Forest Preserves and National Park.

[Carnage04]

I've only ran through one BTS game and I was mostly sleepwalking through it.....building new wonders to see how good they were in practice, trying espionage, etc. I built one city planning on using it to chop rush something and forgot all about it for the most part. I ended up with 7 forests standing around it late in the game, as well as two food resources to keep the population growing.

I ended up building the National Park and 7 forest preserves.....in addition to SoL and Mercantlism this city had NINE free specialists. Due to the amount of forested tiles, I couldn't assign too many more specialists, but I think I managed to get up to 12.......not bad for an afterthought city.

Has anyone else tried running SE and tucking away a wooded city to be a late game Specialist center? Is it a viable strategy?

 

[InvisibleStalke]

Yes definitely - with Sitting Bull I have a 10 forest national park. The rest is farms so the city can support around 16 specialists. It also has National Epic. If you can afford to delay National Epic until later it makes a very good GP farm with caste system.

 

[NaZdReG]

yup totally abusable makes national epic worthy of waiting on. or gearing up a city waaay in advance for the national park. you can even chop a couple of the forests to get things online, they'll grow back in.

once it gets rolling it can be a GP farm/ espionage center if you run a ton of spies. by not assigning more specialists you can also work all the forest preserves, bringing in enough hammers to assist with production needs

NaZ

 

[FrancisMarion]

I specialize a "forest city" everygame now. Spam it with Lumber mills till biology shows up, and then perserve everything in sight. I try to hold off on National Epic till then unless I just have an insanely good GP farm.

Running a SE I've always dreaded getting Scientific Method, but I'm finding the drop I get from obsolete buildings is almost completely made up for by the specialist boost of Biology farms and National Park.

 

[NaZdReG]

important to remember.. you do not need to actually work the preserve to get the specialist. so you can specialize depending on what tiles can't be forested in. got 4 flood plains?? thats 4 late game powerhouse towns. or if you have some gold mines etc you can drop enough farms to offset working those tiles. you get the idea but the specialists are free and just based on the number of preserves.

NaZ

 

[Lord Chambers]

Hopefully your game will be decided before a national park can make any serious contribution to your civilization.

 

[UncleJJ]

Hopefully your game will be decided before a national park can make any serious contribution to your civilization.

It can be if you play on maps with one large land mass, but if there are a lot of civs over water the game can't be won by the time Scientific Method is researched. I suppose it might be "decided" by then because you have such a large technological lead but then you are either lucky or playing at too low a level. The National Park sounds a very interesting way to boost one forest city at that stage of the game. I have yet to use it in any of my games as I'm struggling to learn about otyher things but it can obviously turn a mediocre city into a star performer in a very short time.

The free specialists from forest preserves are good but the removal of health issues could also be a startlingly good use of the national wonder. Imagine capturing a city with many floodplains and no forests, it will have horrible health problems. Build that wonder and you can spam all the unhealthy buildings like forge, factory, (not coal plant for power), industrial park, airport and eventually hydro plant for power. Ironmills would only be half power, getting +50% for iron but nothing for coal, but that could be worth building in some circumstances. If the floodplains were turned into watermills and workshops it would be a hammer powerhouse able to run a lot of engineers and never have to build any of the normal health buildings. I have yet to find a suitable very unhealthy site but that is the other main use of National Park I can foresee.