Tundra and irrigation

[Unimatrix11]

Sorry - wrong - you need to have your answer in form of a querstion... The correct response is: "What is simulating the plant/chop/plant/chop-cycle ?" (or: "what is a lumbermill ?")...

Mr. Alex Treback (or however he is spelled)

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Brizey

Ding ding ding!! The lumbermill improvement simulates a continuous plant/chop/plant/chop... cycle.

The problem is that the lumber mill improvement does not simulate the ability to begin the cycle by planting trees in places where they weren't already growing. One option would be to make the "plant forest" worker task available at the same time that lumber mills become available, or possibly later at Biology to reflect the more organized lumbering operations of modern times. It might also make sense to have a newly planted forest be a "young forest" tile for ten turns (adjusted for game speed), providing no benefit, before it matures into a standard forest tile. And there could be a rule that no forest planted by a player can ever produce hammers from being chopped. Finally, the game might make a distinction between planted forests and natural forests and allow forest preserves only on forests that grew naturally - or possibly on planted forests that have been around for a sufficiently long time that the distinction no longer matters.

As things stand now, the need to decide, "I'm not going to chop a forest in 2000 BC because I want to be able to build lumber mills more than three thousand years from now," seems more than a little absurd. I can understand the desire not to let players chop forests in the early game and then replant them right away in order to have their cake and eat it too. But the solution in Civ IV goes too far in the opposite direction.

[Jaybe]

I can understand the desire not to let players chop forests in the early game and then replant them right away in order to have their cake and eat it too. But the solution in Civ IV goes too far in the opposite direction.

Well, what would you expect??
When the pendulum has swung too far to the left, it will obviously also swing too far to the right. After a couple more iterations, it might become balanced (to some anyway, though obviously not to everyone).

[Petrus2]

Originally posted by nbarclay


The problem is that the lumber mill improvement does not simulate the ability to begin the cycle by planting trees in places where they weren't already growing. One option would be to make the "plant forest" worker task available at the same time that lumber mills become available, or possibly later at Biology to reflect the more organized lumbering operations of modern times. It might also make sense to have a newly planted forest be a "young forest" tile for ten turns (adjusted for game speed), providing no benefit, before it matures into a standard forest tile. And there could be a rule that no forest planted by a player can ever produce hammers from being chopped. Finally, the game might make a distinction between planted forests and natural forests and allow forest preserves only on forests that grew naturally - or possibly on planted forests that have been around for a sufficiently long time that the distinction no longer matters.

As things stand now, the need to decide, "I'm not going to chop a forest in 2000 BC because I want to be able to build lumber mills more than three thousand years from now," seems more than a little absurd. I can understand the desire not to let players chop forests in the early game and then replant them right away in order to have their cake and eat it too. But the solution in Civ IV goes too far in the opposite direction.

Too many rules! Remember KISS.

[Ari]

Why not simply make planting forests an action that can't be sped up with multiple workers? This makes sense from a real life point of view, since you're waiting for *trees* to grow. On marathon, chopping post-math yields 90. If it takes, say, 25 turns to plant (I've played on marathon too long - I can't begin to guess a reasonable number for normal lengthed games), and you want to keep repeating and chopping, then all you're really doing is creating a railroaded lumbermill. Worse, you're deprived of the health benefit of the forest for most of that time. Something like that would be a simple rule that also prevents abuse while giving you an additional "goodie" for some tech (biology, say, or scientific method).

[snoopy369]

Mostly added micro, and as said before they want to encourage a choice between chopping the forest and not chopping the forest, rather than just 'chop all forests'. No matter what length you gave it (less than half the game or so), it is always the right choice to chop rather than not chop if you can replant it; just replant sometime before lumbermill. (The chop/plant/chop also is added micromanagement, which civ4 is getting away from.)
Replanting also gives essentially a 'two improvement' path for tiles, which is inconsistent with the rest of the game.
Grassland (2/0/0) -> Plant to Forest, 2/1/0 -> Lumbermill, 2/2/0 (2/3/0 with RR).

Nothing else has the ability to be improved twice; while you have things like forests and flood plains, they are not player choice improvements, and can only be removed (in the case of forest).

Otherwise why would you want to use workshops? Plant a forest + lumbermill every time, -1/+3 versus +0.5/+2 is not a difficult choice (health=food late in the game) without SP, and in BtS there are many reasons not to use SP .

[Brizey]

I think it adds a touch of realism. The forests in the game are huge--hundreds or thousands of square miles. We know that historically, forests this large have been cut down. But I know of no replanting effort on that scale.

In fact the natual regrowth is suspect from a realism point of view.

