[Civ2] Auto terrain improvement for city square?

[randyripoff]

I want to say that I read somewhere that if you build a city on a square that that square is automatically improved. So, for instance,if you build a city on a jungle or swamp square, the terrain is irrigated. Is this true?

 

[ArcherHombre]

I don't recognize that at all. What I remember of improvements on city squares is that a city square acts as either a road or a railroad, if you are moving a unit from a road or roailroad. Also, I think the city square always give the irrigation benefit, and once you research refrigeration, it gives the farmland benefit (which still needs the supermarket to actually apply).

 

[randyripoff]

OKay, thanks.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Also, it won't change the terrain all by itself. You can still have settlers/engineers change the terrain underneath the city even while its still there, if the rules.txt allows for that terrain tile to be changed.

For example, building a city on top of a forest tile will do the stuff ArcherHombre said, and you can still press "I" to cut down the forest afterwards, which would change the terrain to plains. The same thing can be done with the "O" and "M" keys, as long as they transform terrain as per rules.txt.

 

[Blasph23]

It also automatically "irrigates" whatever terrain happens to be under your city.
If that terrain however does not get any irrigation bonuses in the @TERRAIN section in rules.txt, it won't give extra food.
For example building on forest still yields just one food, since irrigate bonus is listed as 0 in said file. Normally, irrigating a forest tile changes it to plains which is why there is no bonus.
Desert cities have 1 food versus 0 for worked tiles.
Meanwhile if you build on hills, it give you one extra food since the bonus flag in @TERRAIN for hills is 1.
Farmland similarly adds another point but only if there is already at least one food from the base tile. Farmland on desert doesn't improve it beyond irrigation, neither as a worked tile, nor as city tile.

Oh, and you can't build a mine on city tiles, even if the underlying terrain normally supports it. In theory, you could start building a mine, then build a city with another settler/engineer and the mine will eventually be constructed.
However, discovering railroad will not improve the shield production as you'd expect from a normal mined&railroaded hill but its functionality in terms of movement would behave normally.
Farmland automatically appears there once the proper tech is discovered and like everywhere else, only works with supermarkets.