I may be in the minority here, but, if I have a size 12 city, it has at least one high food tile. I can see the paper working out for this, but once you add in hammer/commerce loss of one fewer pop to work tiles/specialize, it doesn't strike me as a good trade unless you built your city poorly. Captured cities who don't have their total tile set notwithstanding.
To be fair to the "avoid starvation" approach, the high-food tiles will indeed have a big effect on the relative efficiency of starving vs. avoiding starvation.
One convenient way to measure it is to look at the total number of specialists vs. total net food.
Taking the 12-size city example again, starvation allows us to run 12 specialists at a total net food of -22. If we average the net food over all specialists, this means we have -1.8 net food per specialist. If we use the trick and begin at 0 Food, then our net food is improved to -21, a +1 improvement, for an average net food per specialist of -1.75.
However, if we replace just two of those specialists with Irrigated Corn, we will have 10 specialists and total net food of 2+6+6-24 = -10. This equates to a net food per specialist of -1.0, much more manageable than the total starvation case (either with zero or non-zero initial food).
How does this help us? Although a net food of -10 is not enough to avoid starvation pop loss with 0 Food in the bin, we can still avoid starvation pop loss with 10 or more Food in the bin. In fact, we can endure N turns with N*10 Food in the bin, without starvation pop loss.
Because this scenario has a less negative net food per specialist than total starvation, it means we can endure longer and have more sustained output than by using total starvation.
In the 99% or so cases where 10 specialists are sufficient, we can safely ignore the 11th and 12th specialists, and continue to reap the benefits of the Irrigated Corn--provided that we have enough food in the food bin to continue using this approach. This applies especially to GPP generation, where a fixed amount of GPP is needed to pop each GP, and exceeding that amount by a small excess will not likely help us at all.
A 300% increase is quadruple output, not triple. Higher multipliers can be achieved, but not in every game (Parthenon, forum)
I was assuming only Pacifism and Golden Age bonuses, not National Epic, Philosophical, or anything else. These two bonuses added together result in a +200% bonus, for triple the ordinary output.
