Civ6 Succession Game 1: Commercial Free Programming

[Ranamar]

Here's a shitty mspaint drawing of how far 6 tiles is for all of the cities we have currently, plus the two suggested locations for the next nearest city:


Placing an industrial district anywhere within that line, for each of the cities, will mean that city will get power plant bonuses when we finally get to building factories.

Some interesting things to note include that powering up Fukuoka is mutually exclusive with powering up Kyoto.  Similarly, there is a 1-tile zone where neither Shizuoka nor the proposed pink dotswill get powered up by an IZ.  Most awkwardly, we could, theoretically stick an IZ which powers up Takamatsu from Shizuoka, but the most appealing spots are all third-ring, and therefore a bit expensive to place things in.

These spots seem like no-brainers, and I expect will constitute our industrial heartland:


If we place a city on the X at some point in the future, it will also benefit from the enormous clustering of industrial zones.  Based just on this map, it would be boosted by 5 factories even before building its own.  However, it's also definitely a filler city, being packed as tightly as possible to Sendai, and I have not (yet) looked at the land to its south.  (I see some tundra...)  Additionally, the IZ 1E of the stone near Takamatsu is difficult to claim.  I think it makes the most sense for another filler city near the northern ellipse by the chocolate.  That city will also be even more dramatically filler (although) it might benefit from some ocean resources; it gets the crab at the least), and the IZ target tile is in its third ring, to boot.

Aside from our industrial heartland here, we still need to think about IZs for Shizuoka and Fukuoka.  The former's spots all feel underwhelming, while the latter mostly has a question of which jungle we want to vanish without chopping.  There are not any significant advantages or disadvantages to any of the possible tiles, unless we want to buy our way to the spot between the two stones.

[Ranamar]

T73:
First up, the administrivia:
Fukuoka is now "Chocolate River"
Takamatsu is now "Candy Mountain"
Kyoto is now "Iron Chef" because there is an iron next to it.
Sendai is now "Wheaties"
Shizuoka is now "Frosted Flakes"
I'm not terribly attached to any of those, but starting with Chocolate River and Candy Mountain got me into a food line of thinking.

I set Games and Recreation as the next civic, but it's likely to be switched in a bit.  It completes in 7 turns if I just set it to research, but I can get Construction in 7 turns and sink the extra culture into something else.  I'm thinking of doing 3 turns of Games and Recreation, followed by the balance into Recorded History before switching it back.  I want to get it close to done while we line up the boost, since it's currently the only available civic on the critical path to Feudalism, but it doesn't save us any time to ignore the boost.

Next, for some combat.  I walked the two archers next to the slinger forward one tile each.  The healthy one took a shot at the slinger, while the damaged one could promote.  I promoted it to Volley for extra ranged attack damage.  At least as importantly, this healed it back to full without having to rest.  With the northern archer, I took a shot at the scout, which took it down by 52 HP.  If I'm reading this map right, it might run out of range next turn, depending on where the warriors move to, but I decided that inviting an attack from the warrior was not worth it compared to being able to consolidate my archery forces to go after the camp which spawned the warrior.  We want to settle near that camp, so we need to get our forces rolling in that direction:

I moved the last archer back over towards Frosted Flakes, as that city feels pretty exposed.  (Although... we had this discussion about Gandhi and war earlier...)

As it turned out, I didn't quite drop industrial zones where I wanted to in that original dotmap, because it required buying more tiles than we could afford, even with the purchase price reduction civic card in.  Also, experimentation shows that the Meiji Restoration ability means that, for the districts we're building, the usual one output per two adjacent districts turns into one output per adjacent district.  It does not double anything else, so, functionally, this means that districts are equivalent to mines for IZ adjacency and equivalent to wonders for Theater Squares.  Since city centers are districts, this means that being adjacent to the city center is functionally equivalent to being adjacent to whatever usually powers things up and doesn't require significant extra effort to line up.

That said, I did put the purchase price reduction card in.  We'll need to build some more settlers soon, but we have barbarians in the way to getting our current settlers there, and it seems like a good interlude to build some districts.  Besides, there are definitely some tiles I'm going to want to buy in the next few turns.
The math works out as follows: We have 105 gold, and get 22.6 gold every turn.  A second-ring tile costs 64 gold with the reduction (for now), and a third-ring around 90 gold.  (That's going to go up soon because of techs, but that's what it is for now.)  This means that we can buy one tile this turn, another one next turn, and, if we spend all our gold on it, approximately one tile every three turns thereafter.  We probably want to be saving up for other stuff if we don't pressingly need one of the tiles, however.

There are other tiles which would be valuable because they could save us production because we want to put districts there, or the like, but this hill near Delhi is the first one I'm buying:
... uh, whoops!  I thought I had a picture here, but rest assured it's the hill that's E SE of Delhi and W NW of Frosted Flakes, in the strategic map below.
It's one of the few high-production tiles near this city, and it's the only one I'm afraid that India might take from us.
Besides, the city there will immediately start working it, since so few of its tiles are preoductive!

