How would your game play without chopping?

DWilson

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One thing that's extremely apparent here in the meta, probably missing that term- forgive me, is that chopping is a central part of the game. Personally, that's always very uncomfortable for me- I hate seeing the trees and resources being torn from the map, and I often refuse to do so (surely to the detriment of my civ). Apparently, my subconscious has the environmentalist agenda (Teddy and I tend to be friends).

It seems clear that Firaxis designed this game in such a way that chopping not only often is, but generally should be a core aspect of your civilization's development and productivity (which, I think, mimics real life to an unfortunate extent). But what happens when you resist?

My question for all of you is how would your game play change if the only times you removed a feature was automatically for district, city, or wonder placement? How would you handle production? Would your wonder priorities and build priorities see a major shift? Would governors be used differently?
 
I would like it much more and actually care about developing cities.

Right now long term production is pretty irrelevant. Who cares if that one city has 300 production per turn? Just chop everything a city will ever build, get some units that you will keep forever (just upgrade them). And that'd be faster then actually setting up a production base.

I think industrial zones would be relevant again!

However late game would suck though, as it'd take forever to build anything and not be worth it. They'd also have to make stuff cheaper later in the game.

I think it'd be nice if chopping early game remained the same so it doesn't become so slow paced, but it should not scale as the game goes along. But again, note the above comment about late game item costs.
 
One thing that's extremely apparent here in the meta, probably missing that term- forgive me, is that chopping is a central part of the game. Personally, that's always very uncomfortable for me- I hate seeing the trees and resources being torn from the map, and I often refuse to do so (surely to the detriment of my civ).

Exactly. I really love building lumbermills :) It makes no sense to chop a spaceship. It also makes no sense to "harvest" copper.

I would simply remove yields from chopping.
 
I'd miss chopping. Historically, tearing down forests and rain forests is what happened. Your civilisation should change the landscape. Maybe you shouldn't be able to chop in a spaceport, but otherwise I'm cool with it.

Equally, I like that if I don't chop, eg because I want to preserve adjacencies or appeal, I suffer an opportunity cost for that.

But to answer your question more directly: mid game cities would be hard to get up and running and late game production would be even lower than it is.
 
There is no in game cost to pay for chopping unless you play a civ that benefits from forests or rain forests.
 
Rainforests dont, but that’s a feature not a bug. They’re harder to chop than other resources - you need bronze working - and the point is you have to chop them because they (mostly) can’t be improved and (mostly) don’t give bonuses. Try to think of rainforests as “weeds”.

Woods are different. They provide adjacency for holy sites and appeal - which can potentially provide additional faith and amenities - and can be improved. So, you give that up if you chop them - particularly as if you chop hills woods and then build mines you’re actually reducing appeal. Woods are worth keeping if you’re aiming for a strong faith economy and or tourism.

Where this gets tricky is escalating value of chopping and optimal play which tends to skew how you manage resources. It’s not that keeping forests or other resources is only “roleplaying”, it’s just that if you really start doing the math you’re always better chopping because your game just isn’t going to last that long. Keeping woods is sub-optimal in the sense it’s not as optimal as other strategies rather than being actually a “bad” strategy - but that’s okay - I don’t think every strategy can be “optimal”.

I don’t think chopping really need to be “nerfed” or stopped as such. It just maybe shouldn’t have escalating value. Instead, the value should perhaps increase when you research certain civics or techs or with certain cards, and should basically top out at some point late game (or do chops top out already? - I can’t remember). The other thing that would “balance” chopping more would be just having the game last longer, so upfront production didn’t trump long term production so much (although that’s always unavoidable to some extent).
 
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There is no in game cost to pay for chopping unless you play a civ that benefits from forests or rain forests.

The game cost is appeal of the the adjacent tiles. But, appeal is a narrow game mechanic that only heavily applies to civs like Australia and Mapuche who derive a benefit from appeal. Appeal has some late game uses, but by then you can make a forest with a builder.
 
Well, for all tile resource types historically over time there has been an increase to resource yield. We are more efficient at producing our natural resources and using our natural resources today due to things like recycling and just better techniques when it comes to harvesting and using every part of a resource and having to throw as little of it away as possible.

We have been a really wasteful species and not very good stewards of the planet. Our awareness and rise in consciousness to such things could be added through having an increase to the natural resources at whatever crucial points in history or technology advancements allowed us such abilities. I would also add farms to that as well, because today we can grow a lot more food on an acre of land than we used to.
 
