irrigation and mining

[pkorten]

I'm planning to try ordering my workers around manually in my next game . I have a few questions about that:

- Can a tile of, say grassland, be both mined and irrigated? Or is only one of them possible, if so, how do i decide which one i choose?

- If i clear a forest or a jungle tile, what do i get? Grassland?
Is it advisable to clear a forest?

-Do you guys ever build fortresses?

Some of these questions are maybe a bit stupid to the veteran players, you'll have to forgive me, i'm a conscript

 

[Tassadar]

You can only built 1 tile improvement, so it s mine or an irrigation.
I always mine shielded grassland and when i reach republic or monarchy i irrigate non shielded grassland. This give optimum shield/growth production.

If you clear jungle you get grassland ( shielded and non shielded), for forest it can be tundra,plain or grassland. if you look carefully you ll see which before cutting. usualy i cut forest on grassland to get bonus grassland( with shield) if it is a non shield grassland then i plant forest on it or irrigate. It depend if you want growth or production.

I built forteress sometime, chokepoint are good spot, put some defender in it with some bombard unit like cannon, the bombard unit get a free shot when under attack.

 

[Shabbaman]

Conscript eh?
POLISH MY BOOTS!

Your advisor gives you a warning when you're about to destroy a previous enhancement, very handy.
Also, you might not know this, railroad gives mined tiles an additional shield, and irrigated tiles an additional food.
I build fortresses, usually when I've got a 'spare' worker. There's a nice article in the war academy on the 'Maginot line', I suggest you read it.

 

[Arathorn]

When deciding which to do (mine or irrigate), look at the city and consider its needs. If it has floodplains and grasslands, you should mine every grassland because those will be its only shield sources. If it's got grass and hills 50/50, irrigate all the grass so you can work the hills. There's no "magic formula" to apply to all cities -- you look at what the city working (or going to work) that square needs most and build that way.

Forests are useful to keep for high food, low shield cities until RRs come along, at which point all non-tundra forests should be cleared (tundra forests can be cleared and a mine set up, too, but that's low priority). This is because you can get a better square from a mined/RR'd grass/plains than from a forested one.

I, personally, just about never build fortresses. On the rare occasions that there is a really natural chokepoint to block off, a fortress and a few defensive units (never just one) can be very useful. But the occasions are few and far between, in my experience. (On the higher levels, it's often hard enough to just defend your cities!)

Managing your own workers, and doing it intelligently, is worth at least one difficulty level. I'm quite serious. Simply doing your own work in an intelligent way will take a Monarch player to Emperor level, with minimal other changes required.

Arathorn

 

[pkorten]

uhm..what is a "chokepoint" ?

 

[Shabbaman]

Originally posted by pkorten
uhm..what is a "chokepoint" ?

Civilization III: War Academy Tips on Managing Choke Points

 

[pkorten]

So if i understand it correctly, if you have a forest on a tundra/plain tile, it is not smart to clear that forest because you then loose 2/1 shields per turn?
And this shielded grassland is the same as bonus grassland i assume?

 

[Arathorn]

Yes, bonus grass = shielded grass, etc.

All notation is x/y/z/ where x is food, y is shields, z is commerce.

Tundra natural -- 1/0/0. Mined tundra -- 1/1/0. Mined, RR tundra 1/2/1. Forested tundra 1/2/0. Roads add 0/0/1. So, it makes sense to have forested tundra (with a road, of course), as nothing is better.

Plains natural 1/1/0. Mined plains 1/2/0. Irrigated plains 2/1/0. Forested plains 1/2/0. Mined, RR plains 1/3/1. Irrigated, RR plains 3/1/0. Here, you can do as well as the forested plains even before RR so it makes sense to clear, if there's no higher priority worker job (which there very often is). Definitely, once RRs appear, the forest should be cleared up, as then you can do better. (Yes, you lose 1 shield temporarily, but once you mine those plains, that shield is returned to you. Or, if you need food, you can irrigate. It's quite a bit context-driven.)

Natural grass 2/0/0. Irrigated natural grass 3/0/0. Mined natural grass 2/1/0. RR, irr grass 4/0/1. RR, mined grass 2/2/0.

Bonus grass 2/1/0. Irr 3/1/0. Mined 2/2/0. RR irr 4/1/0. RR mine 2/3/0.

Forest grass (whether bonus or natural) 1/2/0.

For non-bonus grass, you can see it's a trade-off before RRs come along -- do I need more shields or more food in this city? Bonus grass (mined) is clearly superior to forested grass, simply because it has the extra food.

I think/hope this explains things a little bit better. This analysis is a bit simplistic in that it doesn't consider the military consequences of forests vs. flatlands or the time to road or the shields received from chopping the forest or.... But all those are somewhat context-dependent and harder to explain "in a vacuum".

I should also note that there's no way to tell whether a forested grassland is over a bonus grass or a normal grass other than cutting down the forest to check.

Arathorn

 

[Tassadar]

Here a simple exemple how to micromanage growth or production.

We have a city size 6 without aqueduc or river so it cannot grow anymore and the food storage is full, we assume each worked tile is irrigated plain, than it mean we have an excess 2 food, so it is better to manualy assign 2 citizen on mined hills or forest. Now we have more shiled and no more excess food, so the aqueduc is built faster.

Once the aqueduc is built then reassign citizen to high food tile to allow grow quicker.

 

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by pkorten
uhm..what is a "chokepoint" ?

http://www.zachriel.com/Chokepoint.htm

 

[kb2tvl]

On my current game, I manually ordered my workers through the whole game. As a rule of thumb, I irrigated floodplains/plains/desert. I also mined hills and mountains. Special resources were given priority.

Now, that leaves the rest of the tiles. I avoided cutting down trees where I was not building an expensive structure. In particular, I would cut down forrests for aquaducts. I forget how many shields an aquaduct costs but cutting down trees will give you 10. This reduced the build time and hence allowed a faster population growth.

I generally mine all grass land squares and irrigated all plains and deserts. This gave me some cities that would not reach size 12 untill after railroad. To be honest, I should go back and look at this approach... In any case, following this rule of thumb will still give faster growth that putting those buggers on autowander!

 

[GenMarshall]

CivGeneral looks around the room

I am not sure if there is a topic on this and I dont want to create a tread that already has the question if there is one. I feel that this is the apropreate topic to post my question.

On the SG I am participating, I had recived many s on the count of what Chieftess calls " the mining festival" or "The Great Mining Project"

I was wondering about "When to Mine or When Not to mine"? since I realy need to kick this "Build mines all the time" habit.

Thanks,
CivGeneral

 

[DaveMcW]

Here is a cheat sheet for worker jobs before you get railroads.

1. Connect cities with roads
2. Irrigate bonus food (cattle, wheat, flood plains)
3. Connect resources with roads
4. Mine grasslands
5. Irrigate plains
6. Build roads
7. Clear forests
8. Mine hills
9. Clear jungles
10. Irrigate deserts
11. Mine mountains
12. Plant forest on tundra

Yes it's not 100% perfect but it's very close and easy to remember.

You should always have enough workers so that none of your citizens is working unimproved tiles.

 

[Txurce]

Dave, your last bit of advice should come first. Following it will dramatically raise a civ's performance. I think what stops many players from doing so is not knowing when to build a worker, since the worker build cycle results in a population loss and no immediate benefit.