Are jungles now a good thing?

[Olleus]

shouldn't jungles have plains beneath them as well as grass land?

 

[Dueck]

I suppose the "plains" biome is just a more arid version of the "grassland" biome. Hence, an area which could foster a jungle would necessarily be grassland.

 

[katank]

The idea is that jungles are like rain forests and are humid and fertile. Grasslands are nicer. Cottage spam!

 

[Olleus]

look at brazil. Once the jungle has been cut their is nothing to stop the rain leaching all of the nutrients in the soil away. Its almost impossible to have a working farm 10 years after the rain forest has been cut.

 

[imagod284]

look at brazil. Once the jungle has been cut their is nothing to stop the rain leaching all of the nutrients in the soil away. Its almost impossible to have a working farm 10 years after the rain forest has been cut.

Right, cleared jungle is almost useless after 5 years. Slash and burn clearing creates useful land for only a very, very short time. After about 5 years of farming, the ground is closer to rock than 'dirt'. I think the jungle clearing should have the opposite effect. You should get a boost of gold, or food, or hammers for the clearing (representing the couple of 'good' years after clearing rainforest) and then they should have tundra underneath. It's obviously not what's really under jungles, but the idea is the same, this ground is not worth much.

 

[rewster1]

Slash and burn applies to forests too. The native americans practiced it, and had to move on after only a couple of years of farming. Instead of tundra, it should be desert under deforested/dejungled tiles.
That would put a damper on the whole chopping thing. Sure, getting the hammers early is good, but then the terrain is virtually useless, forever. Or until a forest regrows there. Which is about the same in this game.

 

[ditb]

Do jungles still have (as in Civ3) the ability to kill units that are fortified within them?

Thanks in advance!

Dave

 

[katank]

Nope, perfectly safe to fortify units in it.

 

[Sid the Lucid]

But they have bananas and once you discover refrigeration you can build the Banana Split wonder.

 

[Willem]

disease is no longer an element of the game, so building cities in jungles and flood plains is not as problematic as it was in Civ3.

You still get Unhealthiness from Jungle.

 

[Willem]

Apart from the jungle that is cleared to provide grazing, I assume???

He's correct. In real life, ex-jungles makes lousy farmland afterwards. The problem is that the plant life grows so quickly that no nutrients remain to build up the soil underneath. The trees and other plants just suck everything up right away and nothing is left over once they're gone. The land you end up with after cutting down rainforest is usually marginal.

 

[Willem]

Slash and burn applies to forests too. The native americans practiced it, and had to move on after only a couple of years of farming. Instead of tundra, it should be desert under deforested/dejungled tiles.
That would put a damper on the whole chopping thing. Sure, getting the hammers early is good, but then the terrain is virtually useless, forever. Or until a forest regrows there. Which is about the same in this game.

I beg to differ there. Southern Ontario used to be pretty much all forest way back when, but today it's usually pretty good farmland. Same thing with many parts of Europe for that matter. Temperate forests generally have good soil underneath them, depending on the location.

 

[atreas]

You forget to mention the fact that jungles give no hammers at all, even after clearing - and that's an additional reason to use them only after you have build enough other cities to support them miltarily. Because, if you just use pop-rushing to create both buildings and units for them, they will be very late in getting adequate size so as to support cottages.

For this reason, especially in "all jungle around" cities, it is a very viable strategy to just create there a GP farm - farmed grassland gives faster growth so you can more easily pop-rush buildings for this city. Or even change the city "orientation" midstream - at the start farm (to pop-rush while you still have slavery), and then cottages.

 

[imagod284]

Slash and burn applies to forests too. The native americans practiced it, and had to move on after only a couple of years of farming. Instead of tundra, it should be desert under deforested/dejungled tiles.
That would put a damper on the whole chopping thing. Sure, getting the hammers early is good, but then the terrain is virtually useless, forever. Or until a forest regrows there. Which is about the same in this game.

I dunno, I go to school here in Wisconsin which used to be covered entirely by forest. I see plenty of farms and they all apear to be doing quite well. Same thing applies back home across the Mississippi in Minnesota. It apears to me that the deforested land is quite productive and nothing like deforested jungle.

 

[Thalassicus]

To my understanding, it's how the farmland is used afterwards. If few crops are planted and the soil is leeched of nutrients, it'll be barren in a matter of years, like normal soil. With good farming measures and crop-rotation it'll sustain farming much longer; right now it's just cheaper and easier to burn more jungle.

 

[SuperOrion]

Clearing jungles should give wood until Environmentalism is discovered.

 

[rewster1]

I dunno, I go to school here in Wisconsin which used to be covered entirely by forest. I see plenty of farms and they all apear to be doing quite well. Same thing applies back home across the Mississippi in Minnesota. It apears to me that the deforested land is quite productive and nothing like deforested jungle.

I wasn't saying that's how it works in the real world, rather that's how it should (or could) work in the game to deter all-out chopping.
I grew up in upstate New York, which also used to be mostly forested... except when being clearcut by the Indians. Of course, their populations were sparse, and the land had time to recover between burnings. But they never gained much from clearing the land. At least, they didn't build stonehenge or the pyramids, as far as I know... they just subsistence farmed.

 

[lawren65]

Its slash and burn that is not sustainable, not necessarily that land under the rain forest. With slash and burn the trees are cut and burned to add nutients to the soil. If nothing is done to replenish the nutients or avoid runoff, the land is useless in a few seasons.

Just look to indonesia and southeast asia (or the incan civlizations ) to see that ex jungleland can be farmed for generations is done sustainably.

 

[BenniusCaesar]

I think it's odd that jungle becomes grassland after clearing too. But it's also odd that you don't get any hammer bonus for chopping all those huge, valuable old growth trees not to mention the fact that sometimes 25% of the planet seems to be covered in jungles. So if they went to desert after clearing you might end up with 40% of your land unusable. It seems to me that on Earth a much smaller proportion of land is jungle/rainforest.

 

[Dairuka]

Jungle does indeed take up about 30% of all land on earth.

There are jungles on the Eastern Asian Islands, almost all of Southern Asia, Middle-Africa, and Mid-South America.