Beamup said:
Untrue. Floodplains give a -0.4 health penalty, which is a loss of at most 0.4 food per FP. But they also give 1 more food than any other non-resource tile, so at worst you come out only 0.6 food ahead of any other non-resource tile. FPs are ideal for the non-resource tiles of a GPF until you get to the point that there's so much unhealth you can't grow to work the FPs.
Also untrue. Plains hills, and indeed any hills, are bad for a GPF. That doesn't actually limit its wonder production too badly, though - whipping will be very powerful in a good GPF, and you can build wonders very quickly using whip overflow. But that's not that important anyway since wonders aren't that big a deal for the GPF. It's all about specialists - for which you want food, not hammers.
As to the first one, I disagree with your "untrue" since you'll hit the health cap much earlier when you don't have a variety of food sources/health buildings, so your ealy GP city will certainly grow fast, but it won't be able to support any specialists, because the city will be too sick. Such a city will be better as a whipping city for troops/libraries (depending on peace or war). This will end up hitting you hard because the earlier a GP comes out, the more their ripple effects will help you through time.
FP-based GP farms are awesome, but not when there is an extreme number of FPs without any forest, because you simply need too many food resources before the health cap hurts you. Also, you said 0.4 unhealthy per square, but that is per square in the city; not per square worked. I started on the western edge of a Great Plains map in the middle of a whole pile of FPs, one of which had corn (!!!), but it would have been a terrible GP farm because (on monarch with a non-expansionist Civ) it hit the health cap at 2; 3 with the corn connected.
In short, with regard to your first point, FPs are an excellent, arguably an essential, component of a good GP farm, but there is an optimum number of them, and over this number is just as bad as below it in the short term, and this is only partially alleviated later, since no matter how many health resources you get, there will still be more unhealthy faces from the FP penalty that you'd have if there were fewer of them.
As to the second "untrue," I disagree totally; you may get the bulk of your GPP from specialists, but every wonder is 2/3 of a specialist and any decent GP farm will have a few; I try to build all of my wonders in the GP farm. Anywhere else seems counter productive. I believe that a real GP famr should have a few plain hills to work in lieu of a specialist in order to build wonders. This not only gives you MORE great people but also lets you tailor what kind of great people based on the wonders you build...
As a side note here, and I'm sure this has been written about 20 times before, but stone resources will point you in the direction of engineers and priests while marble will point you mostly towards artists and a little towards scientists (mostly because of GL there, but the marble wonders are LARGELY artist-producing wonders).
Anyway, specializing the GP output aside, having production in your GP farm will also pump up the numbers of GP appearing, not to mention whatever benefit the wonder itself gives being a nice "side effect" to its GP help. Also, I would NEVER rely on whipping to build wonders; I'm loathe to whip in GP farm period, its just completely counter productive unless it's to control unhealthiness, but that should never be a problem anyway because if you watch the city closely, you can just assign more specialists to keep the population from growing.
Anyway, I didn't expect to type that long, but I strongly disagree with your take on things, although I look forward to seeing how you'd argue against what I said in this post.
