Rainforests Should Lose the +1 Food

[Tomice]

As far as I know, jungles had way more available plant food for hunter-gatherers compared to other terrains. So many times of fruit come from tropical forests originally, while there's never been as much food to be found in European forests. The density of animals is also higher. So it's totally ok for me that jungles provide more food initially.

 

[Galvatron]

It always feels really weird to me how rainforests are really desirable settling locations in Civ6, but have very few cities in real life. As I'm thinking about it, a big part is simply that a rainforest tile always has at least 2 food, whereas real rainforests are not particularly known for being rich in food resources (rather a lot of them have been cut down for farmland). One way that we might address this discrepancy is to just cut the +1 food bonus from having a rainforest. Since they only appear on plains tiles, that means all rainforest tiles will only have 1 food unimproved, which makes them much less attractive as a location to settle. To balance this out a bit for Civs with a rainforest bias like Brazil or Kongo, one idea might be to allow them (but only them) to get a +1 food bonus on rainforests.

The reason why that appears to be so is because farms suck.

Rainforests do produce an abundance of food irl, and the most populous civilizations on earth have generally been in those regions

 

[Deadly Dog]

I really like how rainforest have come to be represented in Civ games. To start they are nice and productive early and you can delay getting a builder but there's a hard limit to what you can do with unimprovable tiles, and that unlocking the ability to chop them also unlocks a district reduces the value of a chop towards district production.

I also like that we can`t replant them, though we can afforest those tiles (presumably with pine and eucalyptus) and reforest woods, but the game still pins at least a nominal value (appeal) on old growth.

The growth of tropical hardwood plantations in my lifetime justifies in my mind allowing lumber mills in rainforest, though it comes pretty early.

Finally the new preserve district gives us a way to represent all of those cultures that thrived in rainforests, as other have pointed out with great examples above. But I don`t see that competing with temperate zone improvements once you get farm adjacency bonuses. There's also now a long-term cost to those too, which is vulnerability to drought and flood. So more and more Civ seems to be getting better at capturing historical land use and associated costs of such.

 

[Republic of San Montuoso]

unless you're seriously arguing that citizens working tiles without farm improvements are hunter-gatherers

I mean, you have a large meadow without farm, pastures and no forest, cattle nor cereals... where does the food comes from, for you, then ?

 

[bbufa]

Move lumber mill on rainforest to construction, so rainforest will be equal to wood in term of production (except production from chopping)?

 

[Galvatron]

Except that "unimproved" doesn't mean not agricultural, since we're talking largely sedentary civilizations, unless you're seriously arguing that citizens working tiles without farm improvements are hunter-gatherers....

I assume you mean they're not tribal societies, because they are definitely hunters and gatherers.