Harvest or Improve?

[SeismoGraf]

It also depends on the opportunity cost of not harvesting. Let's say you harvest a stone and get a trader X turns earlier (depending on where you would produce the trader if you didn't harvest). Now on top of the harvested production you get X times the income of the trade route. Plus some of the future stuff on your agenda will kick in sooner (e.g. the city which was supposed to produce the trader, gets its campus X turns earlier; then the next thing earlier etc.).

The negative opportunity cost is mainly the builder charge used for harvesting. I mean 100+ cogs right now VS +1 per turn is usually an easy decision.

Maybe harvesting is too strong. And while it makes sense to "cripple" a peripheral city for the good of the empire, it isn't necessarily fun. Basically you are also encouraged to "pillage" your own cities that would that would take too much of investment and then only contribute marginally. Scorched earth so to speak. I feel bad for the poor little city that only has some plains and tundra left, because everything has been harvested.

One thing which annoys me in particular, is that I have to remember to send a builder to the location of a planned district many turns in advance, if I don't want to waste the underlying resource. And then I have to speed up something else with the harvest, because the harvested production is not stored and does not overflow. Quite the headache sometimes.

While the rationale for the harvesting mechanic is perfectly understandable, all the implications and trade-offs aren't necessarily fun!

 

[paz_paz]

In war you can chop your enemies trees down.

With an a suzerian city state you can chop their trees down

Or you can sign open borders.

 

[JohnGault]

Harvest harvest harvest. I usually wait until I am building a district. Can't speed those up any other way...unless aztec. Then I use gold to buy the first couple of really cheap buildings. Massive jump start on an early city in the mid to late game.

 

[alpaca]

It would be useful to have a table of how many cogs and food you get for the different resources in the different eras.

In theory, you could calculate a discounted cash flow model (the idea is that resources now are on average more useful than resources later) for the yields until the likely end of the game. I don't have enough data to come up with a realistic discount rate or end dates, unfortunately. For a first approximation, you could just compare the total yield until end of game with the immediate payment from harvesting. It is also possible in some cases that waiting for the next era is preferable to both, so your worker might be best spent just sitting around or doing more useful things.

 

[Calouste]

stone is fairly common, and one of the better sources of faith through Stone Circles, at least in my experience. I quite like it.

Quarries also give +1 production to an Industrial Zone they are adjacent too, which is a good reason to keep them, specially if you go for the policy that doubles the adjacency bonus later.

 

[Mahasona]

Um - excuse me but how do you harvest stuff?

When my builder stands over a resource the only option is to improve it.... The bulldozer is greyed out.

 

[Browd]

Look on the top row of action items (where move, sleep, etc. are located) -- icon is an image of a sickle. You can only harvest bonus resources.

 

[Mahasona]

Oh Riiiight! (rants quietly about the UI)

 

[Zenstrive]

I usually harvest them when I target their tiles for districts or wonders.
But most of the times I improve them.
Wood and Rainforest? Instant chop.

 

[ShinigamiKenji]

Wood and Rainforest? Instant chop.

I keep the afore-mentioned Woods in a Plaiins-Hills besides a river. Quite rare to appear, but gives quite some productions before Factories come online.

 

[Zenstrive]

Hills are usually close to city center on my play, and what's next to city center? Districts. So CHOP AWAY!

 

[Wr4ith]

I would like to add my interesting observation there: housing penality doesn't affect harvesting food resources (not sure if bonuses affect though) so it is better to wait a little to get housing light cap(housing limit -1) and THEN harvest marsh/ wheat...

 

[Hans Lemurson]

I would like to add my interesting observation there: housing penality doesn't affect harvesting food resources (not sure if bonuses affect though) so it is better to wait a little to get housing light cap(housing limit -1) and THEN harvest marsh/ wheat...

You sure about that? Unless you're using a UI mod, how do you know how much food actually got added to the food bar?

I know that production boosts gets multiplied by policy cards. Chop a Forest into a +100% Heavy Chariot with 1 turn left to completion and you're looking at some serious production.