The biggest problems right now if that if you see a city in a large forested area, I think to myself, "now that's a great spot for the Eiffel Tower". And then I clearcut the area, and then the city is useless except with a mass structure. Or if I go settle a city somewhere, I chop 2-3 trees to build the first district, and then ignore the city for the rest of time.

If chopping didn't provide a yield (or, say, only provided a very minor yield like a flat 50 production), then for one you would need to further bring down overall production costs, but I would definitely keep a couple more around. A big part of the issue right now is if I have a forested hill, I can chop and mine it, and I both get a big production bonus now and my overall production will generally stay the same or increase (since mines gain hammers sooner than mills do). It's simply a no-brainer to do that right now.
 
I think to mitigate some of this is to add more bonus resources by default (I realize there is a game setting for this) and reduce the bonus of the chop. That way everyone can participate in chopping goodness and derive some benefit without also making your empire an empty wasteland. Also, I can chop a resource that I need removed for a strategic district and not feel like I've changed the identity of the city. The fact that there are more bonus resources will be limited in part because the harvest bonus is slightly reduced to go along with the increasing cost of builder charges needed to chop them.

To add in, maybe give all bonus resources a minor adjacency bonus and not just the resources you build mines and quarries on. Why not? It's ridiculous how low adjacency bonuses are in a lot of cases. And maybe give forests a tree unlock at some point in mid-game to provide +1GPT from hunting or maybe an additional bonus to defense for military units. I hesitate to say food because farms are already almost worthless.

As far as how I would modify my play if I didn't use chops.. well chops are extremely useful to push a wonder or an early district while also being able to get back to other priorities like protection. I feel on higher difficulty levels, game balance includes heavy chopping or nothing else would really get built in the first 75 turns except for military, a few builders and settlers, and a couple monuments. On Deity, Wonders would definitely be a huge risk without chopping. Basically pointless to try.

This basically gets me to my thoughts on balancing in general. I really do feel like they need to rebalance to allow for more population in cities. No easy task because it hits on lots of fundamental mechanics.. district requirements, happiness, science, etc. I think that would limit the chopping because now your cities have the population to immediately work more tiles instead of letting them sit vacant for 150 turns which means I chop that tile.
 
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I think to mitigate some of this is to add more bonus resources by default (I realize there is a game setting for this) and reduce the bonus of the chop. That way everyone can participate in chopping goodness and derive some benefit without also making your empire an empty wasteland. Also, I can chop a resource that I need removed for a strategic district and not feel like I've changed the identity of the city. The fact that there are more bonus resources will be limited in part because the harvest bonus is slightly reduced to go along with the increasing cost of builder charges needed to chop them.

To add in, maybe give all bonus resources a minor adjacency bonus and not just the resources you build mines and quarries on. Why not? It's ridiculous how low adjacency bonuses are in a lot of cases. And maybe give forests a tree unlock at some point in mid-game to provide +1GPT from hunting or maybe an additional bonus to defense for military units. I hesitate to say food because farms are already almost worthless.

As far as how I would modify my play if I didn't use chops.. well chops are extremely useful to push a wonder or an early district while also being able to get back to other priorities like protection. I feel on higher difficulty levels, game balance includes heavy chopping or nothing else would really get built in the first 75 turns except for military, a few builders and settlers, and a couple monuments. On Deity, Wonders would definitely be a huge risk without chopping. Basically pointless to try.

This basically gets me to my thoughts on balancing in general. I really do feel like they need to rebalance to allow for more population in cities. No easy task because it hits on lots of fundamental mechanics.. district requirements, happiness, science, etc. I think that would limit the chopping because now your cities have the population to immediately work more tiles instead of letting them sit vacant for 150 turns which means I chop that tile.

Adding in some extra bonuses for the bonus resources would be great. I do think in the middle or late part of the game you should be able to more or "plant" resources. Like, seriously, what is a farm on a grassland tile actually farming, if not wheat/rice? We should be "planting" cows or sheep on tiles to get little pasture triangles. And if you add an extra bonus for having forests or jungles next to each other as well, that would help too. I'd love if it you had a big grassland space between cities if there was a legit decision of whether to use the land for cows, sheep, corn, wheat, etc... Would love it if there was a real reason to farm things.

And yes, the point about population, I'd love it if they could allow a more exponential growth. We're almost getting to enough housing to fit it in - we just need some more amenities and other balance. There's even a sort of "natural" district procession change to do - instead of having new districts unlock at fixed points (1, 4, 7, 10, etc...) having it at increasing points. So unlock a new district at size 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, etc... It ends up virtually the same at the low numbers, but done this way, if you actually let cities grow to size 25, 30, or even 40, it's not like you're filling the land with districts anyways. You'd need to increase citizen slots (could do them the same way, so instead of just 1 slot per building, the library would be 1 citizen, uni adds 2, and research lab adds 3, so a city could have up to 6 people working in the campus). Yes, the later citizens would be less productive at being "worth" just 2 science or whatever, but the problem now is that they just eat up too many amenities to even think about growing that big.
 
