Jungles: banana vs basic food

[ExpiredReign]

Logging Site = Lumbermill...

Actually what I meant has something todo with an idea I am toying with.

Instead of a 'Lumber Mill' which provides itself. I am looking at making 'Timber' a resource like 'Coal' or 'Iron'.

Then the tile provides the raw materials for a new building (Lumber Mill, Carpenter Shop, Ship Yard etc.) which then gives bonuses for specific areas of our cities.
In the same way we have mines for 'Coal' & 'Iron' but they are utilized in other buildings.

Sorry about the misunderstanding. I probably should have left that bit of info alone. I was imagining everyone could read my mind.

 

[mystikx21]

Logging site doesn't make much sense. There's a type of furniture wood that came from Cuba that is now extinct because we chopped it all down back a couple of centuries ago. Jungle, in the sense of tropical wood, when it has rare woods is more for that reason than because the wood itself is rare and precious otherwise

 

[JohnS]

Bonuses on unimproved terrain sounds interesting - but then it'd be nice to have an option to remove improvements.

 

[Zai]

Logging site doesn't make much sense. There's a type of furniture wood that came from Cuba that is now extinct because we chopped it all down back a couple of centuries ago. Jungle, in the sense of tropical wood, when it has rare woods is more for that reason than because the wood itself is rare and precious otherwise

A very large portion of wood and wood products sold globally every year come from jungle/rainforests, even today when the popular opinion is that cutting down rainforests is evil. It doesn't make sense that we can't build lumber mills on jungle, if anything lumber mills on jungle should be more productive than ones on normal forest, as far as realism goes. Honestly I'd bet Firaxis didn't want to be seen as supporting rainforest logging and that's the only reason it's not in. At this point though it's not really balanced for it, so gameplay wise it may not make sense as things stand.

 

[mystikx21]

There's a difference between a "lumber mill" and a strategic/luxury or bonus timber resource, which was more where my comments were directed. I'm quite sure there's plenty of wood coming from jungles, which is why it makes no sense to put any more resources based upon that there. Production makes more sense under that concept than a new resource and economic system based upon that resource (or other productive resources).

I'm also pretty sure most of that isn't from any kind of regular forestry system but from clear-cutting for agriculture. Clear-cutting jungle is already an option versus lumber mills for "regular" forest, which under that logic would make more sense as a source of instant production rather than consistent production. I'd be fine with that since jungles are modestly productive tiles with villages for gold and later science bonuses.

My preference would be they just have villages and plantations, the science bonus (reduced or split up), and remove or reduce the jungle based pantheons, and you clear cut them if you want production or farms (plains or hills) rather than build mills or farms.

The only question for me would be whether they should generate production when chopped or not (and that chopping should take more or less time than forests).

 

[Thalassicus]

I think jungles don't give production because chopping turns 1 food into 1 production; a production improvement might be redundant.

 

[heinous_hat]

I mentioned this over in the map script thread, but it's strongly related to jungle tile yields... jungle/hills tiles are absent in a couple of commonly used map scripts. Continents Plus and other Firaxis scripts have them, but PerfectWorld and (by association?) Communitas lack those features (Communitas has jungle/hills on small island chains only). Instead you get interspersed forest/hills which aren't as good as jungle for and make it sort of an obvious candidate to chop immediately for increased , especially if you're smack in the middle of the jungle band. It also looks out of place.

I think it might be worth considering allowing more feature combinations for jungle tiles (underlying grass near freshwater, more hills etc) to make those areas more interesting. yields from jungle alone would have to be conservative, but the choice between chopping them for the underlying benefits vs keeping unique tile or benefits would be a greater dilemma. We also wouldn't need to consider somewhat arbitrary measures like allowing some improvements to retain the jungle feature (plantation, farm, village) or eliminating Sacred Path.

I'm sure you guys can come up with a number of reasons why this would be a terrible idea , but I had the impression after playing some Amazon Plus maps that jungles are really boring on common (random) continent style maps and look unnaturally flat.

 

[Thalassicus]

I'd be okay with allowing jungle-on-grass and such for more variety. I think that's a good idea.

 

[Tomice]

I think jungles don't give production because chopping turns 1 food into 1 production; a production improvement might be redundant.

Agreed it's not really needed for gameplay, but from a realism perspective, the whole yield distribution just seems wrong to me. From wikipedia:

Food resources within the forest are extremely dispersed due to the high biological diversity and what food does exist is largely restricted to the canopy and requires considerable energy to obtain. Some groups of hunter-gatherers have exploited rainforest on a seasonal basis but dwelt primarily in adjacent savanna and open forest environments where food is much more abundant.

So this means that removing the forest should significantly increase the food output. I guess the original intention of the dev's was to represent the bad soil unter tropical rainforests when they decided to put plains under them. But this not always true, and surely too much detail for gameplay terms. In general, people remove jungle to increase the food output, and this should somehow be represented. That's why I agree with the following statement:

I'd be okay with allowing jungle-on-grass and such for more variety. I think that's a good idea.

This would increase food after removing jungle.


I also can't understand why jungle doesn't provide production. From jungle, one can harvest building materials, wood for weapons and tools, leather and hides for clothes, plant parts for strings and ropes ... what exactly do we get after removing the jungle, except food??? Sure there's the occasional mining operation under former jungle, but most of it is removed for food.

So I'm very sure we have an inverted reality ingame right now. For the sake of not changing too much, I'd be OK with having 2 food/no production unimproved jungles (they have more food than temperate forests after all). But at least I'd allow lumber mills on them, and maybe give hammers from chopping them.

 

[DeepSoul]

I agree with Tomice. If you have grassland on every jungle tile that would mean a very poor production unless you have access to several hills, so allowing Lumber Mills on jungle is a good idea. Yes, there is the caravan option and later you can have experts but you shouldn't have to depend on that. It's in the start you need production the most. Not in the middle ages when you should already have built the important buildings.

Concerning the food yield, if you can make jungles give 2 food even on grassland it wouldn't upset the balance. This balance makes you have to choose between jungle bonuses from beliefs or clearing the jungle to get an improvable tile. I made this suggestion in the Communitas thread but heinous_hat claims that you can't change feature yield, yet it seems like you consider it here. I would also support having jungles yeild 1 food and 1 production just like a forest since you can get building materials from it and the food is actually quite hard to get. If you want more food you can clear it to get the grassland instead.

@Thal

Actually I would like to turn your attention to the Communitas thread because I have a few questions there if you have time. The question how to remove the lake systems is the most important. Feel free to ignore anything else.

 

[heinous_hat]

You can change feature yield for sure. What you can't do (afaik) is change terrain type after the map is generated. Thus, you're stuck with whatever base terrain you choose to put under jungle (e.g. you can't change from grass to plains when it's chopped and back again later).

I was speculating that it would be nice to have a dynamic yield from the jungle tile (after it's chopped) that started out as junk, but improved over time.

 

[DeepSoul]

You're right. Seems like I misunderstood you in that post.