 

[Wr4ith]

i had +2 food bonus and ui shows my city will grow in 20 turns right after new citizen was born, with -50 housing penality, so it was +|- 40 food needed for new citizen. clearing marsh tooltip showed ~80 food, and after clearing with penality it should give me only one citizen, but i got next citizen and 3/4 bar filled for another one. Im 95% sure about it, anyway its pretty easy to test

 

[Hans Lemurson]

i had +2 food bonus and ui shows my city will grow in 20 turns right after new citizen was born, with -50 housing penality, so it was +|- 40 food needed for new citizen. clearing marsh tooltip showed ~80 food, and after clearing with penality it should give me only one citizen, but i got next citizen and 3/4 bar filled for another one. Im 95% sure about it, anyway its pretty easy to test

So I am assuming that your city was Size 4, was pulling in a total of 12 food (4 base surplus) and had +1 amenity. 4 base surplus becomes 4.4 with happiness, then 2.2 with housing and will fill a size 44 food bar in 20 turns.

Ok, seems like the math checks out. Bonus Food does not appear to be penalized by Housing shortages. Whether it receives the +10% from happiness is not yet determined, but likely unimportant.

 

[varus]

I haven't done any math, but for a thread looking for rules of thumb, I use the following:

I always harvest:
Any rainforest,
Any forest that is NOT on a river,
Any marshes,
Any bonus resource that sits on an ideal spot for a district. Any district. I try to not to "pave over" anything harvestable. If there's a forest or a resource on a tile I want for a district, I clear it first. Same with wonders. This is, of course, subject to abbrogation if the need to build the district/wonder is outweighed by the time taken to get a worker to the area.

I will work any other bonus resource, until about the renaissance. At this point I will start to harvest:
Anything that uses a quarry, camp, or any other improvement that isn't a mine or farm,
Any resource that sits on hills that would be perfect for a mine,
Any resource that sits on any tile that would be perfect for a farming triangle,
Any resource that is on a tile I will not realistically ever work.

By the end of the game, I have precious few bonus resources remaining. The ones that survive are invariably the mined and farmed ones.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

It would be useful to have a table of how many cogs and food you get for the different resources in the different eras.

In theory, you could calculate a discounted cash flow model (the idea is that resources now are on average more useful than resources later) for the yields until the likely end of the game. I don't have enough data to come up with a realistic discount rate or end dates, unfortunately. For a first approximation, you could just compare the total yield until end of game with the immediate payment from harvesting. It is also possible in some cases that waiting for the next era is preferable to both, so your worker might be best spent just sitting around or doing more useful things.

Its probably not by era, its probably the same tech/civic cost as anything.
Base*(1+Factor*[100*tech/67 or 100*civics/50]/100)

 

[Hans Lemurson]

Because Chopping-Yields scale in the same way as Districts, a new District will always take 3 forests to complete (unless you're getting the +25% cost penalty)

With the most recent patch getting rid of the most egregious production-multiplication exploits, chopping/harvesting is much less favorable than in the past. I always harvest any resources that are "in the way", though, but I try not to jeapordize the productive capacity of a city on the flatlands by taking all its forests away.

That said, I'm certain that there's a point in time late in the game where there are few enough turns left and production-yields are high enough, that you should go ahead and cut down every single forest in your empire in one giant orgy of destruction.

 

[alpaca]

Its probably not by era, its probably the same tech/civic cost as anything.
Base*(1+Factor*[100*tech/67 or 100*civics/50]/100)

Thanks, I remember that formula from another thread. My current impression is that you can get a space victory on standard speed by turn 250, which gives us a nice rule-of-thumbish end date for the game (adjust for player skill and speed accordingly). I just posted some statistics for tech costs and such, and it seems acceptable to assume that tech costs scale roughly linearly with time (with the slope changing after the classical era) while civic costs appear to scale quadratic (with Ideology as an odd outlier). Production also feels more quadratic in my games because of factories and power plants. Food bins appear to increase exponentially, if I read the GlobalParameters.xml correctly, the formula is 15 + 8*n^1.5.

These observations are important to arrive at a reasonable discounting model: in real-world economics, exponential growth is typically assumed. In Civ6, it appears a quadratic discounting model is preferable for production and possibly an exponential one for food. One also has to consider utility as a cog's value varies over time (think finishing wonders or projects). This seems like it will be a rather involved analysis, so I'm not really sure if I want to actually do it, much less at midnight. I will think about this a little bit and maybe write something tomorrow