1) Don't remove forests to place the district. it's very odd that in order to preserve a forest, you chop it down and replace it with a "preserve". It would make a lot more sense, thematically, if there was some exception to the "district removes features" rule for preserves to keep the forest intact. Also, when you chop the trees this has a negative affect on appeal of surrounding tiles - hence making the preserve appeal-neutral in many cases instead of appeal-plus, which doesn't seem right.
Yeah I agree, I'd bet this was an oversight and the intention was for them to not remove woods that they were on. This seems all the more evident as preserves and Vietnam were released in the same pack; it seems the conversation at the Civilization office went such as, "Oh, you're working on Vietnam who can only place districts on certain features - Did you figure out how to code so that placing the district won't remove the feature? Great, then we'll go ahead with this preserve district idea because it would be silly if a district themed around environmental preservation would call for chopping down the woods or rainforests to place them." And then they got caught up in the development and hype of the new civilization and features and forgot to code that in. #Facepalm.
2) Let them be included in national parks. Again I understand the rules about no districts in national parks, but it just doesn't make that much sense. A preserve as the thematically "natural district" should have an exception to the rule and allowed to be included in national parks. They are already pretty difficult to build with all the restrictions, and this would help make them a little more viable.
That's a little much, I'd rather not see that. My argument against this would be two-fold:
First, I disagree that they're not very good until you get the 2nd building from Conservation, and that they seems very niche and not really great in most typical scenarios. I'd agree that they're suboptimal (but still good) in many game instances, but that's a good thing - the game already has several options that are universally applicably always a great choice, and I'd rather not have more of these to add to the rinse/repeat feeling of the game. But I feel that preserves are already leaning too far in that direction. Even before the advent of preserves, I found that developing an ancient era faith economy, mostly from acquiring the Earth Goddess pantheon and possibly supplemented by holy sites and other methods, and then the ease of getting a classical era golden age (huts and barb camps pepper in some era score, one or two well-placed districts, meet some civs, maybe a wonder, beelining to first goverment and so on will usually get you there, and then there's a few Hail-Mary options like wiping out a neighbor or sniping a medieval tech with few prerequisites to be first to medieval) and follow that up with a classical era Monumentality golden age to faith buy a bunch of settlers was already an OP strategy. Now you add preserves to this, and the tiles that are around it that are breathtaking generating 4 faith (2 from the preserve and 2 from Earth Goddess) really sends this into overdrive, and that's pretty powerful even before considering the extra food and culture the tiles generate. While it is a lot easier to get most or all of the preserve's surrounding tiles to breathtaking appeal after preexisting woods get an extra appeal and the ability to plant woods, there are still several early game options to do so. The effect of doing this is strong enough that I'll often disregard adjacency bonuses of theater squares and holy sites as well as placing entertainment districts and, to a limited extent, wonders in favor of maximizing their effect on appeal and with preserve tiles as a higher priority. This can let you generate all the cities you need to win the game without ever building more than one or maybe two settlers or ever capturing a city. Then all those cities make preserves, some with juicy overlap tiles, conservation both enables you to finish getting breathtaking appeal on all six tiles of all preserves, and each city has a district that provides bonus food and production, more faith than a holy site, more culture than a theater square, as much gold as a commercial hub or harbor, and as much science as a campus (well... maybe not the last two but close.) While none of this has to anything to do with a preserve tile itself being able to incorporated into a national park (that's addressed more in the second point), it does speak to how they are already quite potent, maybe not OP but that's a good thing, and don''t require buffing. I don't think they're overpowered because there is a drawback: they take up a district slot and don't generate any great people points. I find that using this strategy of preserve as first or second district in most or all cities gets me to first place in all categories very early on Immortal and even Deity, but I'm making significantly less great people points than I usually got in games before the preserve came around. It does offer other tangential benefits as well, such as when using this strategy (either for peaceful or domination games) I'm more and more often building the GMC instead of the IA in my government district as spies are successful enough without the bonus (though it's always nice having one more) in order to faith-buy an army to deter anyone from every DoWing, or to conquer the world easily.
Second, ever since national parks sort of got buffed by reducing their cost by 66% (1800 down to 600), I've been using them more in non-tourism victory games (which I'll finally be able to play tourism again once they fix the monopoly tourism problem *sigh*) and am finding that even without the tourism benefits they're still very good, mostly because of the amenities. I could have sworn that at one time it was 1 amenity to the parent city and 1 amenity to each of the four closest cities and now there's an extra amenity in the parent city but that's not really relevant. It means that if there are five cities in a cluster and each has a national park, each city will get 2 amenities from it's own NP and 4 amenities from the other cities NPs, which is 6 amenities per city, obviously incredibly powerful and a gateway to ICS. The drawback to doing so is that every city that has a national park has 4 tiles that can't be improved, so you have to choose between the extra yields or the extra amenities (unless you're the Maori.) Now with the preserves, there is the stipulation of the preserve that it can't be adjacent to the city center meaning that all preserves are usually placed two tiles away if you want all of the affected tiles to be within the city's radius of workable tiles. Factoring National Parks in, as the 4 tile diamond needs to be within a single city's borders, you can't have a national park completely enveloped in a Preserve, but you can still have 2 out of the 4 tiles of the national park be the corner tiles of the preserve meaning that you get the preserve's bonus yields in half of the tiles of the National Park, halving the opportunity cost. But if you were able to have the preserve tile itself be included in the national park, this would allow you to have one National Park completely enveloped in the preserve on the west or east side, and a second National park occupying 2 out of the 3 remaining preserve tiles. This would lead to the strategy of having 2 National Parks per city one of which has 3 out of 4 tiles get the preserve's bonus yields and 1 dead tile, and the other National Park having 2 tiles get the preserve's bonus yields and only two unimprovable tiles, all while essentially getting 12 amenities per city, which is too much IMO.
