Making Jungles less terrible

[Optimizer]

I don't like that the Jungles are completely useless.

In my personal mod, the Jungles give 2 food and 1 shield. This makes it considerable to build cities close to Jungles, although it will cause disease. It is realistic too, since you can grow decent amounts of food and wood in tropical forests as long as you don't over-exploit it.

I have made the Settler wheeled so that Mountains and Jungles become more of an obstacle for colonization. You can still build roads to get through.

[WarpStorm]

Your mod will give you a major advantage over the AI though. They won't know that they need to build the roads and won't expand into the jungle. So, in essence you've given yourself an area of the map that mainly you will exploit.

[Willem]

It's not as much of a problem as you might think. I've done the same thing and I see the AI building roads through the jungle alll the time. Either because of a resource in there, or a desire to have a trade route with another civ, roads do get built that will allow a Settler in. I yes I have a bit of advantage, but that's mainly later in the game, when the good land is running out, and not really that huge.

[WarpStorm]

But do you have jungle being equivalent to shielded grassland like Optimizer does?

[Willem]

No, although I did increase the shields in it. I'm sure the Amazon Jungle provides at least some resources for the people living there, in order to build things.

[dunk]

Originally posted by Willem
No, although I did increase the shields in it. I'm sure the Amazon Jungle provides at least some resources for the people living there, in order to build things.

The reason jungles are "useless" is because of the climate, not the lack of resources. Very hot, humid, and violent storms. Not exactly the easiest place to build large structures and support a large population.

If anything, I would increase the shield to one and leave the food at one. I see it as very difficult to support a large population in a harsh climate like a jungle. What would be nice is if we could gather shields from clearing jungles like we do when we clear forsests.

[Willem]

Originally posted by dunk


The reason jungles are "useless" is because of the climate, not the lack of resources. Very hot, humid, and violent storms. Not exactly the easiest place to build large structures and support a large population.

That didn't stop the Incans, Aztecs, Mayans, and several other cultures I'm not sure of.

[beorhtwulf]

Well, actually, it did stop the Incans -- they never really got far into the Amazon basin (except at the end, when Pizarro et al. threw them out of the highlands). The Aztec heartland was up on the Mexican plateau, more like the Great Plains than the Yucatan. The Mayans did manage, but I suspect the landscape was a lot less overgrown in their heyday than it is when you see Chichen Itza on TV these days.

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by WarpStorm
Your mod will give you a major advantage over the AI though. They won't know that they need to build the roads and won't expand into the jungle. So, in essence you've given yourself an area of the map that mainly you will exploit.

The AI uses default strategies, even after modding? It can't adjust to the new values and realise that jungles are suitable?

[Willem]

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat

The AI uses default strategies, even after modding? It can't adjust to the new values and realise that jungles are suitable?

It's not capable of pre-planning in this case. It can't think about building a road first, in order to bring in a Settler. If it does manage to build a city in the Jungle, it's an incidental thing after it has built a road for something else. Like going for a resource and building a colony, or establishing a road in order to have a trade route with another civ. There will be nothing in the programming to tell it that there needs to be a road to a certain location first.

[Martinus Magnificus]

Actually, I denied jungles the 'allow cities' flag in the editor, as well as tundra and desert. This makes for a more realistic game, since the A.I. spreads like diarrhea anyway. I tested it and it works good for me. Jungles should be the obstacle thay are in real life.

[Velociryx]

In my opinion, this must be done with extreme care, lest you unbalance the game. If civ3 is to have any success at all at modelling the sweep of history, then it must model terrains correctly, and the fact is that jungles *are* pretty terrible, at least from the standpoint of building and maintaining a civilization, and at least in terms of using our own history as a guide (all the civilizations that saw their founding in a jungle climate are long gone).

Just my $0.02....

-=Vel=-

[lockstep]

IMO +1 shield for jungles (1 food / 1 shield / 0 commerce) is appropriate. This is still worse than forests (1/2/0), and there's also the risk of disease.

[Optimizer]

Originally posted by dunk
The reason jungles are "useless" is because of the climate, not the lack of resources. Very hot, humid, and violent storms. Not exactly the easiest place to build large structures and support a large population.

If anything, I would increase the shield to one and leave the food at one. I see it as very difficult to support a large population in a harsh climate like a jungle. What would be nice is if we could gather shields from clearing jungles like we do when we clear forsests.

The climate effects are represented by the disease models.

This change doesn't make Jungles overpowered, because they cannot be improved. Well, you can clear them, but then you don't win anything except for getting rid of disease.

I dropped the Wheeled flag of the Settler to avoid unbalancing.