In a previous post some time ago we've talked about the wood resource and the possibility to remove a forest in steps, allowing one plot to provide more than one-time boost for stock of wood, much needed for building a navy.
I've had a look at the .artdef, and I've added 2 new features :
Dense Forest and
Sparse Forest that you can see in the following screenshot below the Stone resource:
When removed a "Dense Forest" feature becomes a "Forest" feature, and a removed "Forest" feature becomes a "Sparse Forest". Of course you get more Woods from a Dense Forest than a Sparse Forest (when removing the feature or when working the plot)
They have different stats too (wood resource value, defense value, movement cost, ...), that I may tweak further.
Awesome! This is right up my alley. I think we can also use this for a lot of other cool game mechanics. For e.g. Dense Forest can cost Horse and Vehicle units more movement points to move through, compared to Forest. Sparse forest wouldn't affect movement at all, but could still block vision (how many tiles further you can see) and/or unit defense bonuses (a foot unit could use the trees as cover from ranged/mounted).
I may add a Forest growth mechanism at some point in the mod, technically not difficult, but not sure if it's needed or even wanted, as it would reduce the importance of the decision of cutting down a forest to get a fleet of Trireme now vs keeping a dense forest in prevision of an armada of Ships-of-the-Line in the Renaissance...
Yes, please do! Forests have been bugging me ever since I started playing Civ4. It's silly that if you chop down a forest in 3000 BC, no forest will ever reclaim the tile for 5000 years...
I would personally love to have forest growth as it means you can cut in order to build ships now, but then you'd have to wait for the forest to regrow. I'm mostly familiar with Northern European forestry, so I can't speak for Savanna, Mangrooves, Rainforest etc. Anyway, it takes about 70-100 years for Spruces to grow large enough to be suitable for timber (Sweden), but species like Pines, Oak and other important species require at least 100 years. Historically, lumberjacks would have selected the largest and most suitable trees for cutting (the oldest), and they would have left the thinner (younger) trees in order to let them grow.
If you go for age, rather than density per se, then the longer you let the forest grow before cutting, the better quality and more lumber you'd get. You could even have a scale and ratio where the density (age) of the Forest would determine how much Firewood/Pulp vs Timber, you'd get. A player cutting the forests often, would recieve less Timber. Or if you want, you could simply have a mechanic where each Forest feature accumulates more of the "Timber" resource every turn. Though there should be a maximum cap of course, since trees can grow old, but after 100-150 years, the forest wouldn't yield a lot more timber, due to forest fires, diseases etc.
In the early game, forests would regrow quickly, but later in the game you'd have to wait more turns (since number of years per turn would decrease). Clearcutting (removing forest feature completely) without building any improvement on the tile, should allow the forest to regenerate, i.e. spawning a new (sparse?) Forest on the tile.
Ideally, once you acquire the Lumbermill improvement. The Lumbermill improvement would cut the forest automatically, if the city needs timber at the start of turn, meaning that you wouldn't have to use builders to do it manually in the later part of the game.
Then there's other stuff that I'd like to be included, in no particular order:
- Wood being used for fuel (+production adjacency to Copper/Iron mines)
- Deforestation, meaning clearing forests and reducing forest density should lead to decreased yields of adjacent farms, due to increased soil erosion. Exception would be flood plains.
- Deforestation near deserts, could increase desertification.
- Lack of fuel would increase sickness/mortality (in the winter months, and northern hemispheres).