[GS] New Disaster: Forest Fire

[Vrenir]

What if Firaxis added a Forest Fire disaster to GS?

The way I envision it, a Forest Fire has a chance to start on Forest or Jungle tiles and can spread to adjacent Forest or Jungle. It damages units and improvements. It also has the ability to damage adjacent units, improvements, and districts. As a counterbalance, it adds fertility. Forest Fires increase in frequency and severity as Global Warming advances.

The reason why this would be interesting is that it would create a choice. Cut down the forests and jungles near your cities, and increase Global Warming. Leave them near your cities, and risk damage if they catch fire. Maybe a National Park is protected from Forest Fire damage. Maybe pillaging can set a Forest or Jungle tile on fire.

Thoughts?

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I like the idea.
I know many forest fires happen in areas that droughts hit so maybe tiles that have been hit with a drought might be more susceptible to one.

I like the idea of a National Park not only being immune but would help combat a forest fire to give them another job other than tourism.

 

[Sostratus]

Currently there is a dichotomy:
Clear forest/jungle

• Pro: immediate benefit of chop value, can place any non lumbermill improvement
• Proposed Pro: No forest fire
• Con: increases chance of drought and exacerbates global warming

Don't clear forest/jungle

• Pro: reduces chance of drought and mitigates global warming, +1 yield on tile
• Con: restricted in improvement choices to lumbermills/resource specific ones
• Proposed Con: forest fire

If you added forest fires that can damage infrastructure, then the primary motivator for an inland civ to keep their forests would be greatly diminished: you won't avoid a disaster from striking and damaging stuff, so you might as well chop forests and build an aqueduct, which at least keeps the drought effects tempered.

Woods offer generally very little for most victory types - there comes a point where chopping them always beats the +1 yield from the feature. Eventually a lumbermill on woods will beat a mine in production, but that comes int he future era; and you lose out on the free chop.

If, however, it was more like the drought in that it temporarily "burns out" the woods so it doesn't give the +1prod/food, and then on top of that it could add fertility, then you might have a somewhat compelling narrative to settle such locations. (Especially a big mass of woods next to you that you see get burned out, and a flurry of +1 fertility lands on it.) Sort of like how floods/volcanoes are mostly a boon. Tornadoes really suck to deal with, though, because they don't have counter-play. So we always want to avoid introducing that sort of thing.

 

[AntSou]

Woods offer generally very little for most victory types - there comes a point where chopping them always beats the +1 yield from the feature.

But it's +2 Production?

Plus it greatly diminishes Tile Appeal if you rely on mines for production.
Plus they give +3 Defense Bonus, which stacks with +3 if on Hills.
Plus they're a natural barrier to enemy movement.
Plus Kupe won't be throwing ugly looks at you.

---

For wildfires to work, all we need is natural regrowth of woods. I'm sure it's doable, it was in Alpha Centauri 20 years ago. It would work like this:

- Any plains or grasslands tile without an improvement/feature would have a small chance of growing woods if adjacent to another woods tile. The chances would be greater the more adjacent woods tiles there are.

- Woods tiles which suffer a wildfire would then be unusable for 6-10 turns, for instance. The wildfire animation would only last for two turns on a tile. After two turns there's a chance it might spread to adjacent tiles or go out. Each tile affected by a wildfire would then for the following 9 turns have a sort of shabby looking woods on it, to make it visually clear the woods are currently unusable due to being burned out.

- Builders may use the Plant Saplings action on a burned tile to reduce the wait time to 4-5 turns for one charge. Requires some tech.

- Military Engineers may be used to put out a wildfire on an adjacent woods tile. If so, the regrowth period is greatly reduced (e.g to 2-3 turns), plus there's no longer any chance of it spreading to adjacent tiles.

- A new improvement, Fire Lookout, available in the industrial or modern era, would reduce the chance of fire on that tile to 0% and greatly diminish the chance of fire on all woods within 3 tiles.

 

[Sostratus]

But it's +2 Production?

