How to use National Park

I don't use it. Waste of time to place a city and wait on the forests for National Park. ITs a useless wonder that appears cool on paper but really provides no significant opportunity to implement in a real game situation. I'd rather chop those forests far early and build a thriving economy in that city with valuable improvements. I think I've used it once in my last 20 games. Its lame.

PS for those who put it with national epic, I disagree. I always place my National EPic in my most productive city which usually doubles as a wonder farm and Consequentially a GP farm. The other national wonder I stick there is ussually iron works later. This way can farm GE and make strong runs at the late game powerful wonders like Stat of Lib, cristo, pentagon, eiffel tower, and gorges.

Another possibility is to stick national wonder with my wall street and farm merchants. GM can be settled for even more food which means more GPP and lots more money.

The only thing I can think of as being consistently useful situation for a NP is the tundra instance you guys brought up. However, I don't think thats much of a situation for a national wonder. I personally don't try to spend much time making tundra's productive. Its going too far out of the way. There's plenty of valuable land.
 
I don't use it. Waste of time to place a city and wait on the forests for National Park. ITs a useless wonder that appears cool on paper but really provides no significant opportunity to implement in a real game situation. I'd rather chop those forests far early and build a thriving economy in that city with valuable improvements. I think I've used it once in my last 20 games. Its lame.

PS for those who put it with national epic, I disagree. I always place my National EPic in my most productive city which usually doubles as a wonder farm and Consequentially a GP farm. The other national wonder I stick there is ussually iron works later. This way can farm GE and make strong runs at the late game powerful wonders like Stat of Lib, cristo, pentagon, eiffel tower, and gorges.

Another possibility is to stick national wonder with my wall street and farm merchants. GM can be settled for even more food which means more GPP and lots more money.

The only thing I can think of as being consistently useful situation for a NP is the tundra instance you guys brought up. However, I don't think thats much of a situation for a national wonder. I personally don't try to spend much time making tundra's productive. Its going too far out of the way. There's plenty of valuable land.

Its not good with iron works - since it removes coal and that removes some of Ironworks bonus.

Its not worth saving forests in your early cities - I agree its simply not that powerful compared to the early production boost of chopping those forests. But once I get 7-8 cities up, if I find a forest / jungle preserve I'll likely hold onto it for NP. Getting a bunch of free specialists later is always good - although it probably means only one extra GP in a space race.

Its also pretty good combined with Globe Theatre to produce a really big city - just fill the land with farms and you can grow to size 40 and pull in a ton of science and trade income.
 
Its a situational wonder, no doubt. I basically did what Invisiblestake talked about in the recent IU game. A mid-game wave of expansion got me a couple jungle-heavy cities needed to block territory. I chopped down just what I needed to grow and produce a little (I eventually did a 6pop whip to finish the NP :mischief:) and left about 6 jungles. With specialists maxed it can run about 14-15 specialists (in CS) without starving.

It is even better to build in a forested area because the forests can be milled until the NP is finished, then converted to preserves. Of course, the tradeoff is not getting the production from chopping. I sometimes build the NP in a tundra/forest area settled a bit later.
 
I don't use it. Waste of time to place a city and wait on the forests for National Park. ITs a useless wonder that appears cool on paper but really provides no significant opportunity to implement in a real game situation. I'd rather chop those forests far early and build a thriving economy in that city with valuable improvements. I think I've used it once in my last 20 games. Its lame.

PS for those who put it with national epic, I disagree. I always place my National EPic in my most productive city which usually doubles as a wonder farm and Consequentially a GP farm. The other national wonder I stick there is ussually iron works later. This way can farm GE and make strong runs at the late game powerful wonders like Stat of Lib, cristo, pentagon, eiffel tower, and gorges.

Another possibility is to stick national wonder with my wall street and farm merchants. GM can be settled for even more food which means more GPP and lots more money.

The only thing I can think of as being consistently useful situation for a NP is the tundra instance you guys brought up. However, I don't think thats much of a situation for a national wonder. I personally don't try to spend much time making tundra's productive. Its going too far out of the way. There's plenty of valuable land.

You're using the NP where it's NOT supposed to be used as.
 
Yeah, NP is best used in an area that you otherwise wouldn't have even bothered developing, like tundra-forest. I used it once for a jungled area, because it was either that or nowhere - no decent polar lands within my realm (or even in the world, for that matter) and that jungle had no resources to bother planting a city for, so it was just a blight until NP came along.

Then I built it and parked the surrounds, and had a heck of a time building enough stuff to actually be able to use all those specialists. Good thing Citizens produce a hammer, I guess. (I built most of the parks before I could get NP completed in the newly built city.)

