# Harvesting

What Is Harvesting?

Harvest is the act of cutting down a tree, ideally for it to never reach four piles of wood and also without it being completely cut off.

Why Should You Harvest?

It’s all about being efficient and effective.

Lets start by the facts:

1. Keep in mind that trees have a maximum of four piles of wood and that they will never surpass this amount of piles of wood, meaning that they will stop growing when they reach this maximum.

2. If you don´t fully cut a tree, meaning, taking out one, two or three piles of wood, it will take about 68 seconds for it to gain another pile of wood, until a maximum of four piles of wood.

3. If you fully cut a tree down, this time will be more than four and a half times higher, for it to gain the first pile of wood in the exact same place the tree was before you cut it down.

So being efficient means that we want to use our resources in best way possible and being effective, in a populous context, means that you get to your objectives faster, that mainly are getting maximum population and mana.

By harvesting trees you will be able to make sure trees never stop growing, which means you will have more wood, since this simulates as if trees would be able to grow indefinitely. This is called efficiency, which comes by the fact that you are using your trees in a way that they never stop growing, which means that you are using the time trees take to grow at the best of its capability, since fully cutting them would lead to a much longer wait to get a pile of wood, meaning less wood in the overall time, also meaning less effectiveness, because you would not be able to build and upgrade faster than your enemy. So by having infinite wood resources, you able yourself to be more effective, since you can more easily build and upgrade houses, which is your building objective in this game. Harvesting not only enables you to have more wood, as also leads you to have more control over it and making sure no tree is fully cutted.

How To Harvest?

Despite it can be a hard job when you start doing it, it will, with time, become an automatic action, something that you do even without thinking. Gather two or three men and start cutting trees down. By holding Ctrl you will be able to give up to nine different orders to your followers, meaning that you will be able to send them to harvest four different trees.
Try it out, the method is pretty simple:

Select two or three braves, hold Ctrl and send them to cut the first tree and then, still holding Ctrl, click on the ground for them to place the cutted piles of wood, in the place you want them to be.

Did you got it done? Good. As you can see it is not hard to send them to cut one tree and place the piles on the ground.
Now try it with two trees:

Select two or three braves, hold Ctrl, send them to cut the first tree, click on the ground, send them to cut the second tree and click again on the ground. To deselect them just right click anywhere, you don t need to hold Ctrl for that.

Have you done it this time? Did your braves strangely happen not to cut the second tree? If yes, that happens because you haven´t clicked anywhere on the ground for them to place the cutted piles of wood of the first tree and as such they only pretend to cut the second one, since they are already occupied transporting the piles of wood from the first tree.

Now do the same action for the number of trees you want to cut and see if you can get it right.

Apply It In Game

By the time you can get this set of actions right, try to apply it during games. If you are still new to it, use only two braves to harvest each tree, because it will be easier not to fully cut a tree for mistake while building or upgrading. It will not be an easy task in the beginning, and you may actually lose some efficiency in your game, but you will come around with it and harvesting will become a piece of cake for you in no time. Then you can only expect much better games from yourself. You will have more wood, faster population and more mana.