I have been struggling with terrain management in Civ3.
Some background: In Civ2 I would only occasionally cut down forest because with railroad it was productive as is. To a lesser extent, it was aesthetically pleasing to have forest and emotionally rewarding from a "Sim Empire" perspective that I was ecologically responsible.
OTOH, in Civ3 it is more advantageous to clear cut the forest completely and strip mine the land. In fact, before one builds hospitals, mining should be much more prevalent than irrigation -- and hospitals come late in the game. So here I am: frustrated and unsatisfied with my empire, forced to ecologically devastate the globe.
So today I was thinking about the range wars between cattlemen and sheep men. I mused that it would be a good idea to implement a range or ranch as a tile improvement. After all, this is historically accurate and there are examples of deforestation for ranching, though not as prevalent as for farming. And I considered the tile bonuses delivered from this activity, as a great many raw materials would be generated in addition to the food....
And then it hit me: what if I thought of "mining" the pasture as an abstraction for "increasing its productivity" in a non-farming sense. It was like an epiphany. All of a sudden, it made sense to clearcut forest, mine the plains, and railroad the heck out of my territory! Of course it would deliver food (strip mining a tile wouldn't produce much food I'd be anxious to eat), raw materials for construction of various finished goods, and commerce.
Now I feel much better about the aesthetics of the game. If any graphic artists agree with me and want to change the graphic of a mine on prairie to that of a sheep, I'd be in his debt.
Peace
