Intensive Forestry Operations
|
Quick Start Challenge  Items below this point
Known Bugs and Glitches |
Workers should never be idle and at this point in the game you should be carrying or building a fairly large worker force if you anticipate that the game will proceed to the point where railroad construction will be necessary. If life were perfect, you would be able to have no workers at all and then instantly have as many workers as you need to complete all your railroads in a single turn. But life and civ3 both are not perfect. The military power and economic power of railroads also combine to dictate that the worker workforce should be at its highest point in the game just prior to the discovery of steam. You could have access to the Democracy form of government which would increase worker productivity by 50%. This increased productivity could be offset by the knowledge that every worker will have to be supported by gold payments from your treasury at the rate of one gold unit per worker per turn. I quantify this time period as being “prior to the discovery of Steam Power”, because railroads are such an overpowering military and productivity force in the Civ3 game that their presence will almost always force you to honor a set of priorities that will cause any if not all forestry operations to be set aside while railroads are completed. So, essentially we are focused on forestry operations that provide us with the maximum benefit from our workers in the period of time leading up to beginning construction of railroads. These same operations may continue after railroads are completed for as long of a period of time as you decide they pass the cost benefit tests.
The Big Picture If you are a person that has difficulty with numbers, then this topic may give you a brain freeze if you spend much time trying to search for places that I could have made a mistake in this article. There are lots of numbers in tables and there are about 40 or 50 different combinations of worker traits, government, timeline positions, and technology status. In the big picture, worker productivity will increase depending on a couple of key events and these increases will reduce the time that it takes workers to complete their tasks. Worker movement costs will not generally go down. The decreased cost to plant and harvest forest will mean that you will want to perform more and more forestry operations if possible. The fact that movement costs remain about the same will mean that you want to avoid grouping workers together into crews that lay down virgin roadways at a cost of an increased number of workers that must waste a movement turn to detour off the roads onto virgin terrain..
Task costs in terms of “Worker Turns” Again, as of September 2002, the standard civilizations known to have the industrious trait include: America, China, Egypt, France, plus Carthage and the Ottomans from PTW. The table below displays the number of worker turns that would be required to complete a given set of tasks for workers with standard skills versus the enhanced industrious workers. The four columns under each heading represent the four possible combinations of worker productivity that may exist if you are operating in the Democracy form of government or if you have discovered the technology of Replaceable Parts. (click here for an image that can be posted in message board discussions) It is possible that you could discover steam power and have no access to coal and in this case you might have researched up to Replaceable Parts without yet being able to build railroads.
** This is a weird case were the actual worker turns required to perform a set of tasks would be lower if the integer round up effect did not apply to the individual tasks. Note 1: The numbers shown in parentheses in the table above will indicate where a round off effect could result in some different results when multiple workers of different nationalities can be applied to the same task. Note 2: You have to play close attention to the turns required to complete these tasks if you use the Civ3edit program to look at the factors that control how workers complete tasks. The required turns is set at 2x the number of turns that would be required in despotism, monarchy, or republic on flat terrain. The required turns for a worker to complete a task is always multiplied by the movement cost for the terrain type where a worker is currently located. For terrain types like forest and jungles, this creates a complicated multiplier effect that you must take into account when you look at the values in the editor. As an example, the editor sets the base number of turns to clear jungle at 16 which is then multiplied by the movement cost of jungles which is 3 and then divided by 2 to arrive at the base figure for despotism as shown in the table above {3 * 16 = 48 ; 48 / 2 = 24}. Intensive Forestry Operations
Things are simplified by the fact that you are either an industrious civilization or you are a civilization that has standard workers, so we can divide the forestry discussion into those groups.
For ease of management, it is probably best to use a crew of nine democratic workers and then just assign them with one planting team of 3 working in between individual road builders and individual harvesters. The forest harvest workers actually take 7 turns to clear the forests but with three harvesters working, you will yield a bonus once in every 2 to 3 game turns. The three road workers can stay ahead of the planting team plus give you some flexibility to reinforce the planting team or harvest workers when you get more than five of six road squares out in front of the rest of the crew.
sl
- in the table above indicates a slave or foreign worker.
