[SPOILERS] Team SsS

[spacemanmf]

Forest growth on the hill! Thought I was going crazy then. Give me my cookie!

[Sandover]

Good job!

Here you go *hands imaginary cookie to spacemanmf".

[scooter]

Great news about both the wheat and the forest growth! About the forest hill thing - how many worker turns would it take to mine the hill? Chopping would be 3, so I'm curious how many turns it would cost us.

[Sandover]

Four (five if we count the turn moving onto the hill). As is the worker completes two turns ahead of BW.

[scooter]

Thought about it some more... Here's the thing, the quicker we finish two chops, the quicker we have two workers. Once we have two workers we could easily go back and mine it real quick, but I would imagine just doing two straight-up chops would get us our worker about 3-4 turns quicker? Is there a benefit of mining it that would outweigh that?

Maybe the answer is yes, but I'm curious what you think about that trade-off. We would be saving a worker turn by not having to move BACK onto the hill though, so maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea - in that we would gain a higher-yielding tile...

Edit: crossposted

[Sandover]

A worker is 60H.
Currently we're making 4H in Sandograd producing a worker.
We can get 40H from two forest chops in 7 turns.

So our second worker basically finishes once we've chopped those two forests, and we'll get some overflow into a warrior. The alternative would be to finish the hill mine first, which would get us the worker a few turns (guesstimating three) later, but "saves" one forest for later.

[scooter]

Actually when you put it that way that's not that bad of a trade-off really. 3ish turns later in order to use a forest on a settler/Praet instead. I'm curious what Square Leg thinks too if he gets a chance to pop by. Obviously we've got some time to decide still, but I think I'm leaning towards the mine first.

Any lurkers have an opinion?

[Sandover]

Another thing worth considering is that we'd lose 1C from working the hill instead of the sheep tile. "But food and production is way more important than commerce in the early game!" Well, true, but even the loss of such a slight amount is likely to delay Agriculture by one turn, which delays working our 5F tile (farmed corn).

We do have 11(!) forests within our BFC with a few more being added once we get our (creative-boosted) border pop, so I figure another alternative is to focus purely on chops for production for a while and use the lake tile (2F,0H,2C) for a slight research boost until we get our corn farmer. We can also use the lake tile some while making our first worker even if it delays it by one turn, as long as we're not going for mining the hill first.

[novice]

Actually when you put it that way that's not that bad of a trade-off really. 3ish turns later in order to use a forest on a settler/Praet instead. I'm curious what Square Leg thinks too if he gets a chance to pop by. Obviously we've got some time to decide still, but I think I'm leaning towards the mine first.

Any lurkers have an opinion?

Well apparently some people think it's horribly unfair of lurkers to chime in, but I'll take my chances.

Delaying the worker 3 turns means delaying the settler and thus your 2nd city 3 turns. These things snowball, and you've got a lot of forests. Your worker finishes on turn 15 and moves onto a forest, it does nothing on turn 16, and starts chopping on turn 17. If BW came say on turn 19 I would do the mine, but not in this case.

[Square Leg]

The strongest bit of going BW first is the ability to chop out a 2nd worker sharp. We should do that in my opinion. If the first worker has time to put a couple of turns into a mine then fair enough, but he should be ready to chop as soon as BW is done. Especially considering we cannot farm yet. We are stuck in an annoying situation where our worker may have to twiddle his thumbs for a turn... So be it - like novice says - we need another worker otherwise we delay all sorts that is worse than having an idle worker turn... This is one advantage of starting with the wheel! there is always something tto do!