Of Woodcutters and Checkboxes

[Ben]

Something that has always bothered me--and even more so lately because of programing window forms-- is that the woodcutter uses "checkboxes" for "Plant and Cut" and "Cut Only." Yet, we can only select one option. Seems quite weird to me.

Anyway, instead of changing to, for example, radio buttons, maybe we should keep these apparent checkboxes, and change the options to "plant" and "cut." Both of these would be enabled by default. The advantage of being able to plant would enable much better city planning, as well as make planting within a city much less risky. Further, it would take more "luck" out of the game so you don't need to rely on your woodcutter planting trees before he cuts.

[Krom]

Maybe leave just one CheckBox named "Plant trees". Enabled by default.

[Jeronimo]

Maybe leave just one CheckBox named "Plant trees". Enabled by default.

In my opinion, woodcutters need the 3 options: normal, only plant, only fell.
It makes for a more interesting base micro, specially during first 35 minutes.

Only plant: good for timing, you plant as much as you can, but felling the minimal trunks to keep your 2 initial sawmills active.
Then you won't have woodcutters waiting (normally at first they cut more than they plant in normal behaviour).

Only fell: has its uses to liberate space, delete a forest.

[pawel95]

Only plant: good for timing, you plant as much as you can, but felling the minimal trunks to keep your 2 initial sawmills active.
Then you won't have woodcutters waiting (normally at first they cut more than they plant in normal behaviour).

What you mean with "good timing" makes sense actualy. However it is already possible to keep 2 sawmills nearly the whole time working, just with some additional foresters at an other forest.
Sometimes it really looks like woodcutters would plant trees all night long, until there are already "finished" trees, but they aren´t cutting them down.
!However, this should go into the discussion "Improve the Forester Cutting/Planting - Frequency"-System of the foresters, instead of implementing a new/next button

[Romek]

Generally, I don't like changes that make the game easier. At first, I wanted "plant only" to be introduced too, but now I'm afraid it might make the game easier. In current release, you have to find a good place to make good plant-only woodcutters(on some loacations it is not that easy), but with this change, everyone will be able to plant trees even in space where there's plenty of trees already. This feature wont change much on easy maps but it can change a lot in harder maps like (Across the desert, Shadow Realm, Golden cliffs).

[Jeronimo]

Being honest, I'm fine with current woodcutter (but I'm not against adding new useful features to KaM).
There is still a sort of "woodcutter micro" but is about building them separate from each other, and reserving spaces (blueprints) for posterior woodcutters.
Each woodcutter will create a large area of trees alone, and similar to farms build micro (2 farms seed for 3rd, then you build 3rd farm), 2 woodcutters plant for +2 (later added).