Civ6 Chopping/Harvesting: When is it worthwhile?

[HansLemurson]

I have been puzzled by how many strategy discussions I've read[citation needed] talking about using forest-chopping in Civ6 to hurry early production.  

Clearing land costs you a Builder-Charge which cost you production to obtain in the first place, and the price of Builders goes up when you have to replace those spent charges.  Furthermore, the value of land clearance increases with time, making the premature clearing of land a dubious prospect.

But later in the game, Harvesting is more valuable and builder charges can be made cheaper, making the Harvesting of resources more valuable.

At what point in the game does it become worthwhile to cut down forests and forever lose their Production potential?

[Ruined Everything]

Chopping is an awesome way to boost production. Let me give you an example from my recently played turn set (T30 - T50) from RB SG 1 (emperor, small map, 6 players, inland sea.) 

In SG 1, Kyoto, our capital, was rocking 14 base hammers at T35. With the 30% worker boost civic, that got amplified to 18 hammers. Workers from T30 - T40 cost me 54 hammers, so I could build a worker in precisely 3 turns. Each worker charge was worth 18 hammers - I was in effect building one worker charge per turn. 

At T45, I finished Early Empires. That gave me access to the colonization policy, which boosts settler production by 50%. I then sent the workers that I'd built using the 30% worker boost civic to chop down forests. Each chop was worth 34 hammers. With the colonization policy, that was boosted to 51 hammers. Recall that each one of those chops was a single turn of 'stored' capital production. By passing that production through two boosting policies, I turned the 14 h/t capital into a 51 h/t capital. That's more than a 350% production boost.

In civ 6, workers should be thought of as stored production. You can spend that production on tile improvements, or you can release it, by chopping a forest, at a later date. If you can stash away production using the worker boost and then release it using a second policy's boost you can get a massive production boost. There is no difference between me spending those 14 hammers on a settler directly at T35 and routing them through a worker to reemerge at T45. Workers act as a sort of federal reserve from Master of Orion! The T45 option, however, has massive production boost implications. Understanding this, I think, is an important step towards understanding how workers work in civ6.

[Ruined Everything]

(This ignores the fact that you might want to work those forests! Mines are strictly better than forests, so the dilemma only really appears for flatland forest. Whether to use a forest as a way of recovering stored production or not is strictly dependent on the map - how big you're planning on growing your cities, which tiles are available, etc.)

[HansLemurson]

Forests on hills we all agree should be chopped and mined, and resources in the way of a District should be harvested before they are lost, but are you advocating for the destruction of permanent assets?

Sure you can "store production" and then "release it" later for bonuses, but you can only do so a limited number of times. Your talk of a 350% bonus is dubious math. You're just accessing temporary and finite sources of external production. Production whose quantity will be greater later, whose usage increases the cost of all further Builder Charges, and which can permanently remove a long term asset from your lands.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that "Production Now" is worth more than "Production Later", and getting settlers out early leads to compounding growth, but given all the factors that I mentioned, are you saying the time when "Chopping becomes worthwhile" is "As soon as you can fell a tree"?

Are there conditions that might induce you to "save a forest for later" or value it for a sawmill instead? Or do your calculations lead you towards a world devoid of trees whose sacrifice gave your rapid victory?

[The Black Sword]

If you chop a forested hill and replace it with a mine that's 2 worker charges, and it doesn't increase the tile yield until after you get the Mine-boosting tech. I'm not convinced you should be auto-chopping those until after that tech.

In general, I've only really considered keeping river side forests to be milled and even then they do get chopped. When to chop is a difficult question though(more interesting than I initially thought to be fair), I've been thinking case-by-case so far.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I put an epic game up the other night to try and get my head around movements and fighting with 1upt. Chopping does not seem to scale with game speed! I went to chop before I put down a commercial district and got like 30 hammers. Massively overlooked there, but if this is the case on online speed which is like double speed if chops still aren't scaled then this would be absolutely retarded.

[yuris125]

Yeah, I believe there's already an NQ mod out for multiplayer which halves the yields from chopping, precisely because they don't scale and are completely OP on online speed

[HansLemurson]

Yeah, on Online speed the yields are so high that it's a total no-brainer. (Still have no idea why they cut promotion combat-XP costs in half...did they think there would only be half as many units?)

But this is good for the discussion, because there is clearly a time when chopping is always good, when the yields are sufficiently high.

But what is the threshold, and does it vary by terrain type and forest location? Are there cases where one might chop a plains-forest, but not a grassland forest? A situation where hammers are important enough to clear a Hill forest, but not a forest on the flat?

Is early-chopping to get a settler out 2 turns sooner more valuable than later chopping at 2x the yield to hurry a district? (Interestingly, I read that chopping yields scale at the same rate as district costs, so ~3 forests will always complete a new district in any era)

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Yeah, I believe there's already an NQ mod out for multiplayer which halves the yields from chopping, precisely because they don't scale and are completely OP on online speed

Lol, china 4 turn workers slash and burning the land ftw!

[Ruined Everything]

Is early-chopping to get a settler out 2 turns sooner more valuable than later chopping at 2x the yield to hurry a district?  (Interestingly, I read that chopping yields scale at the same rate as district costs, so ~3 forests will always complete a new district in any era)

This *is* interesting. As long as there are sufficient forests around, that means that in any era:
1. If you have 3 charge workers, a district costs as much as a worker.
2. If you have 6 charge workers, a district costs 1/2 as much as worker.

Good for protracted expansion.

EDIT: With the 2x multiplier thing, feudalism and 'mids, a single worker can chop out 3 districts with overflow. That seems very powerful - I'll have to check it out in my next game!