How would your game play without chopping?

[Kimiimaro]

I usually pick the Divine Spark.

 

[UWHabs]

Yeah I slot in God King from the start and I would say 75% of the time I can get Goddess of the Harvest. It's been this way since R&F.

Edit: I may actually go so far as to say Goddess of the Harvest is just bad design. It allows for way too much power from faith by playing a non-religious game. Just nix this pantheon entirely

I don't mind a way to get more faith from non-religious sources. In fact, some of the design aspects I like most have to do with mixing things up (ie. Choral Music or Feed the World giving you culture/food from holy sites, the tier-3 religious buildings giving all choices of extra bonus, or even the stuff like stone circles letting you get faith from stone). But Goddess of the Harvest to me just adds way too much, and becomes too critical.

Sadly I haven't gotten to try out the +faith per appeal on tiles since that one falls really fast, but to me that feels like a better balanced bonus. At least it means you only get the bonus if you keep appeal high. It might be unbalanced but at least it has a sense of logic to it. I don't understand how harvesting copper gives me a massive faith boost.

 

[eleven11]

I don't mind a way to get more faith from non-religious sources. In fact, some of the design aspects I like most have to do with mixing things up (ie. Choral Music or Feed the World giving you culture/food from holy sites, the tier-3 religious buildings giving all choices of extra bonus, or even the stuff like stone circles letting you get faith from stone). But Goddess of the Harvest to me just adds way too much, and becomes too critical.

Sadly I haven't gotten to try out the +faith per appeal on tiles since that one falls really fast, but to me that feels like a better balanced bonus. At least it means you only get the bonus if you keep appeal high. It might be unbalanced but at least it has a sense of logic to it. I don't understand how harvesting copper gives me a massive faith boost.

Well that's kinda what I mean I just said it poorly.. It's quite a leap to say "I sacrifice this copper in the name of God!" and have your little citizen zealots go wild. At least Earth Goddess matches our cultural roots in the BC times.

I usually pick the Divine Spark.

I love great people, don't get me wrong.. but Goddess of the Harvest can buy me about 8 settlers and 12 builders throughout the game for doing something I was going to do anyway... chop.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I would love to see chopping nerfed. I agree with Archon Wing that it really detracts from the feeling of building a city. Don't get me wrong, chopping should stay, but it shouldn't be the go-to mechanism for everything.

Realistically, no option in the game should have "always do this" be a reasonably-applied heuristic. When it is you don't have much of an option.

 

[historix69]

Realistically the production values of forest tiles and chopping should be reduced and other production values, e.g. those of factories should be increased in modern times.

Example :
Germany as an industrialized modern nation still has 30% of its small terrain covered by forests. In a civ game, those forest tiles would be improved with lumber mills and Germany's production to a large part would result from working forest/lumber mill tiles, e.g. building modern wooden tanks and wooden battleships. In real life only about 2.5% of German population work in agriculture, forestry and mining and they contribute about 1% to GDP.

Forests increase tourism and are used as holiday and recreation areas, increasing its value far beyond the value of the wood when chopped down in an instant.

Spoiler :

Biodiversity
The territory of Germany can be subdivided into two ecoregions: European-Mediterranean montane mixed forests and Northeast-Atlantic shelf marine. As of 2008 the majority of Germany is covered by either arable land (34%) or forest and woodland (30.1%); only 13.4% of the area consists of permanent pastures, 11.8% is covered by settlements and streets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany#Biodiversity

In 2010 agriculture, forestry, and mining accounted for only 0.9% of Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employed only 2.4% of the population,[62] down from 4% in 1991. Agriculture is extremely productive, and Germany is able to cover 90% of its nutritional needs with domestic production. Germany is the third largest agricultural producer in the European Union after France and Italy. Germany’s principal agricultural products are potatoes, wheat, barley, sugar beets, fruit, and cabbages.
Despite the country’s high level of industrialization, almost one-third of its territory is covered by forest.[87] The forestry industry provides for about two-thirds of domestic consumption of wood and wood products, so Germany is a net importer of these items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany#Primary

 

[shaglio]

I think chopping should be nerfed heavily. I feel like it was meant to be a nice little compensation for having to place a District/Wonder on a forested tile (similar to the Loser Gold for being beaten to a Wonder in previous iterations of the game). But they made the bonus so big that it became the go-to strategy to clear-cut the entire landscape.

That would be the equivalent of the aforementioned Loser Gold if the gold bonus was so big that players were queuing up Wonders that they knew they'd get beaten to, just to get a mega cash windfall. So, IMHO hit the production bonus from chopping with a supersized nerf bat and Magnus won't be nearly as overpowered as he currently is.