Thx for your post Bibor
.
Regarding Floodplains: I never wrote, that they shouldn't be regarded as food. Personally, I count FPs as 0.5 food that doesn't give a resource.
To the Jungle-cities: If you think one more Worker, so what you're either underestimating the cost of Workers, or you are not aware of the opportunity cost. A Jungle city needs 1 Settler + 2 Workers, that's 220
! Opportunity cost could i. e. be 4 Horse Archers or 4 Granaries!
On Deity, AIs settle and improve the land extremely fast, there often is no more land available at 1000 BC. What I propose is to let the AI found and develop that city and take it over, once it at least got improved food and is something like size 4. Then one often can even steal one or two Workers on top, and one often gets a nicely large city that already has a Granary (66% chance) . Therfore, conquering the city has an even better opportunity cost than 4 HAs or 4 Granaries.
Ofc., peaceful games are a slightly different, but peaceful games are not optimal play, because CIV favours war. Also: If you count Uranium or Oil as resources, you're winning your games too late. At the time when those come into play, I got at least 40% of the map or the game has already been decided and I'm short before winning it.
Your argument for the Jungle or Tundra city I don't understand unfortunately. Many human starts are in the middle of a map, and there even are mapscripts like Rainforrest, where the complete map is all Jungle. If you find, that Jungle-cities are not suited for National Park city, please take a look at this screen:
That city could hire 24 Specialists if the empire were currently running Caste O_o .
And I commented already at tile-sharing with making the readers aware of, that cities grow larger in certain games than i. e. in Domination or Conquest games. Well played Domination games usually end with Cavalries and Rifles, or, if the speed i. e. is quick, then they end with Nukes. In both cases, the whip remains to be extremely efficient, Biology-fueled Farms + Kremlin whips have an efficiency that only drafts can beat, so in those games, doing with less tiles / city is no problem. Growing cities large to work the maximum tiles is only important in the very end or when a game drags out because an opponent cannot be conquered without Nukes, so it shouldn't influence the early game choice of where to found the cities. Having 8 good tiles is really enough.
Seraiel