At the beginning of the game, both mines and woods are +1 to the tile. So if you chop a hill forest early there's no yield loss if you're investing in builder charges.
By the time you get lumbermills (which start at +2) you've got apprenticeship, bringing mines to +2 as well. So the trade-off is +1 from the woods in exchange for chop value.
Mines get industrialization, bring them to +3, before lumbermills pick up steel to also make it to +3. So the trade-off is still +1 from the woods in exchange for chop value.
Eventually, lumbermills get a boost in the future era at cybernetics for a further +1, pushing them to +4. Mines also get +1 at smart materials, pushing them also to +4. So the trade-off is still +1 from the woods in exchange for chop value.

The reason this is important is because the benefit is always going to 0-1 because the mine boosts always come before the lumbermill (except in the future era) but +1/turn advantage of woods becomes less and less valuable because the number of turns left in the game decreases the closer you get to victory, while the chop value only rises. Similar to the newly buffed Religious Settlements being so good, the value of getting the chop early completely outweighs the other benefits. I'm not endorsing this as a good thing, I'm just saying it is mathematically true in the way that inflation or government bonds work.

Plus it greatly diminishes Tile Appeal

The reason I qualified "most victory types" was because this only matters for culture - tile appeal just doesn't have enough impact on other win types. Which is a shame, because the industrialists currently have such an upper hand over the eco warriors in civ6 and every developed country IRL so far has gone through a phase of suddenly valuing its own environment much more highly and curbing the pollution excesses of the old days. But my loyal citizens don't seem to mind living in Hansa land - "poisonous smoke is progress," as I always say...

 

[AntSou]

Thanks for clearing that up.

You forgot to mention Woods help with adjacency for Holy Sites and Industrial Zones.

In any case, I don't like to chop down woods, even if the math is against me . Ever since Alpha Centauri I've never been too keen on removing them in Sid Meier's games.
---

What do you think about the following ideas as alternative ways to balance mines and lumber mills:

- Removing Food output altogether in a tile if a mine is built there;
OR
- Bonus production to any lumber mill on or adjacent to a railroad. Railroad must connect to a city;
OR
- Leina's Forestry Management provides +1 Production in Woods tiles without lumber mills;
OR
- Liang or Magnus give +1 to Lumber Mills in City;

Also, are there any city states which give production bonuses to unimproved woods? I've never met any.

 

[Sostratus]

What do you think about the following ideas as alternative ways to balance mines and lumber mills:

I would propose the issue is less mines v quarries v lumbermills as improvements and more quarries & lumbermills (which depend on features) vs chops. Bonus resources & woods both provide +1 yield to their tile, and it's the same amount forever. The 3 improvements all roughly track each other (although IMO quarries get their bonuses too late, they should be moved up) so for the most part the only reason to prefer a stone quarry to a mine is because you want the tile yield more than the chop.

I think generally the solution is to then give players methods to improve the output from the resources + features directly so there's less of a reason to chop them.
If you were to run the numbers you will find that just as a matter of effective production, chopping after a pretty early point is essentially forever outweighing the +1 yield; even worse, this doesn't take into account that expending production early has extremely high returns vs late. IE, 200 towards a settler early ends up being worth a ridiculous amount of yield equivalent at turn 200- a return far higher than the natural "inflation rate" of civ. A simple "Net present value" analysis based on the fact that costs go roughly 1x to 10x over the course of the tech tree is a great first order approximation of this.

And there's also the compounded value that you can chop in wonders before an opponent, meaning you can get a wonder like Machu Picchu where you otherwise could not. Alternatively you could nerf chop value, but I think the fact that it + district cost follow the same formula is a good feature of the game and it feels satisfying to use when you need it.

But there should definitely be some way to make eg stone or copper go from +1 to say +3 by the industrial. As far as woods go they have the +1 for rainforest from zoos. IMO this effect should be transferred to a city center building to make it more accessible, and woods then should have something similar for +1, but perhaps only old growth woods. See, you don't want to make features so good they never get chopped, and woods can be planted indefinitely so we have to be careful with that.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[AntSou]

I would propose the issue is less mines v quarries v lumbermills as improvements and more quarries & lumbermills (which depend on features) vs chops. Bonus resources & woods both provide +1 yield to their tile, and it's the same amount forever. The 3 improvements all roughly track each other (although IMO quarries get their bonuses too late, they should be moved up) so for the most part the only reason to prefer a stone quarry to a mine is because you want the tile yield more than the chop.