[wodan11]

I remember reading a study about regrowth... it conclusively demonstrated an increase in growth in oddball places, coinciding with the cutting down of the rainforests and other continental forests. They hypothesized that the decrease of planet-wide "vegetative consumption" (for lack of better terms) of CO2 and other plant needs, spur the growth of trees etc world-wide.

Basically, that the omnipresent scrub trees and undergrowth in modern times have spread in size and/or turned into small forests themselves.

Of course in the game that would imply that trees should just pop up in any unimproved tile, not just in ones adjacent to existing forests.

Wodan

[Jaybe]

Of course in the game that would imply that trees should just pop up in any unimproved tile, not just in ones adjacent to existing forests.

I wouldn't have a problem with that.

[joncnunn]

As long as there was a higher probability of spreading to an adjoining tile than a non-adjoining one.

Originally posted by Jaybe

Of course in the game that would imply that trees should just pop up in any unimproved tile, not just in ones adjacent to existing forests.

I wouldn't have a problem with that.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Brizey
I think it adds a touch of realism. The forests in the game are huge--hundreds or thousands of square miles. We know that historically, forests this large have been cut down. But I know of no replanting effort on that scale.

The real problem with realism, as I see it, is how little forest tends to be left late in the game. I'm skeptical as to whether the planet's ecosystem could be maintained with so little forest. And what are the people in all the cities, towns, and villages supposed to build their houses out of if virtually all of the forests have been clearcut?

The root of the problem is that Firaxis has made the benefit of clear-cutting entire forests far too large compared with the benefit of sustainable forestry practices (i.e. working forest tiles). If we look at what generally happened through history, the proper reason for players to clear entire forests ought to be to make room for other improvements, not to get a massive immediate boost in production. A tiny bit of extra production might be reasonable from harvesting more trees at once than is possible with sustainable forestry practices. But clear-cutting shouldn't result in more production than harvesting trees on a sustainable basis for half a millennium (in the early game). When Firaxis made chopping forests ridiculously overpowered, they created a situation where they felt that they needed to take away the ability to replant forests in order to discourage players from chopping everything.

As for the size of the forest tiles in Civ, that is an unavoidable part of the simplifications required to create a playable game. Either players can plant entire entire tiles, or they can't plant at all. Under that paradigm, the act of planting a forest tile would logically be viewed as representing the combined total effect of numerous smaller planting efforts.

Here's an interesting idea: instead of making planting forests a worker job, the job could be assigned to a special Forester unit, which would be a national unit with a limit on how many can be built. The Forester units would plant entire tiles at a time because the game is tile-based. But the limit on how many Forester units are allowed would keep the overall rate at which forests can be planted within reasonable limits. Couple that with a decrease in the value of chopping and we would end up with a much better balance.

There are two down sides to this change. First, it would devalue the State Property civic by giving civs that aren't running State Property a way to offset the production value of State Property workshops. And second, for civs without State Property, the change would essentially make workshops useful only as temporary stopgap improvements while waiting for Foresters to get around to planting.

On the other hand, I would very likely actually end up making more use of workshops than I currently do. As things stand now, since I normally use Universal Suffrage and Free Speech,I almost invariably view cottages as better than workshops. But with my proposed changes, using a combination of irrigation and workshops while waiting for my Forester units to get around to planting forests in areas where I want more production could be an interesting alternative to cottage spam.

And it would certainly be more realistic to have a world with a higher percentage of forests than we currently see late in Civ IV games. I don't know about other countries, but from what I've heard, the combined effect of planting and cutting trees in the USA has resulted in an increase in the total number of trees, in stark contrast to the massive deforestation that inevitably occurs in Civ IV.

[joncnunn]

I guess you could see more forest "survive" by reducing the hammer gotten from those choped outside of city radius further, but I think it would still be marginal even if it were 0.

It just makes too much sense to chop forest towards the borders for security reasons and if the tile would be within a rival AIs city radius if it were in their culture then choping the forest to deny them the health benifit should the tile lapse back into their culture makes even more sense.

I think a good solution would probably be to bring back global warming events from previous Civ versions; with say things like Factories & Power Plants, especally Coal Power Plants increase it's likelyhood. While forests decrease the likehood; grassland forest more so than plains/forest or tundra/forest.

[Kuciwalker]

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Global Warming is one of the worst mechanics in the whole series. In addition, that won't deter a chopper, since chopping hurts his opponents as much as him, while only benefitting him.

[Brizey]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker In addition, that won't deter a chopper, since chopping hurts his opponents as much as him, while only benefitting him.

Just like deforestation ITRW.

[Kuciwalker]

Actually, GGS claims that deforestation was one of the causes of the fall of the Middle Eastern civs, then Greece and Rome.