National Park

[fenrus]

I'd say a city that has 1-2 high yield food resources (fish, wet corn) with a lot of plains/tundra forest. A city like that can still be productive even before Biology since you can work ocean tiles or run 2-5 specialists even without the NP.

I typically avoid developing Plains Forest (no river) anyways, I'd only chop them for quick production.

 

[goodolarchie]

I've captured major cities mid-late game that still have 6-8 forested tiles left, it seems the AI worker is hesitant to chop them if there's absolutely anything left for them to do (railroad spam anyone? ).
I usually vassalize at this point so I need strong culture to counteract the existing AI cities. National park seems like a no brainer in this case because the tiles improve quickly and don't need to be worked to gain access to a lot of specialists. Being able to throw 8 bonus artists into a freshly conquered city is like being able to run the full culture slider, and pretty soon you're going to assimilate whats left of your vassal cities while you focus your troops on a different front.

Agreed on the point on the tundra though, if you're going to use NP domestically this is a great way to make use of sub par real estate.

 

[CivMcNut]

I like this idea of making the National Park a very powerful wonder. I will have to incorporate it into my coming games. When I play to win by Domination it becomes available so late that the game is already decided by the time it comes out.

In some past games I used National Parks to stop really bad pollution towns. The forest preserves/free specialists were just gravy. It is not that intensive of a hammer investment to make as far as National Wonders go.

 

[tinstaafl]

I have found it hard to get more than 5 or 6 forest preserves in the national park city. That being said, it can sometimes happen. For instance, in my first immortal game, my capital was on a small peninsula which right outside of the bfc widened into a large patch of jungle. Beyond the jungle, there were several good city sites that i settled before charlemagne got there. Maintenance was prohibitive already, and i had to relocate my capital early, something i almost never do, so i couldnt settle the jungle for a long time, even when i had iron working, because, well, charlemagne was my religious buddy, he's kinda hard to take down and i already had alot of land for standard size map so i went teching. Later in the game when i filled out the land i finally got around to place a 20 forest preserves city there. It was more like jungle preserves though except for 4 forests, so it had 20 specialists but not much else. I think it didn't even help me get another late golden age because it kept popping engineer after engineer so probably workshops would have served me better .

 

[Tristan_C]

For extra fun with epic national parks, play an Advanced Start (industrial or modern) OCC at a high difficulty level in the arboreal mapgen. It is a very different round of civ4, to be sure.