Best ideas for Terrain (Irrigate or Mine)

[thevaliant]

Apologies if this has been asked, but I couldn't immediately find an answer.

What is the best option when faced with multiple options on a tile square. Irrigate or mine? (And why?)

Personally I:
Mountain - Mine
Hills - Usually mine
Desert - Usually mine unless there is little food in the city radius, then I might irrigate a few.
Grassland and Plains - Irrigate

And then the unusual squares:
Forest - Usually leave
Jungle and Swamp - convert to grassland

Any other thoughts?

 

[Mize]

If you have excess food, grassland with no production can be mined into a forest and then irrigated into plains with a shield. Sometimes you will also get a special resource (game/horses) out of this. Same goes for jungle that turns into grassland with no production.

If you are low on food, then you can irrigate hills and even jungle with gems to get more resources.
For example, if you have a size 18 city, which works one mine square and has two more hill squares that are unused because the city can't grow anymore, you can irrigate and railroad one of the hills. Then you'll have 2 more food for the city to grow to 20 and to work the two unused hill squares.

The same goes for gems in the jungle and sea squares. The gem square gives a lot of trade but only 1 food. If your city lacks food, but has a lot of ocean, irrigate that gem square, get 3 more food from the grassland and work 3 more ocean squares. That is more profitable than just working the gem square if your city does not have the food to grow to 20.

 

[Volcanon]

If you have a grassland tile that would become deer forest or horse plains then forest it and then chop or not chop depending on need. Civ 1 uses not-quite-random ways to assign bonus tiles so you can often guess where these may be. If you have a bunch of forest tiles chop down most of them to get plains, since plains give you food and production.

If you have a city on entirely grasslands or grasslands and water, and you don't have enough production from shield grasslands, then its sometimes a good idea to plant some forests later on to keep production up. A railroaded forest makes 1 food and 3 production, which isn't terrible when the goal is to get a lot of shields.

Irrigate desert and hills only if you really need the food. Mining is usually the better play. Usually a bad idea to build a city near to all or mostly desert because irrigating won't give you enough food to keep population up.

You can only mine mountains, so do that.

If you want to abuse bugs, then feel free to railroad the ocean.