Finally, I solved our amenity problem: Nan Madol has 2 Jade.  The Suzerain bonus is completely useless to us at this time (and probably will largely always be useless), but we can really use the luxuries right now, and +2 culture at all theater districts is likely to very soon be useful to us.

End of turn, T73:

It's in strategic mode because that mostly makes the districts that have been placed easier to see... except that there are industrial zones hidden beneath both Iron Chef's and Frosted Flakes's name tags.
I haven't placed any at Chocolate River yet because I want to slip in a pair of jungle chops from the worker that is coming out there before placing the districts.  I'm pretty sure that will net us more resources than it costs us by letting a tech complete in the meantime.  If it turns out to get us less than the 25-30 production per tile (ignoring the food...) that the worker charges cost us, then I'll regret it, I admit.

Interturn, Victoria butters us up:


Tomyris is also impressed, but only says, "hrmph" as a voice:


T74: After the frenzy of activity last turn, this one felt rather uneventful.

I could buy another tile this turn, and I ended up buying another one near Frosted Flakes.  That city is the one most in danger of being encroached upon by foreign influences, and while a flat grassland tile may seem pretty unremarkable by normal standards, it is somewhere to put a theater square, and we have the population for that.  The city's build order is Builder(4T)->districts.  The industrial zone is listed at 24 turns, currently, while the theater district is listed at 12.  TBH, I think I'll probably build the theater district there first, because the industrial zone is relatively lackluster and to a certain extent exists to project factory power later.  Frosted Flakes is growing so fast that it will have population for yet another district in no time, anyway.

Victoria compliments us again interturn:

I think this is a hint about her having an agenda to do with city states.

T75: Masonry comes in.  The next tech is Construction.  Before I forget, I'm switching off the Games and Recreation civic research for Recorded History.  I'm going to turn in for the night after this turn, and I don't want to forget in the morning.

Actually, since I'm about to go to sleep, I'm going to put off the one major decision this turn: should I settle the green hex next to the settler here?

Exactly 6 tiles to its west is an industrial district.  On the other hand, it prevents settling of the black dot that Sullla suggested.  We've got a nice river valley to the south in the tundra... but it's tundra, which isn't good for much beyond mining and districts.  Yet another option is to try to walk the settler all the way past the mountain range to do something on the other end of the map.

I'll make a decision in the morning, but this is your chance to weigh in.
(Also, it occurs to me that there was a lot of talk earlier in the thread about settling and some solid arguments I should have sent this settler north or west.  It's not *that* much of a loss if I turn it around now.)

[Ruined Everything]

I see the logic behind settling in such a way as to maximize the effects of our i-zones, and I think that it's a great idea! That being said, I think the land around the square next to the settler (and really, anywhere around that southern region the settler's at right now) comparatively less good compared to what we could be settling - I'd wait and settle that spot later when we're closer to industrialism.

Maybe consider sending that settler further to the East (I assume you're settling your pink dot with the first settler - am I wrong?) I think my Crabs/Mercury dots (Yellow and Silver on my proposed dot map) or Sullla's dot by the mercury are both places with perhaps better immediate growth potential.

Depending on how brave you are, you also might consider grabbing that fertile region to the west - or putting a seafood village up north by the chocolate river. Of all the non-East suggestions I made in my dotmaps, I do think my light blue dot on the chocolate coast was pretty good.

What's the thinking behind going i-zone before culture-square? Does the math work? Honestly don't know.

[Ranamar]

Quickly, before I've fired the game back up, the idea behind dropping I-zones before culture-squares is mostly that culture-squares build at double speed. If we're going to have one escalate in cost a little, I'd rather it be the one that we get a production multiplier on. It's possible I got that backwards because we won't see the benefit for awhile.

(Now I'm going to go back in and look at city spots that aren't incremental growth for that settler, because you're right that the spot there won't come into its own until we get factories. Edit: and I've decided: I'm going to find a way to get the settler between the rice and the mercury, hoping that there are no barbarians along the route south of the mountains.)

[Ichabod]

You can place the Theater Districts already on the cities with at least 4 citizens, even though we won't work them. This way, both the IZ and the TD will be inexpensive (sorry, I know realize you already did it).

I actually like that proposed city site near Wheaties. It has a wheat of its own and I'm almost sure it can share a wheat with Wheaties (tile sharing has some bizarre rules in Civ 6). It has decent amount of hills and that's all that is needed for a decent city. And closer cities are easier to get online, because builders don't have to travel as much.

I'm ok with other spots too.

[Ruined Everything]

And closer cities are easier to get online, because builders don't have to travel as much.

This is an interesting point. I hadn't considered this before.

(I still think that the rice & mercury site is incrementally stronger, but I do see the arguments for the nearer site now.)