My first games with it, though, I didn't know about the free specialists, and saw no use for Preserves, so I found a high-food place and built it and Globe. Got my population to about 56 (with help from Sushi-power; at least I understood THAT!). Coulda done better with a better site, but that was pretty good for a first try, I thought.
 
I don't know about others, but I often find myself in possession of a city liberated from the AI's foolish management with 10+ forest tiles. If those cities can be fairly productive with minimal/no chopping, I often leave the forests up and prep the city for an NP/NE combo or some such as soon as I get Biology.

Mostly I pair it with the NE to generate a specific type of GP if my farm is polluted, usually to found a corporation.
Sometimes if I don't have an obvious Wall Street city (i.e. no shrines and I'm running 80-90% science slider so even my commerce cities don't generate so much cash), I'll build it there and run all the specialists as merchants to generate cash.
 
The National Park is a powerful building. It is perfectly nice in jungle towns. The argument of you can hold just as many specialists as forest preserves if you cut down the jungles and irrigate w/ Biology is misleading. This assumes you cut down the jungles early, irrigated them all after CS, AND have had time to grow said city to size 20. If you've had all that time, and that many extra workers (that could be busy elsewhere), you probably arent researching fast enough anyways :).

NP's beauty is its quick and easy setup, and net contribution of 100+ GNP and GPP to your economy, whether it be free scientists or merchants (or even artists!).
 
In addition to the above uses, sometimes it can be worth it to leave the trees if you found the city late. For the purposes of trade routes, I like to have one overseas city grow to a huge size. If astronomy lets me settle a location with two food resources and tons of trees (or decent trees and land to grow them on adjacent), normally I leave the trees as they allow the city to grow larger without all the healthy buildings and enhance trade income; I can whip the basic infrastructure; and I can often use US to buy the expensive stuff.

In a nutshell the oppurtunity cost for not chopping goes down over time and if you don't settle there until astronomy the specialists more than make up for the hammers.
 
For the purposes of trade routes, I like to have one overseas city grow to a huge size. If astronomy lets me settle a location with two food resources and tons of trees (or decent trees and land to grow them on adjacent), normally I leave the trees as they allow the city to grow larger without all the healthy buildings and enhance trade income

I am not sure if you mean to imply it or not, but I'm pretty sure the free specialists do not count in your city population, so they wouldn't count for your city size for trade-route value calculation.

Can anyone confirm?
 
I do not mean to imply it. What I mean to imply is that when growing up a city on the far side of the world, it normally runs afoul of the health cap before the happy one (either because I have so many luxuries/culture or I'm in HR). Health buildings can be ignored early when you have 10 or 12 trees in the BFC and later I will have the NP. This normally allows the city to grow to truly monstrous size once I spread in Sid's Sushi or Cereal.

There is quite an advantage to having (at least) one monster city overseas and I often find that settling a city after astronomy gives me a high growth city with enough trees to make the NP rather useful. Trees = higher health cap before NP is built and the NP = larger city afterwards. If the island lacks fresh water, NP continues to look even better than chopping. If I'm going to end up going environmental for health, diplo, or UN reasons then its an easy choice.
 
it should be mentioned that Japan can get electricity in their national park city without coal but BEFORE fission or plastics, since their shale plant does not require coal.
 
I don't know about others, but I often find myself in possession of a city liberated from the AI's foolish management with 10+ forest tiles.

This is exactly what I encountered in the game I'm playing now. I parked the NP in this city and it became an instant powerhouse. That was the first time I've ever had any luck with it.
 
Its not good with iron works - since it removes coal and that removes some of Ironworks bonus.

Its not worth saving forests in your early cities - I agree its simply not that powerful compared to the early production boost of chopping those forests. But once I get 7-8 cities up, if I find a forest / jungle preserve I'll likely hold onto it for NP. Getting a bunch of free specialists later is always good - although it probably means only one extra GP in a space race.

Its also pretty good combined with Globe Theatre to produce a really big city - just fill the land with farms and you can grow to size 40 and pull in a ton of science and trade income.


Sry I meant NE with Ironworks not NP. I wasn't very clear.

As far as Globe theater and NP combo I don't think that's necessary. The forests take up farm space so really can't get it that large without sushi corp and the specialists from NP are FREE so no unhappiness plus you get lots of happniess from preserves...
 
It's great for an OCC game. Globe removes the unhappiness and NP removes the unhealthiness. It gives you an extra end game kick just when you start to need it.
 
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