Are Rainforest tiles too OP now?

[Fluff Bunny]

Ever since forest fires became a thing, and the fact that a large area can burn over and over again many turns, I feel like Rainforest has become one of the best tiles to be near for late game.

17/18 food per tile average around my rainforest cities. It just seems a little silly.

[grognardgary]

Turn down the disaster slider. I always set it to zero I rarely get more than one forest fire an era, and sometimes it doesn't grow back.

[Copernicus]

You could always just switch off the Maya & Gran Columbia DLC.

[Spartak]

Disable Forest Fires mod. Forest Fires suck

[Stormwinds]

There's no way you are hitting anywhere near 17/18 food per rainforest under normal circumstances unless you are playing on a TSL map or something.

[Fluff Bunny]

Originally posted by Stormwinds:

There's no way you are hitting anywhere near 17/18 food per rainforest under normal circumstances unless you are playing on a TSL map or something.

I'm not sure what TSL map is, but this is the second game in a row (out of three since I had the latest DLCs) where rainforest food output (and production output) is in the high teens in the late game.

Part of it is that there has been a large landmass of jungle, and it seems to go in a big circle for dozens of turns continuous burning, regrowing, and burning again. Each time it burns it increases production and food output. This is second game in a row like this, so I can't believe I'm the only one experiencing this.

Interestingly, there is forest right next to the rainforest but it never seems to catch on fire or get ludicrously high points.

[SLG]

Do you have wonders, districts, and improvements near the rainforests? If yes, it could be they are adding bonuses to the tiles.

[Fluff Bunny]

Originally posted by SLGray:

Do you have wonders, districts, and improvements near the rainforests? If yes, it could be they are adding bonuses to the tiles.

For my cities with the highest output, yes I do, and yes, I do have rainforest specific wonders there that are boosting it- without going back and checking, I can't say exactly how much (I'm guessing not more than 2 or 3), but even with that, it is still an absurd amount. I'm Japan this game, so I don't have any Brazil specific rainforest perks. Still, with such high output, I can pretty outbuild any civ in those cities, so they have several wonders each.

I think what causes it is when a large rainforest has a non-rainforest terrain in the center, so the fires burn around and around for half the game by the time the fire does another circuit the previous terrain has regrown.

The areas with the obscene output in both games have been between my civ and a rival civ where we at first didn't build close to each other, so there also wasn't a lot of removed rainforest tiles to stop the fires burning almost continuously for the first half the game.

(in the most recent game, the fires lasted a few ages at the start and made it impossible to colonize, or invade my neighbour). It almost seems like a cheat though. There should be a max-cap to how much advantage fire can provide. I'm just glad I got the bonus instead of a rival.

[Copernicus]

Originally posted by Fluff Bunny:

(in the most recent game, the fires lasted a few ages at the start and made it impossible to colonize, or invade my neighbour). It almost seems like a cheat though. There should be a max-cap to how much advantage fire can provide. I'm just glad I got the bonus instead of a rival.

I'll say it again: Honestly, unless you really want to mess with strange rules, turn off all the DLC that you're not planning on using when you start the game. The base game is always going to be way more balanced without all the strange items added by the DLC packs.

[SLG]

There are civic policies later in game that give bonuses to certain tiles, like woods, marshes, etc. Also do not forgot that one tile and the other tiles around that one tile will get bonuses from each other. Like when you place districts, you will see what the other tiles give that tile where you are placing a district.

[Positron]

I would like to totally disable disasters as an option please.

[Fluff Bunny]

Originally posted by Positron:

I would like to totally disable disasters as an option please.

Can you not? I know on advanced game setup there is an option to adjust how frequently they occur, I would be surprised if this option doesn't allow you to turn them off completely.

[Catalytic]

This is really only an issue on certain maps. You have to have a map that is capable of generating a large body of connected forests or rainforests for there to be the circular fires like this. I play a lot on the Seven Seas map and it seems to be gated such that it won't put more than 4 such tiles together. It'll intersperse forests in your rainforest and vice versa. The result is that the fires that generate burn themselves out in fairly short order because they run out of adjacent tiles that are still unburned that they can spread to. You can abuse it a bit after conservation by planting a ton of forests to fill it in. I try and do this on tundra and sometimes get lucky. The catch of course is that it costs you a ton of time and resources to set it up and it hits so late in the game that it's hard to really call it an "exploit" if you have to give up your production to have a continuous forest fire trashing your city for a whole era or more and you're relying on a random event to trigger it.

Anyway, as others have said, you can turn off the DLC, turn down the disaster frequency, avoid Apocalypse mode, and choose map scripts that don't generate regions where this can happen. That's the work-around.

[Positron]

Originally posted by Fluff Bunny:

Originally posted by Positron:

I would like to totally disable disasters as an option please.

Can you not? I know on advanced game setup there is an option to adjust how frequently they occur, I would be surprised if this option doesn't allow you to turn them off completely.

If you set the slider to zero, you still get some forest fires, coastal flooding and eruptions.

[Spartak]

Originally posted by Positron:

I would like to totally disable disasters as an option please.

Only mods can do that

[D34DLY]

there is mod to turn off forest fires. it works.