Medicine and Genetics

[DrSpike]

I nearly always leave this and trade for it later.

[Brizey]

I occassionally use Enviro in an OCC game.

[popejubal]

Originally posted by Krill
Medicine = environmentalism = +6 health. Not always useful, but can allow some cities to grow a hell of a lot larger.

If your city is already working all of its tiles, then you can get exactly 2 (two) extra people out of Environmentalism. Each person eats 2 food and generates 1 polution. That's a total of 3 food per person if you are maxed out on health (and if you aren't maxed out on health, then Environmentalism isn't doing you any good anyway).

Only if you somehow are not yet working some food producing tiles will Environmentalism allow you to get more than 2 extra people in a city.

Add in the fact that you aren't getting an extra trade route and you aren't getting the 4-10 gold cost reduction (and food boost) in each city from State Property and I think that it is an easy conclusion that Environmentalism just plain stinks.

[joncnunn]

Funny this should come up now, my current game is one in which I needed to get Medicine early. Very few Health resources [and mostly the ones the benifit from supermarket at that], many happiness resources.

I was actually considering switching to Enviormenantalism on the turn of discovery except that an AI's surplus Wheat opened up a turn before which allowed time for Hospitals (and keeping FM instead.)

Map is such that my most productive cities are non-coastal, but that's probably normal.

Health Resources I have within my empire:
Clam, Fish
Cow, Sheep, Deer (from overseas trade)
And that Wheat that just opened up.

So yeah, my health resources absolutely sucked. Luxaries were in abdunance.

Looking at the tech tree, Medicine didn't speed along Refridgation though (that was the first modern era tech I researched in this one), so perhaps the prereq of Refideration of Biology should be changed to Medicine. Refrideration is already a prereq of Genetics.

[Virdrago]

Very rarely (actually, never) have I absolutely needed Medicine. Even the AI doesn't bother with it, unless it wants it via trading for it. It doesn't seem high on any priority list. Maybe that should change by making it a prereq.