Saving the forests vs. chopping everything
The two main reasons to save the forests / chop moderately early on are:
- You have stone/marble and want to build stuff or get a lot of failgold
- You want to chop an army later
Here we're definitely not in the first case, although having some forests to chop an army could be nice. So let's weigh the opportunity costs of chopping / not chopping. First, there's only one mechanic as powerful as chops early on, which is the granary-whip. Having access to granaries+slavery very early on allows you to both save forests and improve tiles instead of chopping, basically negating the opportunity cost of not chopping. Here, for this to work, we would need to tech Agriculture+BW+Wheel+Pottery, putting us around T35. Add the time to whip a granary and re-grow, we're at T40. But we're missing an improved plains-cow and a riverside sheep. And we don't even have Fishing, as teching it would put the Granary even further away. Plus, as the timing isn't very good, we have wasted hammers on warriors/barracks that are not needed on Monarch. And in the meantime, our worker didn't have much to do but chop forests, so we're not even saving that many. We end up behind the "chopping-approach" in both hammers and commerce. And now the capital has to whip a granary + settlers, and we don't have any happiness resources -> cannot 3pop whip the settlers, have to whip them 4-2 while investing natural hammers/food surplus in them = not that efficient. Do I really need to say any more on the matter?
Now that we've set aside the early granary approach, what about saving the forests, i.e. staying at only one worker and building settlers. What will happen is pretty simple: we won't reach Pottery/Writing any quicker but we'll have one less city and (at least) one less worker by T50, without having more improved tiles. This can be acceptable if we plan to attack very early (i.e. HA-rush), but here, waiting until construction means we wouldn't be chopping anything until T75. Let's say we reach Construction on T85, we'd have all the forests left, but 4-5 cities instead of 7, less improvements i.e. less commerce, slower troop movement and no real production advantage: one forest gives as many hammers as one pop. So having 10 more population is far superior to having 10 more forests, which would be much more useful if chopped early on, as the whole game is about snowballing.
Building "improvements" or connecting cities instead of chopping
(mostly an answer to @Anysense , but probably a good reminder to many people out here)
First, I didn't have Pottery until T49, so I could hardly build cottages -- couldn't have anything but unimproved land at T50. But that's besides the point.
Quick maths:
- 1 chop = 4 worker turns = 1 floodplains cottage. 1 mine = 5 worker turns
- 1 chop = 20 hammers. Opportunity cost of not having built a cottage (assuming you want to work it immediately) = <4 commerce (because building the cottage takes more worker turns)
In some games, though, your bottleneck is commerce and you don't want more than 3-4 cities early on. In this case, building cottages can be relevant. But here we already have plenty of commerce, so chopping is just superior in every way. Same thing goes for roads.
Looking back, this reply seems to be a bit more smug than I intended. Might have been inconscouisly driven by Anysense's post's smugness, but never mind. I'm not offended in any way, nor do I wish to offend anyone. I'm really enjoying to have, once again, such a lively discussion on the forums.
into a unit, say 4
6
. And no granary/library, that is later you'll have to whip both whithout chops. Dunno if it matters though, research is so cheap on Monarch it feels like at least double gold on Deity.
by having 1 fp less on BFC, so totaling only 1
