What is your policy on tundra, desert, mountain and ice tiles?

I prefer having 15 Floodplains and 6 derserts than 21 green tiles.

Floodplains gurantees a city full of food and money
 
Is it just bad luck or does the map generator hate me? (Wait these are the same thing :D)

I tried four games recently (small Big_and_Small) and had two starts on a short island chain, one of which AI neighbour's second city cut me off completely from the continent. The others were one tundra start and one was in the dry land with only one floodplain in sight for me, while the AI started on floodplains and his first three cities had more than ten floodplains in total. :<

...so much for my choosing Gandhi and wanting to try out a specialist economy. :(
 
Mountain tiles just inside cultural borders also give better visibility than hills do. They're good, natural fogbusters / early-warning systems for approaching / passing units.
 
Oooh necropost.

Anyway, I'll put a city where ever it's necessary, whether it's to block an AI from expanding or to get a needed or really really desired resource ASAP. As long as a city has a purpose it doesn't matter if it's in a otherwise poor spot, or has some poorer tiles. Plus, usually there's SOMETHING you can do with a poor city, you just... have to wait for the right improvements. Tundra isn't so bad, and while desert and mountain is useless, I rarely have a city that has too many of those. And if it does, it's again, probably because it has a really really good resource that I want or need, or it's keeping the AI from expanding.

Though I've never put a city in snow terrain. I just never see a benefit in putting a city in a location that terrible, though If I conquer an enemy city located in a place like that, I usually keep it, because it's in the middle of nowhere and that's cute. <3
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Mountain tiles just inside cultural borders also give better visibility than hills do. They're good, natural fogbusters / early-warning systems for approaching / passing units.

IIRC mountain tiles are impassible in CivIV. In CivIII your argument holds. Sorry to add to the necro but I read the first 2 pages without looking at the dates. Oh, well, interesting discussion by the old-timers with several good points.
 
15 floodplains also guarantees a bunch of :yuck:
15 floodplain = 6 :yuck:; 15 pop working these tiles consumes 30 :food: plus at most 6 extra for the :yuck:. Meanwhile 15 floodplains produces 45 base :food: so you have a net of 9 :food: + improvements, and up to 15 with enough health. In comparison grassland only breaks even without improvements. So in the long run you're looking at 7.5 specialists versus 5 improvements. I would take the specialists, especially as this kind of spot is begging to be a :gp: farm.

In the short term the :yuck: hits immediately--each floodplains will give you +1 :food: over each grasslands, so as long as you have at least 6 :health: you'll break even with grasslands from the beginning, and win out if you have more than that. Only thing is you may miss out on We Love the King days.
 
In the short term the :yuck: hits immediately

That's the problem. On higher difficulties you start out with maybe +4:health:, so then the 6:yuck: immediately starts to kill your city... you'll be at a surplus of 1:food:, at least until/unless you find something good food-wise to improve.
 
Wouldn't you typically be roaded to your main network pretty quickly though, which would likely give you access to :health: resources?
 
I settled an all-floodplains location on some silly mapscript like Donut once. It was not pretty. At all. Maybe it would have gotten better in late game with access to more health resources and buildings, but I only played that game until maybe 1000AD and then got distracted by something else.
 
A watermill can still be placed on a ice-river tile.
So, that tile will generate +1 production.
+1 more prod from Replaceable Parts.
+2 Gold with Electricity.
+1 prod from a Railroad.

I don't usually run State Property, but, the tile should gain the +1 food with it, as well.
So, some Ice tiles are better than others.

Tundra tiles along a river can have the same as above, and can be irrigated.
I believe than can have cottages at that point too, but, only along a river.

TMIT pointed out that desert can spread irrigation to non-desert tiles, if a city is built on the desert next to the oasis (freshwater sourse).
 
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