I think generally the solution is to then give players methods to improve the output from the resources + features directly so there's less of a reason to chop them.
If you were to run the numbers you will find that just as a matter of effective production, chopping after a pretty early point is essentially forever outweighing the +1 yield; even worse, this doesn't take into account that expending production early has extremely high returns vs late. IE, 200 towards a settler early ends up being worth a ridiculous amount of yield equivalent at turn 200- a return far higher than the natural "inflation rate" of civ. A simple "Net present value" analysis based on the fact that costs go roughly 1x to 10x over the course of the tech tree is a great first order approximation of this.

And there's also the compounded value that you can chop in wonders before an opponent, meaning you can get a wonder like Machu Picchu where you otherwise could not. Alternatively you could nerf chop value, but I think the fact that it + district cost follow the same formula is a good feature of the game and it feels satisfying to use when you need it.

But there should definitely be some way to make eg stone or copper go from +1 to say +3 by the industrial. As far as woods go they have the +1 for rainforest from zoos. IMO this effect should be transferred to a city center building to make it more accessible, and woods then should have something similar for +1, but perhaps only old growth woods. See, you don't want to make features so good they never get chopped, and woods can be planted indefinitely so we have to be careful with that.
Just my 2 cents.

What about doing it the other way around? Just hypothetically, what if you couldn't build mines on hills by default at all?

Let's say, mines would unlock at Mining as usual, which would allow you to build mines over the appropriate mine-able resources, just like quarries. However, to build mines on empty hills you'd have to wait until an Industrial Zone is built. You'd then be able to build mines on the hills adjacent to the Industrial Zone.

Wouldn't this increase the value of stone and woods vs chop considerably? In fact, it would increase the value of most bonus resources, not only stone.


Some further necessary adjustments:

- Construction available straight from Masonry, without requiring the Horseback Riding tech;
- +2 Production +1 Food from the Water Mill building;
- Camps provide +1 Production, +1 Gold with mercantilism (it's the other way around at present).

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Ohhh, I LIKE THIS THREAD!!!!!!!

Wood IS a RESOURCE!

 

[Sostratus]

What about doing it the other way around? Just hypothetically, what if you couldn't build mines on hills by default at all?

Let's say, mines would unlock at Mining as usual, which would allow you to build mines over the appropriate mine-able resources, just like quarries. However, to build mines on empty hills you'd have to wait until an Industrial Zone is built. You'd then be able to build mines on the hills adjacent to the Industrial Zone.

If you couldn't mine hills at will, it would greatly reduce the amount of production available. This would, contrary to a first guess, make chopping even more valuable, since the production return from chops would effectively be worth more turns of city production. So you'd really really want to chop out stone and wood. Also, most hills would sit empty, which would be a bit strange for players. The only way to attack this problem in a meaningful way is to make the relative advantage of chopping vs not smaller. The underlying fact is that a chop goes from 20 to 200 over the course of the game but the value of a feature/resource is always 1. In a balanced world the relative value of the feature value needs to climb over the game quite a bit! In fact we sort of see this now- I'm much more likely to chop a hill that i can mine than a flat woods I can only farm, because the effective delta in production is 0-1 on the hill but closer to 3-4 on the flat land. Notice how sea resources never get harvested - because there is no alternative to fishing boats. But the total level of production in the game needs to stay the same or go up; if it goes down, it's making chops better.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

If Wood gets counted as a resource, with only old growth accountable for stacking the resource, and that as a resource is being locked to say ship production, and also districts productions, run out of old growth forests, will cause your civ to collapse. Easy chop fix. Not definitive but something.
Fisheries can be built with the governor I don't remember, swapping around coastal cities.

