Civ6 Chopping/Harvesting: When is it worthwhile?

[SevenSpirits]

Its realistic in the sense that you can move food and relocate workers and machines nowadays.

Its very ynrealistic that trader units generate the food and stuff out of thin air.

Trade route to a capital with encampment and industrial district should give +4 food & prod to outlying city...and subtract this amount from capital. Realistically, that is.

I think it's an OK abstraction. It's true that trade is positive sum. So a simplified abstract system representing commerce SHOULD generate stuff apparently out of thin air.

The sketchy part is that gold, supposedly representing the positive outputs of commerce, is already in the game. So I consider this an example of Civ 6 having too many redundant systems. It's not an elegant game.

[Ruined Everything]

I'd argue that the gradual shift in your civilization's economy from being dependent to tile yields to being dependent on districts/buildings/trade routes sort of reflects the gradual transition of historical economies from being primarily based around primary sector activities (mining, farming, lumberjacking, etc.) to secondary/tertiary sector activities (trade, manufacturing, etc.)

In civ6, basically all tile yields are primary sector activities (plantations, lumber mills, etc.) This (obviously) contrasts with civ4, where a great deal of the commerce/hammers on the map in the late game where associated with manufacturing (e.g. workshops) / assorted tertiary industries (cottages, etc.) I think this is reflective of the game that civ 6's designers put out - tile yields are strongly equated to the idea of raw resources, and most other parts of the economy are represented by different abstractions.

It's a decision that definitely has aesthetic merit, IMO. Whether it makes for a better or worse game is something for smarter people than I to decide.

[HansLemurson]

If Districts gave you access to powerful Specialist slots who would make use of Feudalism's super-farms, then I would agree about the transition from Primary to Secondary production, but the fact is that Caravans produce resources from thin air without any population.

If Caravans moved resources, but perhaps provided a bonus (Gold, +25% production...) in doing so, then I'd say that would be more realistic.

*****
However, we are getting WAY OFF TOPIC. This thread is about Chopping/Harvesting and when is the right time to do it.

[T-hawk]

I remember one of the Civ franchise or similar games having caravans that convoyed food rather than adding it.  Might have been one of Civ 2's expansions?  Anyway, what happened was they were never worth using.  Civ cities aren't divergent enough to make worthwhile building something that only redistributes resources rather than adding.  Firaxis knows this so all the recent Civs have had trade routes that merely create.

It's somewhat silly to patch with the proposal to move resources plus a bonus.  Since then what you do is send caravans in both directions to net out the movement but keep the bonuses.  That could be further patched with rules against bidirectional or cyclical groups of trade routes, but then that becomes an unfun experience of manipulating your way around the gamey rules, you get things like setting up dummy cities solely to serve as route sources or sinks.

Edit: I'm thinking of Alpha Centauri's supply crawlers, which could optionally convoy resources between bases or harvest them. And exactly nobody ever used them for the former.

[Commodore]

Edit: I'm thinking of Alpha Centauri's supply crawlers, which could optionally convoy resources between bases or harvest them.  And exactly nobody ever used them for the former.

Well, they were used to convoy minerals, in a way...

Same thing here, really. Often the way Civ-series games work 20 of a thing now is worth a lot more than 1 per turn of the thing in perpetuity.

[HansLemurson]

I remember one of the Civ franchise or similar games having caravans that convoyed food rather than adding it.  Might have been one of Civ 2's expansions?  Anyway, what happened was they were never worth using.  Civ cities aren't divergent enough to make worthwhile building something that only redistributes resources rather than adding.  Firaxis knows this so all the recent Civs have had trade routes that merely create.

It's somewhat silly to patch with the proposal to move resources plus a bonus.  Since then what you do is send caravans in both directions to net out the movement but keep the bonuses.  That could be further patched with rules against bidirectional or cyclical groups of trade routes, but then that becomes an unfun experience of manipulating your way around the gamey rules, you get things like setting up dummy cities solely to serve as route sources or sinks.

Edit: I'm thinking of Alpha Centauri's supply crawlers, which could optionally convoy resources between bases or harvest them.  And exactly nobody ever used them for the former.

Civ2's Caravans could move 1 food from one city to another (as well as filling the target city's food box).  It wasn't worth the 50 shields and loss of a trade-route slot that could have given commerce.

In Alpha Centauri, Supply Crawlers could be sent out to harvest food or minerals or energy from un-worked terrain.  This was extremely powerful as delivering minerals to your cities to build more Crawlers allowed for compounding growth far beyond your normal population limit.  Delivering food to cities also allowed for a "specialist economy" in small otherwise unproductive cities.  You still had to tie up the land though, so you weren't actually getting resources from nowhere.

Edit: I'm thinking of Alpha Centauri's supply crawlers, which could optionally convoy resources between bases or harvest them.  And exactly nobody ever used them for the former.

Well, they were used to convoy minerals, in a way...

Same thing here, really. Often the way Civ-series games work 20 of a thing now is worth a lot more than 1 per turn of the thing in perpetuity.

Civ contains both "Gain X production now, at the cost of Y/turn" and "Pay W production now but gain Z/turn".  The trick is always to make sure that Z/W is more than Y/X.

(...There's nothing like verbalized algebra to make a simple point confusing. )

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I had massive love for the civ 2 trade caravans. Instant building of new crucial wonders with caravans. Some of them were hugely OPed too.

[Sareln]

It looks like they just patched out chops outside of your territory.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/289070/a...7742411203

[HansLemurson]

It looks like they just patched out chops outside of your territory.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/289070/a...7742411203

And I never got a chance to use them well 
Good bye lumber-pirates, I hardly knew ye.

[HansLemurson]

It is now much more difficult to give production-multipliers to forest chopping, and the extra units you get as a side effect can no longer be turned into Gold. And you can't even chop forests in neutral lands!

So, with all these exploits gone, where does Chopping stand?