Improving Grasslands w/o Fresh H2O

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

The general rule of thumb on improvements seems to be mine the grasslands, irrigate the plains. Of course, from time to time you run into a situation where there's no nearby fresh water for irrigation. How do you typically handle that situation?

1. Irrigate a few grassland tiles to get fresh water over to the plains. Obviously this isn't always an option, but it often is. If you do this, how many grassland tiles are you willing to irrigate before you decide it's not worth it? Do you wait until you're out of despotism, so your irrigation has some benefit on the grasslands, or do you feel like getting the plains irrigated makes it a worthwhile tradeoff?

2. Mine the plains for now, switch to irrigation later when you get Electricity.

3. Wait for Electricity, leave the plains unimproved until then. If you choose this option, does it depend on the difficulty level you're playing at? It might be a much longer wait for Electricity at Chieftain than Diety.

4. Something else, like maybe, "I don't build in those areas."

 

[Bamspeedy]

1. Irrigate the fewest number of tiles needed (preferably non-bonus grassland as you want to mine those as soon as possible)in order to get the irrigation to reach the plains. Once the irrigation reached the plains I can change the irrigated grassland back to mines. It also depends on how close you are building cities and how much grassland you have, as you may not need those plain tiles until post-hospitals anyways.

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

Oh yeah. I hadn't thought about the fact that you don't need to keep the grassland irrigated to keep the water flowing into those plains.

 

[MrWhereItsAt]

Somewhat situational dependent. If you can't get water there, just build mines in every tile that can be worked by the population you can get there, remembering that fast growth is bad if you're already having happiness problems (unless you can poprush).

Once you have electricity, then correct your terrain to max your terrain use with as many resources as possible.

 

[Alkar]

Once, I made my babilonian slaves to irrigate about 30 squares to bring water to my Ottoman capital city. I had to clear 10 jungle squares, and also built roads to make it faster.

I founded 4 new cities at the path sides, taking extra advantage of this "Great Water Supply" D-I-Y wonder xD