports itself, but 3 food is even better as it will make growth faster and than means extra citizen faster and extra science. If you have a lot of 3 yield tiles to work, why not a farm and two mines? They give the same yields as working 3 forests, so you safely can chop the forests early game if you have other sources of hammers.

One last thing about early hammers vs late game hammers: even without the snowball effect the early hammers bring, late game hammers are less important simply because gold purchases become more advantageous as the game progresses, you get more and more gpt, and things become relatively cheaper (the gold to hammer ratio becomes bigger for late game buildings). So what you can't build because lack of hammers you can rush buy with gold.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Time value of money applies to resources in civ. Faster buildings, faster growth, faster tech, faster factories etc. chop usually wins.

 

[blankity_blank]

On Standard, an Artillery costs 320 hammers. Infantry costs 375. A Research Lab costs 500. Chopping a forest gives you 30 production max. Those hammers would be irrelevant in the late-game, because the point of chopping is saving turns. It's much better to chop 2 forests in the early game to get a Settler out 3 turns or so earlier than it is to save them.

 

[MightySpice]

You don't chop them (unless ofcourse you have plenty). You work them in the later game. After several multipliers it helps the total output of your city.

The list produced by gobble is hardly a list of the early game. Your forrest Will be chopped by the time you are finishing the second building of the list (if not earlier).

 

[gobbledydook]

That is a list of buildings that you might complete before getting Chemistry Scientific Theory, because 1f2h tiles are just awful to work.

I was wrong about the tech that gives +1. It's Scientific Theory. I guess that is something going for saving forests for lumber mills. Maybe just chop enough forests to get the pre-NC buildings done on time?

 

[stormtrooper412]

I chop out everything in the first and maybe 2nd circle in the early game, and I mill the rest. Unless it's something on a hill that I can camp

 

[MightySpice]

In my current game my capital had two tiles of forest. The other cities had none.
You guessed right: i left the forrests and built a lumbermill. One, because in the other forrest was deer.

 

[beetle]

I left the forrests and built a lumbermill.

Leaving the forest on grassland deer is okay, since you work that tile. You should have chopped that other forest, gotten your granary a turn sooner, and post fertilizer it would have been three or four food. You cap was running 1 pop short all game.

The other cities had none.

Sure, that happens a lot. They did okay. So why pass on the free early chops for the games that offer that?

I was wrong about the tech that gives +1. It's Scientific Theory. I guess that is something going for saving forests for lumber mills. Maybe just chop enough forests to get the pre-NC buildings done on time?

Unless you are rolling in gold, I think you would want to chop until you have Public Schools up. Of course, the forest is all gone long before then. A city on river but everything flat does fine with watermill+workshop+factory+hydroplant (maybe a stable). You would not miss the ’mills at all.

I chop out everything in the first and maybe 2nd circle in the early game, and I mill the rest.

I think you could make a mathematical argument for forests in the 3rd ring. But why are you not chopping forests in the 4th or 5th ring? That still gets you 6 and 3 hammers, so still significant for early buildings.

For the complaints about the low production for a city on nothing but flat grassland: Why did you put an expo there?

 

[Chum]

I honestly don't remember the last time I worked a lumber mill.

Or built one for that matter. They are terrible improvements that I really don't want to work, and there's only a very small window where they are useful if you're going a specific path on the tech tree (If you're going Sci Theory before Chemistry or your Ideology).

If the forest is on fresh water, you chop it, period. You want 3 or 4 food tiles early on.

If the forest is on a hill, you chop it, period. You want mines to work early on for production.

If the forest isn't on fresh water and is on flat land, and you have enough hills in your capital to work, you chop it for the early hammers.

If the forest isn't on fresh water and is on flat land, and you have no hills, well, you put that city in the wrong spot. Build a lumber mill I guess, but that city is going to be garbage.

Basically, any time I am working a lumber mill, I planted an awful city.