Standard Worker Civilizations with Replaceable Parts
Democracy reduces the cost to plant and clear forests even further because it increases the worker productivity by an additional 50%. The democratic versions of these workers will now have the ability to work at a rate that is three times as fast as the standard workers. A single worker of this productivity group in democracy can plant and harvest a forest in nine turns for a cost of 9 pieces of gold and yield the harvest bonus of 10 shields. The cost of using this technique to rush improvements and units is effectively 0.9 gold per shield compared to the typical hurry rate of 4.0 gold per shield.
sl
- in the table above indicates a slave or foreign worker. Note that these tables include an increasing number of options to use slaves and/or foreign workers to perform these forestry tasks. This reflects the reality that many games will include an increasing number of slaves as the game progresses into later stages where an increasing number of rivals may have been eliminated.
Industrious Worker Civilizations with Replaceable Parts
Workers are so fast that they can complete many tasks in less than one turn and as a result they waste some of the productivity gain by default. Compared to standard workers these guys are on the Civ3 equivalent of lots of “Jolt Cola” and can complete individual tasks four to six times as fast. These workers are so fast that slaves should be used to build any roads to help cut down on the excess power wasted by the workers of our own civilization. Assigning Slave workers to build the roads and then letting individual workers of this class follow along behind and plant/harvest produces the cheapest possible shield production in the entire civ3 game (after you exclude Great Leaders from consideration;) ). These workers should almost always work alone except when harvesting or planting forests and then they might need a slave as reinforcement for a turn or two.
sl
- in the table above indicates a slave or foreign worker.
Clearing Jungle in the Intensive Phase
The very first table on this web page displays the worker turns required to complete a number of different tasks, but the turns required to clear and improve jungle terrain are reemphasized here to focus on the potential benefits:
** in the table above indicate significant round off waste effects The second column of each table displays the worker turns required to clear the jungle and make the square accessible to other crews of workers that may perform the next tasks most efficiently. The third and fourth columns display the number of turns that would be required if the same worker who cleared the jungle performed all the rest of the tasks. It would be nice if the worker automation function to clear jungles would at least perform the complete task sequence in the first column and it would be even nicer if a hot key command were added to the game to automate a worker to fully develop the jungle by performing the tasks in all three columns. Currently the “clear jungles only: automation command does not do a good job of even performing tasks in the first column. My approach to this task is to assign as many workers as I can to clearing jungles as shown in the first column, I only do this when they run out of other terrain squares to exploit using Forestry Operations and when all the railroads are in place. If none of my citizens are dying, I can get the most bang for my worker turns dollar by delaying this task until my workers are most productive. Then I follow the jungle clearing workers with an optimized crew of workers to plant and harvest the forests and usually a different crew to follow and lay down the railroads and improve the terrain square if there is a chance that it will be needed for a citizen in the future. I can usually improve the efficiency of the follow on work crews by just a few turns by using the right mix of slaves and workers and assigning these tasks to crews of workers actually makes it much easier to manage them in each turn because I keep them doing the same task sequence over and over again, turn after turn. Standard workers developing jungle squares, after replaceable parts and democracy are in place, will cost 20 to 21 gold units per terrain square and yield a 10 shield production bonus that is worth 40 pieces of gold. With ten workers assigned to this task we are earning an extra profit of 5 units of gold per turn after the support cost for the workers have been paid. With industrious workers, this profit is almost doubled.
The pace of Forestry Operations should intensify during the period just prior to and just following completion of railroads. Any terrain squares that can be forest farmed will yield a profit of between 20 and 30 pieces of gold if developed in an efficient manner. Keep workers busy and assigned to productive tasks at all times so they can pay for their own support costs through direct contributions to production. As the productivity of each worker increases with the discovery of replaceable parts and/or the switch to a democratic government, the profit yielded from each forestry square will increase. As workers increase in productivity, it is usually easier to assign them singly to some of these forestry tasks because this type of assignment will keep the workers occupied for longer periods of time and minimize the number of individual unit tasks that a player has to assign in any given turn. A great deal of this tedious micromanagement could be eliminated by adding a few well thought out command options to the worker “hotkey” list. The most progressive solution would add a special unit to the game that would allow a player to load workers into a consolidated crew that could undertake a fluid sequence of tasks controlled by a simple script language. Next Topic – Extended or Reconstructive Forestry Operations
Other related topics:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
- 
- 
©
2002 by cracker@CivFanatics.com
All rights reserved. Please read the Terms
of Use.
Send mail to our webmaster with technical
questions about or potential problems with this web site.