Jungle Start Strategy?

[Spoonwood]

Without railroads it is 2 food and one shield in both cases.

If we have advanced to railroads we need to compare 2 tiles each. One mined plain and one irrigated plain together yield 4 food and 4 shields. 2 mined grassland tiles do the same.

By the time railroads are available converting irrigations into mines so that net food equals zero is a standard procedure.

Yes, you are correct in what you say. But, the irrigated grassland railroaded tile might not be as irrelevant as you expect. If we want to push out a space race at a fast pace the irrigated grassland tile has power for more specialists for us, whether that's specialist farms or cities with hospitals (ICS on huge maps has limitations due to the hard coded city limit). Alright, you probably knew that. I don't know if you've ever thought about gifting a city to a friend or research partner. If such a city has a police station and a courthouse, I would expect that the police station and courthouse remains once gifted to the friend, for a boost on the commerce of the friend. If a city has scientists in it already, and it's done with enough cities, that could boost their science rate also, maybe? One would need to check via investigating a city after gifting it.

Edit: I tried gifting with two different friends using archphoneix's old HoF spaceship launch save. The first friend, only had one luxury, and had tax collectors or entertainers as specialists. The second friend had tax collectors or entertainers also. All non-cultural buildings remained. I forgot about gifted cities only getting 9 tiles, unless it was captured and then gifted back. Persia's Adrinaople was on the other side of the pangea from them, but their still had some science from the courthouse and police station. Getting them we love the president days I guess could involve getting them war happiness, but that's something I don't know how to handle, much less maintain in a productive manner.

 

[Buttercup]

I was given a Jungle start yesterday.

It's mostly about clearing key jungle and wetland squares, which means trying to average 2 Workers per town instead of 1, and hang the cost:

The dark green circles are where Forest has been chopped and the light green circles are either jungle or wetlands.

Growth was slow going early on, but once you get two or three healthy towns/cites then you can function fairly normally.

The big drawback is that because so many workers are needed then military takes a bit of a back burner and so it's more about keeping people sweet than enraging people. And this will compund as time wears on as without Iron they'll soon be a target for bored Civs.

But because most of the other Civs are in the same boat, there's not too much to worry about on that front just yet:

Another drawback is that should the time ever come to engage in a war, all you're going to be doing is taking more jungle, the AI is particularly bad at clearing land.

But this is Monarch difficulty and I've still got the tech lead, Republic in good time and all rivals happily polite, a good luxury and a horse resource, so depending on when an AI stack of doom arrives, this isn't what I would consider a bad start, it's just a more restrictive start, restrictive in choices of approach that is, rather than restrictive as in too slow or too hampering.

A lot of issues will be situationally specific with Jungle starts, but, as I said earlier, they're normally ok and some of my favourite games have been Jungle starts.

 

[Spoonwood]

It's mostly about clearing key jungle and wetland squares, which means trying to average 2 Workers per town instead of 1, and hang the cost:

I tend to have 2 workers per city, so I would probably have 2.5-3 workers per city for a jungle start like you have. At least, eventually.

 

[Takhisis]

Remember that sometimes it's better to first build a road through the jungle (for resources or for transporting armies) and then clear the intervening terrain; after all, you lose fewer turns from a lot of individual workers if each of them doesn't lose the entire turn there. I think tjs282 has a better handle on the maths for that, but still when you need a resource to arrive fast e.g. iron for developing Swiss pikemen then you just go and get it.