[GS] Nazca Lines and the Power of Desert tiles

[Caprikel]

I'm curious as to what you guys think of the viability of desert cities now that Nazca lines are a thing?
I have a few screenshots from my Mali game to show some examples of what they can do.

Here is an example of a Petra city with Nazca lines surrounding the outer tiles, along with one adjacent to the two niter resources. Unfortunately they're very hard to see with the Civ V textures, but if you look very carefully you can see them.
Now while Nazca lines themselves can't be worked, them adding +1 food, +1 prod, and +1 faith to every adjacent tiles means a potential 3*6=18 increase in tiles yields from one improvement.

Next I'll show how they can be used in other ways in a non-Petra city.

In this screenshot, the Nazca lines are being used to make a few high yield tiles out of pure desert, while also being used to improve a couple maoi improvements. Using Nazca lines to make a few elite tiles makes them amazing for low population cities that wouldn't be able to work lots of tiles in the first place.

So what do you guys think of Nazca lines? Would you consider desert cities to be competitive with the use of Nazca tiles?

 

[Phoenix1595]

I have used them to good effect, in that otherwise useless desert tiles become output machines.

It is interesting to note that you played as Mali+Petra city+Nazca lines. I played with the same setup, and my Petra-running, Nazca-Lined Timbuktu became one of the best cities I have ever built— food, faith and production were insanely good.

I think Nazca helps bring back the lost Civ5 desert civ game, which is fantastic for those of us who play Egypt/Mali/Nubia. Of course, the issue is that one cannot count on having Nazca in every game, so having a killer desert civ game is going to be a relatively rare treat.

 

[Mr_PeaCH]

This is a reason to be able to cherry-pick City-States when setting up a map and starting a game. Once you get use of Nazca when you play Mali or another desert-friendly CS you don't want to go without. But times that I did were phenomenal.

 

[UWHabs]

They're also useful to place on the edge of deserts, since they still help adjacent tiles too. I'm not sure what "mathematically" the best arrangement is, but if you had an infinite flat desert, I think planning each city to have 3 adjacent lines tiles would basically give you about half the workable tiles, but they each become 3/3/3 tiles, so worth it to work. And that becomes even more valuable if you have either another improvement to place on those tiles (open air museum, for example), or if you have Petra or another resource.