 

[Deliverator]

For wildfires to work, all we need is natural regrowth of woods. I'm sure it's doable, it was in Alpha Centauri 20 years ago. It would work like this:

- Any plains or grasslands tile without an improvement/feature would have a small chance of growing woods if adjacent to another woods tile. The chances would be greater the more adjacent woods tiles there are.

- Woods tiles which suffer a wildfire would then be unusable for 6-10 turns, for instance. The wildfire animation would only last for two turns on a tile. After two turns there's a chance it might spread to adjacent tiles or go out. Each tile affected by a wildfire would then for the following 9 turns have a sort of shabby looking woods on it, to make it visually clear the woods are currently unusable due to being burned out.

- Builders may use the Plant Saplings action on a burned tile to reduce the wait time to 4-5 turns for one charge. Requires some tech.

- Military Engineers may be used to put out a wildfire on an adjacent woods tile. If so, the regrowth period is greatly reduced (e.g to 2-3 turns), plus there's no longer any chance of it spreading to adjacent tiles.

- A new improvement, Fire Lookout, available in the industrial or modern era, would reduce the chance of fire on that tile to 0% and greatly diminish the chance of fire on all woods within 3 tiles.

I had a look at making Forest Fire/Wildfire as a new Disaster type, but I don't think we have mod support for new Disaster types yet. Also wanted an Earthquake Disaster with a chance to create new Geothermal Fissures.

Since Disasters in Civ VI should have some sort of upside my idea was that Woods should go through three states after a Forest Fire:

1) Burnt Woods Feature for perhaps 1-2 turns - with Production Yield reduced to Zero.
2) New Growth Woods Feature for perhaps 10 turns - with Yield boost +1 Food perhaps.
3) Back to regular Woods Feature after that.

At the moment you also have Old Growth Woods which provides more Appeal so that might need some rework to fit with this.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Currently there is a dichotomy:
Clear forest/jungle

• Pro: immediate benefit of chop value, can place any non lumbermill improvement
• Proposed Pro: No forest fire
• Con: increases chance of drought and exacerbates global warming

Don't clear forest/jungle

• Pro: reduces chance of drought and mitigates global warming, +1 yield on tile
• Con: restricted in improvement choices to lumbermills/resource specific ones
• Proposed Con: forest fire

If you added forest fires that can damage infrastructure, then the primary motivator for an inland civ to keep their forests would be greatly diminished: you won't avoid a disaster from striking and damaging stuff, so you might as well chop forests and build an aqueduct, which at least keeps the drought effects tempered.

Woods offer generally very little for most victory types - there comes a point where chopping them always beats the +1 yield from the feature. Eventually a lumbermill on woods will beat a mine in production, but that comes int he future era; and you lose out on the free chop.

If, however, it was more like the drought in that it temporarily "burns out" the woods so it doesn't give the +1prod/food, and then on top of that it could add fertility, then you might have a somewhat compelling narrative to settle such locations. (Especially a big mass of woods next to you that you see get burned out, and a flurry of +1 fertility lands on it.) Sort of like how floods/volcanoes are mostly a boon. Tornadoes really suck to deal with, though, because they don't have counter-play. So we always want to avoid introducing that sort of thing.

Yes, I would actually like to see forest & jungle tiles improve-in various ways-the longer you leave them untouched. Maybe increased drought & global warming mitigation after each X turns, +1 productions/food/culture/science per X turns (maybe based around Social Policies/Technologies), Increased Amenity. Just an idea.

 

[Deliverator]

Yes, I would actually like to see forest & jungle tiles improve-in various ways-the longer you leave them untouched. Maybe increased drought & global warming mitigation after each X turns, +1 productions/food/culture/science per X turns (maybe based around Social Policies/Technologies), Increased Amenity. Just an idea.

The thing is in real life forest actually need fire to renew nutrients so while old forest might look prettier is doesn't necessarily make sense that they'd give more food etc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ecology

 

[steveg700]

The bottom line is, forest fires move away from FXS's implicit design, which is that players need to have more incentive to keep their forests than chop them. Turning forests into a hazard would give players one more reason to go ahead and chop them out of the way.