Goods Simplification Proposal

[Ramstormp]

How effective was the standard collection of lumber, though? If you can get plenty of lumber via the city-screen then why would you need so much more.

My low effort googling seems to imply that exporting lumber was a major reason for establishing James Town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lumber_industry_in_the_United_States

I'm not suggesting logging being a huge sustainable industry comparable with plantation cotton or processed cloth, but an early game decision point.
More generally though, I know that Lots of towns and settlements in my area (Australia, not America) were first founded for logging reasons, and that isn't supported by the current game design. It annoys me that gold rushes aren't really supported either. Or they weren't (I haven't played much of the recent versions of WtP).

And as I bang on about all the time, it incentivises expansion and interacting with the map. It's a good thing imo if you take note of the forests while exploring so you can factor that into later 'exploitation'.


Edit: regarding the AI, I assume it is easier to program the AI to apportion its lumber among cities after it gets a lot from chopping than to program it to decide in a long-term strategic manner whether it should chop them now, later or never, and for what reasons.
I have no idea whether the AI supports big chops currently.

Sweet woode! Some fun quotes in there too.

So, what would be a reasonable amount per chop and at what sell price? Adding a zero per chop was the quickest way to change it in Civ4BuildInfos.xml, and also gave me a nice, drastic overview of what might happen. I have a feeling human players will take advantage of it more than the AI at that rate. I didn't play much myself. The AI was still using 2 lumberjacks with lodges per city. The AI also is being overly cautious about sending out pioneers... at least as of the non-development version. Also, the AI already magically redistributes a certain amount of all its goods among its settlements... I think.

There may be a question of how long it should take to clear the forest and if it should cost something; and maybe there should be two different types of forest removal... The other being a quick slash and burn method which could provide boosts to the soil.

 

[Brosso B.]

Sweet woode! Some fun quotes in there too.

We have the goodliest tall trees, don't we folks. Your meddowes will be so faire you'll be saying "Please, please mister president, we can't take it anymore, enough with the sweet woode!" But we're going to have a big, beautiful faire meddowe, all along the southern border. Believe me.

So, what would be a reasonable amount per chop and at what sell price? Adding a zero per chop was the quickest way to change it in Civ4BuildInfos.xml, and also gave me a nice, drastic overview of what might happen. I have a feeling human players will take advantage of it more than the AI at that rate. I didn't play much myself. The AI was still using 2 lumberjacks with lodges per city. The AI also is being overly cautious about sending out pioneers... at least as of the non-development version. Also, the AI already magically redistributes a certain amount of all its goods among its settlements... I think.

There may be a question of how long it should take to clear the forest and if it should cost something; and maybe there should be two different types of forest removal... The other being a quick slash and burn method which could provide boosts to the soil.

I don't remember what the prices are like and the system may have since changed. It all depends on how many hammers buildings cost, what are the standard prices for other things etc. In unmodded CivCol it's about 5 for cotton, 10 for cloth. I'd say lumber 4/6 buy sell, and maybe you get like 200 for a chop. Probably more though, 800g for a chop doesn't seem like a big incentive.

Back when I played the AI generally chopped all forests unless it had a lumber bonus on it. Then it would spend 500+ coins on a lumber camp, and the bugged (or just really badly designed) event would trigger EVERY SINGLE TIME "kids were playing in the forest and burnt the whole thing down", which would remove the forest and really penalise the AI.
From memory the AI would never even replace that lumber camp so it became a dead tile.

I agree it should take a while to chop, and a slash and burn option could get you a bit of lumber but open the tile up much faster, in case you really want the resource underneath. The boost to soil sounds too fiddly to me.