Adding in some extra bonuses for the bonus resources would be great. I do think in the middle or late part of the game you should be able to more or "plant" resources. Like, seriously, what is a farm on a grassland tile actually farming, if not wheat/rice?

This always bugs me. Particularly around horses.

I get why it’s the way it is in terms of gameplay. If you could “plant” bonuses resources, horses or certain luxes, it would be a real problem. But in terms of suspension of disbelief, it’s a bit hard.

My current mental solution is to just assume seeing wheat or rice or horses etc. on the map just means these spots are particularly good for those resources, rather than they “have” wheat or whatever (and nowhere else does).
 
In Civ games bonus resources like wheet originally represented "good soil" to grow wheet to get a rich harvest, not only the wheet itself. It is difficult to move the soil as it is difficult to move flood plains. In the same way cows/milk represented good grasland to do dairy farming. A rich harvest allowed export of surplus harvest, so the bonus resource could be used as tradable resource like in Civ4.
The concept is inconsistent, because strategic resources like horses represent "good grasland to grow horses" and "access to horses", but the game does not allow to swap horses for cows on good grasland (or vice versa).

They could greatly improve the game by separating the access to a bonus resource like special plants/seeds and animals and the quality of tiles. The player then could spread seeds/animals at will on suitable tiles and district placement would not be limited by bonus resources.

Regarding the chopping of forests, I would suggest to allow forests to spread into nearby tiles, but also give tiles which are not adjacent to a forest tile or a river/irrigation the chance to turn into desert or tundra (depending on latitude).
I rarely use chops since I like to play long games on marathon speed on a balanced difficulty and I like forests near my cities. It is also a lot of micro-management having a worker and magnus in the right spot in the right turn to chop. Using the bonus chop overflow exploit is tempting but I did not research on what circumstances it works and when not. From the production numbers ingame you need to monitor the city for several turns to see how much production really was transferred into the new building project.

I would like to see a free automatic chop when placing a district or improvement on a forest tile, reducing building costs.
 
It would change my game play only marginally. However, I do not play an optimized game.

While I have started to use Magnus as my #1 governor almost every time, and have on occasion gone for the Goddess of Harvest Pantheon, neither are key to my strategy or enjoyment. I do not slot policy cars to take advantage of overflow, nor do I chop like crazy.

Primarily I use the chop to either rush Wonders, to get some benefit when I need to clear space for districts, or in the late game to help a late game city build a district and/or fight off loyalty.

In Science Victory games I often avoid the chop, and am content with using Reyna to buy Space Ports, and the Royal Society tier 3 government building to use builders for speeding along the Space Projects.
 
I've never played a game in which I've chopped systematically everything in sight just to get that bonus production, so my strategy would remain the same (and I usually play on Emperor with an ultra buffed AI).

I mean I sometimes play with real players (2-4 + AI's). Chopping is not an optimal strategy when your long run production is somewhat relevant. Like you can chop a couple of forests in a semi-new city to get a few units and when the other human declares war on you and you lose them, where are you going to get your production from? Of course chooping hill forests and late jungles is a no brainer, but turbo chopping everything can get you in some nasty situations.
 
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.

How about giving gold or some other reward than production?
 
It would change my game play only marginally. However, I do not play an optimized game.

While I have started to use Magnus as my #1 governor almost every time, and have on occasion gone for the Goddess of Harvest Pantheon, neither are key to my strategy or enjoyment. I do not slot policy cars to take advantage of overflow, nor do I chop like crazy.

Primarily I use the chop to either rush Wonders, to get some benefit when I need to clear space for districts, or in the late game to help a late game city build a district and/or fight off loyalty.

In Science Victory games I often avoid the chop, and am content with using Reyna to buy Space Ports, and the Royal Society tier 3 government building to use builders for speeding along the Space Projects.
Are you me? :shifty:

:lol:

Seriously, though, I play almost exactly like that.
 
How about giving gold or some other reward than production?

I'm okay with them giving production, but not nearly as much as they do. Additionally, I was playing V the other day and I'm not sure it's an improvement that builder actions happen instantly. It makes them feel too cheap and easy... but in practice it makes them WAY too important.
 
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