Tundra and irrigation

[joncnunn]

Still having the jungle in the industrial era is a major reason your suffering from insufficent citizens to work all tiles.

Each jungle tile removes 1 food from what it would already produce. So if it was a flat jungle, it's producing 1 food instead of 2 and if it was a hilly jungle, it's producing no food instead of 1.

And then there's the other things that tile could have been producing:
In flat:
Farms (+1 pre biology; +2 post biology [with an irrigation connection]) This by itself turns the tile from a 1/2 the food needed to support itself to producing a food surplus.
Cottage (evenually a Town): This feeds itself and produces commerce.
Workshop: Still better than unimproved jungle due to the hammer.
Watermill (if river): More hammers than Workshop.

In hills:
Windmill: This will also bring the tile enough food to support itself and produce some hammers.
Mine: Produces more hammers at the cost of less food than the windmill. But this 1 food is still more than a jungle hill of 0.

Originally posted by Yosho


Actually, if for some reason there still happens to be a jungle in my National Park city when I build the national park, I'll keep it. It's not a great square of course, but it's still a free specilist, the health penelty is irrelevent in the national park city, and because of all the forests in my national park city, I rarely end up having enough population to work all the squares anyway.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by joncnunn
Still having the jungle in the industrial era is a major reason your suffering from insufficent citizens to work all tiles.

Right, I generally won't have jungle in the industrial era. However, if you have forest on most of the tiles of a city (which you ideally want in the city you build your national park in), a combination of grassland forest, plains forests, tundra forest, and hills forest, even with a few farms you probably won't have enough food to work all your tiles.

Obveously jungle is by far the worst of all possible tiles, and you should generally clear it ASAP , that goes without saying. That's not what I was saying, though; what I said is that if you DO happen to have a jungle tile in the city after you build the national park wonder (say, from the jungle spreading from outside the city radius, or if it's a city you recently conquered from some minor AI, or whatever; it's happened to me once or twice), it's not really a good idea to clear it. I guess you could clear it and hope forest spreads to there, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[wodan11]

Actually you've both got a point. If you chop the jungle, you lose a specialist. If irrigated, you could farm and simply gain the specialist back... no gain.

The other options, assuming the worker feeds himself (which is a big assumption), might give a couple of hammers, which might be useful. Is that worth losing a specialist? Hard to say. However, we could say that you would lose your least desirable specialist... you're probably already running as many spies and engineers as you can, or scientists, or whatever. So you're probably taking off a priest or something. So, trade a priest for whatever the improvement is. Again, we're assuming the tile gives 2 food. If it gives 0, 1, or 3 food then that definitely should be taken into consideration.

Wodan

[Supr49er]

I once got an event where Johnny Appleseed planted a apple trees on one of my plains, giving me +1 .

This made me wish we could use our advanced workers to plant forests. Maybe only one replant per square to avoid the obvious exploit.

[Kuciwalker]

Replanting has been discussed to death. Firaxis' position (correct IMO) is that it destroys the strategic early game choice of whether or not to chop.

[Asmodeous]

I've been curious, exactly how much does it increase forest growth? I honestly haven't seen a forest grow past the middle ages. :/

Me.

[Asmodeous]

The other options, assuming the worker feeds himself (which is a big assumption), might give a couple of hammers, which might be useful. Is that worth losing a specialist? Hard to say. However, we could say that you would lose your least desirable specialist... you're probably already running as many spies and engineers as you can, or scientists, or whatever.

Oh, and I forgot, this isn't necessarily true. A great late-mid game setup (I've found) is Representation/Beauracracy/Caste System/State Property/Whatever. The Caste System bonus to the unlimited specialists is secondary, for the most part, to the bonus hammer from workshops if you're using a lot of them for their SP bonus.

With that kind of setup, if you have a city that's got 10+ forests in its radius, you've got a massive super-specialist city that you can slam with 10+ scientists, and that one city (with oxford) will generate 50% of your civ's tech on its own without needing to crank your research rate to keep up with, or stay ahead, of the opposition.

The loss of Slavery isn't really a huge issue considering the amount of hammers you're slamming out with all the workshops, and when you get to that point there's very few wonders left you can rush to begin with (if you care about those), and the lack of Emancipation isn't that bad all around, in all reality, especially since you can lower your science rate without a major impact to your research to put a point or two into culture to make those theatres, colleseums (holy hell I butchered that), and radio towers make up for the anger.

Me.

[wodan11]

Good point. Caste System with National Park can be huge.

Wodan

[Jvstin]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Replanting has been discussed to death. Firaxis' position (correct IMO) is that it destroys the strategic early game choice of whether or not to chop.

Exactly. Civilization III, for example, had the "chop, plant, chop" dance.

[joncnunn]

Actually, it was the "plant, chop, plant" dance as choping the same tile a second time would not yield additional shields; at least not after one of the very early patches to vanilla.

Originally posted by Jvstin

Exactly. Civilization III, for example, had the "chop, plant, chop" dance.

[Petrus2]

I understand why the multiple-chop method is prevented, but really if you think about it, forests are simply a slow-growing crop.

[frenzyfol]

But they are a crop that humans have only had the foresight to replant in recent times. Hence the lumbermill improvement.

[snoopy369]

Gameplay reasons here of course, reality is irrelevant...

[Petrus2]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Gameplay reasons here of course, reality is irrelevant...

Yeah I know; like I said I understand it. But I'd really like to exploit the ability to tree farm

[Brizey]

Originally posted by frenzyfol
But they are a crop that humans have only had the foresight to replant in recent times. Hence the lumbermill improvement.

Ding ding ding!! The lumbermill improvement simulates a continuous plant/chop/plant/chop... cycle.