changing chopping behavior a little

[dmm1285]

I don't like how it applies the minerals at all right now, where it puts them to what you were building at the second they are chopped, instead of just giving you 20 minerals overflow and letting you choose where to put them before the end of the turn.

How it works right now is a pain for me because I like to use chop minerals for settlers, while not limiting my growth, so I have to make sure at the beginning of to switch, or the minerals go towards a barracks or warrior, or somehting that I did not want or need to build yet.

Instead, I'd like to see it work exactly as overflow does, you would have 20 minerals plus the city's production to play with and decide where it goes before the end of the turn.

My questions are:
1) Has some mod out there already done this? It seems like an obvious fix.

2) If it hasn't been done before, how hard would it be to mod in?

[Dale]

You can queue builds. Use that to get around it.

I can't remember the key to press..... shift or alt I think.

[dmm1285]

Originally posted by Dale
You can queue builds. Use that to get around it.

I can't remember the key to press..... shift or alt I think.

I'm not sure how the queue would help, it seems that the minerals apply to whatever is first in the build order the exact second the forest is cut down

[Dale]

Hang on, so you want to specify what thing the hammers produced by a city/chop/etc go to each turn????

That's crazy! That's mega-micro-management! Plus, a city can only build one thing at a time. If you change your build queue, you are using a very inefficient method. If you half build something, then go off and change the build queue to something else, then the half build thing will start to decay. That means you start to loose hammers.

For anything that has hammers already allocated to it, if it is not building worked on right now, then it will decay each turn. What you're doing (if I understand you right) is costing you many hammers in all the switching around of the build queues. Not to mention the nightmare micro-management you must be doing.

So I'm sorry, but I can't see anyone doing a mod for this.

[dmm1285]

No, you're misunderstanding me (or I'm not explaining it well). What I like to do for my first settler (and maybe my second) is to basically ONLY use chop hammers and pop rushing for it so I can be growing in the meantime.

Now, if chopping worked logically, it would work just like the overflow is, so when I get the message that 20 hammers are going to London, I could just open up the city window and switch to the settler for a turn, then switch it back the next turn.

What happens now is you get the message for 20 hammers, but they go ONLY to what you are working on when the message comes up. This actually creates more micromanagement for me, because I have to keep track how many turns the chop has left, or the hammers go somewhere instead of my settler.

If this still doesn't make sense, try starting a game and watch how the hammers from a forest come into a city vs. how you can play with the overflow, you should understand what I'm saying then.

Also, the hammer decy thing has no affect at all on me, the settler is still finished within 10 turns of starting.

[Dale]

Okay I understand what you're saying.

It works like this to stop the chop-exploit that MPers were using in Civ3.

[dmm1285]

Ok, I'm not sure how it could be exploited any more the other way, but I don't plan on playing multiplayer or exploiting the bug, so how hard do you think this would be to mod?

[Dale]

Ask a python modder to look. I'm an SDK modder. If there's an answer, it'll be in python.

[Yakk]

I don't understand. I thought chopping did work the way you asked?

When you get the chop message, you go to the city, change what is on the top of the production queue, and the next turn that thing gets the production from the chopping is what you moved to the top of your queue.

Next turn, rejigger your queue and things go back to normal.

Because of the ese of this, I'm trying to figure out an elegant way to make chopping not be instant. I figure makeing "clear-cutting" improvements that evolve away, and while they are active generate +6 hammers per turn...

[Oldphart]

Originally posted by Yakk

...
Because of the ese of this, I'm trying to figure out an elegant way to make chopping not be instant. I figure makeing "clear-cutting" improvements that evolve away, and while they are active generate +6 hammers per turn...

I have wanted something like that, it seems more realistic in many ways. Maybe a ramping up is best, though - you get less yield from the first worker-turn because of setup overhead.

In addition, I think logging should only be possible adjacent to a city or river in the beginning, unless you have elephants (ivory).
Roads with either horse or cow (oxcarts) would give access to remote non-river areas.

River or railroad should also give a small chop bonus because there would be less overhead getting the timber home.