understanding rivers and health

[radiospace]

I'm trying to figure out how the health advantage of rivers (in BtS) exactly works. Do you get a health benefit for every square in your city radias that has fresh water; every square that you are *working* that has fresh water; or only for founding the city on a square that has fresh water?

[Blake]

Founding a city on freshwater.

[radiospace]

and what exactly is the health benefit of founding on a fresh water tile?

[thyrwyn]

+2 Health.

[radiospace]

thanks.

[Crossfire]

Which is good for countering the -health from the usual floodplains associated with rivers.

[thyrwyn]

That, too. Plus you can build Levees in BtS, and add production to those river tiles

[joncnunn]

A worked unimproved flood plains tile yields 3 food which would pay for it's unhealthiness at much higher level than is actually in the game.

[Blake]

To be complete:

Founding on a floodplain destroys the floodplain. This eliminates the -0.4 health. Whether or not this will ACTUALLY change the health penalty or not depends.

The bad health is truncated, here are the thresholds where the additional floodplain causes additional unhealth:
3 Floodplains (-1.2)
5 Floodplains (-2.0)
8 Floodplains (-3.2)
10 Floodplains (-4)
13 Floodplains (-5.2)
15 Floodplains (-6)

So if the city radius has that many floodplains and you are founding on one of those floodplains, you'll "gain" an extra health, which will basically offset the loss of 1 food by founding on the FP (rather than grassland). At other floodplain counts the health penalty doesn't change.

Note: Jungles are -0.25 health and are added to the floodplains number, so the floodplains numbers wont work until all the jungle is cleared - but you're going to do that sooner or later.
Forest is +0.5 health, but positive health is calculated (and truncated) separately from negative health.