Give me one good reason why builders shouldn´t be able to cut down trees in neutral zones

I voted before I read the post, ah well.

Of course we should for no yield. After all its not like Civ V builders that lasted for ever. The ability was removed due to exploit and the exploit was the hammers. Bring it back, its not free so you will not be chopping down a Brazilian rain forest for the hell of it. I do feel a builder should be able to build a road though. I would rather have a few builders making a path through the forest as well as the option to clear for sight.

 

lol mate

 

them trees is dangerous. What will you pay for the hospital, dad? no i thought so..

 

For any yield? No. For strategic value? Yes. Perhaps limit chopping in neutral or enemy territory to military engineers?

The scaled distance idea that several people have posted about already seems like a very inelegant and difficult to communicate in game solution. I think only getting yields from within your borders successfully and succinctly abstracts the capabilities of transporting whatever benefits you would gain from clearing an area.

 

They shouldn't provide a yield, but I don't understand why it should be limited to military engineers. In particular it fits the spirit and flavor of Rome's legions. It's the kind of thing that influences the game so infrequently that it doesn't impact game balance. It's just fun to have unorthodox options like that.

 

Honestly the more I think about it, limiting to military engineers seems like a really obtuse and gamey thing, so leaving it open to builders (and adding the ability to Legions, I do like that) would require fewer mental gymnastics to justify.

 

Military engineers were mentioned as alternative to builders. This wasn't to say that a unique unit like Legions can't chop forests either. I do agree that they should be able to.

Most seem to agree that chopping neutral zone forests should be allowed but without a yield bonus. So the action is purely for strategic purposes to move units around in foreign lands. That sounds a lot closer to the job description of a Military Engineer than a Civilian Builder, in my view.

In my head: Builders perform actions within our borders; they're civilians. Military Engineers can do some of those actions outside. At war a foreign Military Engineer can chop a forest in my civilization, and later in peace my Builder will grow a new one. This sounds more logical to me.

 

So a military engineer is just a builder who is… so militant… he can do buildy things anywhere? The same way a melee unit is just a "military butcher" I suppose, civilian butchers turning into pumpkins the second they cross national borders after all..

VI needs to let us interact with the map, we literally paid for this map and there's so few gameplay arguments against being able to put roads and clear woods on it wherever we want

 

The way I see Builder vs Military Engineer is that they are both a bag of hammers (cogs?). They are abstractions of what set of actions you want to convert your production into. If you want to work on your own nation (peaceful), you convert that production into Builder. If you want to expand and exploit the foreign lands (aggressive), you convert that production into a Military Engineer. Sure they have overlapping buttons, but you are essentially choosing which way your empire looks (inwards or outwards). The more of this type of decision making in the game the better in my opinion


Even without any changes to VI right now, you can build roads and chop forests anywhere on the map, you just need to earn the ability to. Military Engineer builds roads anywhere no? .. Chopping forests, conquer that land first. Sure we paid for the game, but that doesn't mean we should have the right for a button to take us straight to the victory screen. You gotta play the game!

 

I would let builders chop for yield within 2 hexes of its territory. Chopping used to be a way to nudge tile expansion. Clearing out nearby growth to build a city makes sense. The broken part of this pre-patch was the global access to yields from far flung places.

 

Should give a yield proportional to the distance from the city that gets it and based on roads in the area and what Era, as that changes the road efficiency.

 

Really the gameplay justifications for receiving anything from chops and harvests are super weak at this point. Sure, I can turn terrain features into hammers... by spending hammers (now that builders are mortal). There's times that this can be leveraged to strategy, but it's not elegant.

And turning hammers into harvests... what? So the builders are my serfs? But my city "built" them... and they die after helping me out? The builder system in Civ VI is the same we would have gotten in a game called "Crazy Weird Serfs that Die After You Use Them To Chop Something But They Are Not Called Choppers And By The Way You Make Them Out of Mines Game... VI!" and it is too much for me.

If there is a harvest analogy in the game, it should be just gold-based. Now that builders are mortal they shouldn't generate hammers, because that's just way too messy a way to get distracted turning hammers into hammers instead of focusing on "what THING should my city build next." It shows a game not-thought-out.

 

I never really understood the big benefit of making builders have limited uses that makes sense in real life or is consistent with how Civ 6 treats all the other units, who are immortal (until they get killed).

If all the military units had limited uses (maybe their ammunition runs out or their sword arm falls off from too many swings), there will be hell to pay.

In Civ 6, I can get a city's production to the point of churning out builders every turn or so, and together with the builder enhancing policy card, can terraform the entire empire very quickly.

Re: chopping forests outside borders - I don't think they should. The concept of borders involves an element of control over the terrain - which is why barbarian camps don't spawn within national borders.

Land outside of a nation's border is either unclaimed wilderness where there is no infrastructure to do anything a civilisation would ordinarily do (such as work land, conduct land clearing operations etc), or is land of another country and they would not permit any of these things either.

Besides which, what's to stop you from marching an army of builders to another civs' settling land and destroying all their nice terrain? That won't be very nice.

 

You can't kill trees in neutral zones. That would go against their neutrality. If you do that, the Ents will ally with Gandalf & come after you

 

It doesn't make sense for pre-industrial human civilians to be able to clear-cut forests on this scale without living near them. It should at least require advanced technology.

I tend to think of builders flavor-wise as more an investment in and mobilization of the local citizens, rather than an actual mobile terraforming unit. Like by doing almost all their work within the cultural boundaries of your civilization they show they are drawing on the people who live there and aren't totally self-contained.

This is why I'm fine with them going away when they're spent, as well - a "builder" is a public works project that employs the locals temporarily. When it's done they go back to their homes and regular jobs - as opposed to military units, which have their own traditions that get passed down within militaries over the years.

And also the cost in hammers of a builder is directed at the projects they work on, and then those projects become self-sufficient. Whereas the cost in hammers for a military unit is to create the unit administratively - build the initial logistics around it - and then after that the personnel, equipment and stuff all gets paid for by the maintenance gold.

 

Obviously, the limited build charge was a trade off for instant improvements instead of waiting a number of turns for the farm build to finish.

 

Right, plus just an attempt to de-clutter the board and reduce idle units and busywork.

They could apply a little of the same principle to traders and spies in the late game - let them build into something permanent rather than having to keep reassigning them.