Keeping forests & jungle the entire game

[Hermann the Lombard]

Your city feeds on food surpluses. Jungle doesn't produce a food surplus; that's why jungle populations are so low and so vulnerable to exploitation by food-rich outsiders...who may die from tropical diseases but "share" worse diseases with the natives.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by couerdelion
Now that DOES surprise me

Perhaps the food penalty is because the jungle wildlife eats the food itself.

After thinking about this a bit, it seems that the design decision behind this is to make the player choose between:

1. A bad tile "improvement"
2. Health bonus with Environmentalism

If they didn't make jungle tiles a bad place (and forest tiles attractive places for chopping) this is a no-brainer.

Still looks like a no-brainer, though

[Yosho]

Yeah...I think jungles are mostly just supposed to be an obstacle to early growth, and an incentive to get ironworking and lots of workers early in some situations. The health bonus for enviormentallism with jungles was probably just thrown in for consistancy more then anything else.

[Son of David]

The solution is to put resources into jungles and make those resources disappear if the jungle is torn down.

Thus bananas should not remain if you chop away the jungle they grew in. Other resources could be exotic kinds of birds or animals that, through poaching, give a gold bonus to the square.

Then later in the game these tiles would be even more attractive - thus making environmentalism a better civic option.

[Badtz Maru]

For a long time, I didn't chop forests at all. I was into big production in the later part of the game and loved lumbermills. I still like them, but I'm not afraid to chop to increase population or income, especially if the tile is on a river (the commerce bonus for being adjacent to a river is not given if there's woods). Lately I've been buy-rushing

Of course, all jungle must die when they start to cause health problems for my cities, but if you prefer production over commerce leaving practically all forest tiles is a viable strategy for a builder.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Son of David
Thus bananas should not remain if you chop away the jungle they grew in.

Yeah well, when you build that plantation the jungle gets chopped down anyway.

Some improvements are destructive while others aren't. IIRC you can build a camp without cutting down trees and stuff. Very few improvements are that way, however.