Surviving a jungle start?

Heya, first time poster long time lurker. I've learned a lot from these forums, so much in fact that I've moved up to prince without a coach!

A group of friends and me sometimes play Civ over a 1-2 day LAN, where people get to veto the map if they start in a really bad spot (mass jungle, right next to another player so it'll be no fun). The problem is, we tend to always play on tropical... Now I'd like to know, how do you survive a really bad mass-jungle start?

I've been playing some games on Prince where I started next to the ocean, in the middle of the jungle. I can play along with the AIs a bit, but eventually always fall behind due to the huge amount of time it takes to clearcut all that jungle. The many happiness/food resources hidden between the trees do help a bit, but they come too late for my tastes to make a big enough difference.

Should we just let go of tropical? Or is there a better way to utilize jungle starts?

I mod my game so that jungle provides 20 hammers when cut down. That means while you do fall behind when you start in the jungle, once you get ironworking and build enough workers, you can get a rapid boost of production, hopefully catching you back up.

Jungle grows only on grassland, so at least the land under it is good. A few more workers and early iron working will slow you down a little, but plenty of cottageable land can make up for it... especially if multiple gems are in reach.

The best commerce sites are usually in the jungle. Just suck it up during the early ages, but gems, dyes, and other high commerce resources are usually in the jungle, and they usually cluster together. Honestly, I'll specifically target a jungle site for my third or fourth city if one is available.

You don't need to clearcut all at once, just cut enough for the city to work, and once you have 16 or so towns at full capacity along with some plantations or gem mines you can look back and laugh at the earlier hardships.

OFFTOPIC: It is serious bull [cabbage] to not have copper as Sumeria...I mean come on...

I found that if you start with heavy jungles, only you need is one good production city (hopefully your capitol, has 3-4 hills and maybe gold, or gems), beeling to BW, then switch to Priesthood, build Oracle, take IW as free tech. Run over everyone with Swords

While chopping jungle and cottage.

Teching to priesthood to get IW from oracle? That seems likes a waste. IW costs less than Mysticism/Meditation/Priesthood combined.

It's like the previous posters said; jungle cities are a hassle to develop at first, but since they have primarily grassland and calender resources, they make exceptional commerce cities. Jungles don't need to be chopped down all at once; you only need to have enough cleared to allow the city's population to work productive tiles. Iron Working and Calender are techs to think about getting sooner rather than later.

Since jungles make for good commerce cities, you may want to think of looking elsewhere for a production city, although some jungle cities have enough food and grassland hills to make good production cities.

Like iranon said: build more workers and get IW quickly. Depending on the difficulty you either beeline to IW yourself or to alphabet and trade for IW.