[GS] Stone and Copper - Do you mostly harvest?

[L4Psha]

I'll try give you a few ways to look at this:

1 production on turn 10 is worth a lot more than 1 production on turn 100. So the value of your small steady income steadily diminishes.
So if you have to choose between 1 production per turn, or getting say 50 production at once, you do not need just 50 turns time for those choises to be equal. In fact, since inflation over 50 turns is really big, the value of that small trickle will probably never add up to 50. (its like 1 + 0.95+0.905+0.86+0.817+....)

Those who advocate aggressive harvesting do so from the viewpoint that efficiency = winning earlier. They will win their games usually between turn 150 and 200. Say you are going to win a domination victory at turn 180. Any troops you build after turn 160 will never reach the front lines, and thus your production is worth nothing after turn 160. At turn 120, your small trickle can only provide you 40 more production of value. (and that is not even counting the inflation explained above) If at turn 120 you can gain more than 40 by harvesting, that is obviously a good idea. Add the inflation story to that, and you will want to harvest even earlier.

If you think you can't win before turn 200 and thus it's probably not a good idea for you to harvest, you sort of make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is however understandable that while those who only live to win as fast as possible see no counter to this argumentation and rightfully harvest everything, others feel it's a choise of playstyle. Civ is after all also a builder game, and we like it partly because we want to build a beautifull and powerful empire, not to deplete everything as fast as we can and win with a shriveled sort of empire that seems to be winning on it's last breath. (it is after all not only harvesting this logic goes for, it is also to be considered when doing other longer term investments. You don't want to be building mines, factories, powerplants etc if your game is not going to last long enough to make them worthy, so you don't build any of that crap, you just harvest and cram out units asap)

It's a good thing they make the value of the harvesting grow over time. In the very early game, there is virtually no value to gain, because 1 worker action costs about 20 production and your harvest doesn't really give you much more than 20 production. As time goes on, the harvest becomes more valuable. By the time you get to feudalism, your worker action costs less, and the harvest provides a lot more, so now it has become very valuable. When exactly you should harvest is a complicated matter, but @ feudalism is probably a good baseline since that is both where your harvests just jumped up in value and it also is, if you play aggressively and win fast, between 50 and 100 turns before the end of the game. Stuff that is very valuable for harvesting you may want to harvest earlier. Stuff that is in your way for districts you probably want to harvest super early. (district placement should absolutely be prioritized over preserving harvestable resources) If you want a space victory, you may well want to keep stuff around one or 2 cities till the end so you can harvest it to build space parts. And many more considerations can go into what you will harvest when. But at some point you should harvest everything, winning the game with unharvested resources around is like dying with a big fat bank account.

Yes, i also thought about inflaition, but mostly it's my playstyle them. A always play till the end. Late game is the most interesting for me. Especially after addition of the future era.

 

[LMT]

i never been a big fan of mass harvesting/chopping. I certainly get why it is strong, especially when R&F came out but part of me feels it is wrong to just remove most/all resources.

It may feel wrong, but it seems historically accurate to me.

If it's rainforest or woods, I'll chop away. If it's stone, I harvest. Copper & crabs? Depends on where in the game I'm at. If I don't get around to them until later on, the gold amount doesn't seem worth it.

 

[UWHabs]

Stone I almost always harvest. Another big bonus to harvesting is if you can plan it to max bonuses. Magnus harvested Stone goes a long way to getting stuff up faster.
Copper though I will almost never harvest. I tend to find that I'm never too flush with builder charges that I'd rather get the mine up on it a turn sooner rather than get some gold. Obviously back when we had Goddess of the Harvest, that was a different story, but I'd definitely love to actually see the math to see what the tradeoff truly is. Crabs I think would generally be worth keeping, because of both fishing boats and the adjacencies they give to harbors or fisheries.

 

[Ferocitus]

Sorry I had to add that on the flip side India shouldn't harvest cattle or build a pasture on them in the first place.

Sounds fair.
Proscriptions on food and produce could be tied to other religions and cultures, e.g. meat and dairy in Judaism, no pigs in Islam/Judaism etc.
Japan could harvest crabs, but it might mean the loss of a governor.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50178408

 

[tetley]

1 production on turn 10 is worth a lot more than 1 production on turn 100. So the value of your small steady income steadily diminishes.
So if you have to choose between 1 production per turn, or getting say 50 production at once, you do not need just 50 turns time for those choises to be equal. In fact, since inflation over 50 turns is really big, the value of that small trickle will probably never add up to 50. (its like 1 + 0.95+0.905+0.86+0.817+....)

That's exactly the kind of math I had hoped to see on here, to analyze whether harvesting makes sense.

However, on turn 100 you are getting more than 1 production per turn from quarries. The techs start to make them yield more. And I have no idea what happens if Ruhr Valley enters into the mix.

 

[MisterBoomBoom]

Anyone have a handy link to to the best "harvest any resource" mod available/working for GS?

 

[Victoria]

winning the game with unharvested resources around is like dying with a big fat bank account.

great quote. I would change the last bit to dying with a beautiful looking fat bank account that you enjoyed making.
if you have 20-30 cities you have a barren landscape stripped of everything but with 10 cities you can mine because the workers are not so expensive. After all a 2:1 grassland hill is not as cool as a 2:4. You can do these things and still win and win well. In fact as long as you get ahead in science you do not have to conquer, just pillage. Make the game much more manageable.
It’s funny but when I play with 10 cities and finish at sat T220 the game is shorter time wise than playing with 30 cities and finishing at T170. So I now hate conquering everything, and if you do not take (cities) you do not get so much hate.