[Ranamar]

Interturn, the barbarian warrior commits suicide by player unit, bringing the archer down to 40 hp.  Nothing a good promoting can't fix...

Also, Pedro finished the Pyramids.  So, yeah, we had exactly one turn in which we could have placed it, had we had access to the tiles (which we couldn't afford) before it went away.

T76: I placed Osaka between the copper and the crab.  I'm not feeling inspiration for a name, just yet.  (Crab Cakes will be later... we have at least two places with tons of crab.)  Also, our front-line archer picks up Volley, healing from 40hp to 90hp.  He'll rest a couple turns in Osaka while more archers catch up to clear out the barbarian camp.

Osaka does have one problem, that I only just noticed however: there are no available tiles which can be worked for even 2 food until we improve the crab, and even that is not 3 food.  We're probably going to need to farm some of these plains for it, since there is not even food in reach.  The production potential if we can manage to grow the city is incredible, however.  Likely, we will need to use one or more of our precious trade routes to grow this city, rather than to boost other cities' production.  In the meantime, since Iron Chef isn't using its mercury mine, I grab it for an extra production.  Also, since city centers count as districts, we're getting +2 culture in Osaka from Nan Madol for being on the coast.  Since we need all the food we can get, I started on a granary.  65 hammers (13 turns) for +1 food doesn't feel great, but, if we ever manage to get this off the ground somehow, the housing will be handy as well.

T77: For some reason, the barbarian pikes are marching towards Osaka.  If I'm honest, this suits me fine.  Next turn, they'll be over a river from the city, and it will be a lovely shooting gallery.

Chocolate River finishes a builder.  The next one will be 90 production, and it turns out that chopping jungle right now gets us 25 food and 25 production, making the wait-to-chop plan turn out to have not been hugely worth it.  (Also, this cranks up the cost of every builder still in build.  I wonder if there's a race condition where completing builders on the same turn saves you hammers.)  Bumping us up to 5 pop will let us work another (unimproved) chocolate, however, so it's probably still worth it: around 30 builder-hammers turns into 25 hammers and 25 food.  If we put the first one into a builder and the second into a t-square, we should come out ahead on hammers as well as food.

Wheaties finishes a builder, too.  The builder builds a mine on the mercury next door, so now we have more luxuries we can sell.  It's going east after this to start improving Osaka.  I sell the mercury to Saladin for 14 gold, 1gpt, and a salt.  I could have gotten 10 gold and 5gpt from a couple of people, but a bunch of our cities are about to tick over from 4 pop to 5 in the next couple turns, and I think maintaining a happy buffer is worth 4gpt.

I undo the tile micro on Wheaties to get us to grow to 5 population one turn sooner.  Once we do, I need to switch back onto all the 3-production tiles, which, conveniently, is now 5 instead of 4.  (On further analysis, the production change is kind of a wash: we're trading 6 production over then next 3 turns for ... 6 extra production in the 2 turns after that, but it also gets us the science output from both an extra population and the mercury.)  I also finally figured out the comment from before about whether it makes more sense to build cultural districts before industrial ones.  I must confess to being slow here: In Wheaties, it will take 10 turns to build an industrial zone (at the current 15.6 production per turn; growing partway through nets us roughly an extra 15 hammers, so it would likely take 9 turns instead), which gets us +3 production immediately.  Then, it takes 5 turns to build a theater square at 18hpt.  Unfortunately, the I-zone does not give enough production to reduce the build time by even one turn.  (It's close, though... I haven't done overflow math.)  Alternately, we can build the theater district first and get 10 turns of 1 culture per turn while we wait for the industrial zone to build!  It costs us a grand total of about 15 hammers, and trading 15 production for 8-10 culture is probably about as good as we can get in this game.  Furthermore, that analysis forgets our cultural city state with 3 envoys, so we're actually getting 30(!) culture out of those 15 lost hammers.  Wheaties is building the theater square before the industrial zone.

Interturn, the barbarian spearman turned around

T78: Frosted flakes completes a builder, so we're going to start trekking that and the 1-charge-remaining one that mined hills near Frosted Flakes across the map.  The new one will take a couple turns to plantation some sugar, which we should probably start selling off given that I seem to have gotten us too many luxuries after all.

Two archers ought to be enough to to take a barb spearman, so I decide to scout with the third one.  We have got to settle Chocolate Crab, here, as it will be another incredible source of gold:


T79: Last turn before Construction comes in and district and possibly tile prices go up.

I make an executive decision that Osaka needs at least one tile with >2 food output, so we're saving the grassland near Iron Chef to be farmed.  It's a pretty disapointing farm, but with Feudalism we should be able to farm the two tiles next to it and buff it into a respectable 4 food output.  (Sadly, the other two farms would be required to be attached to Chocolate Crab.)  This means that the theater district for Iron Chef will beput over by the truffles.  It will be underwhelming for awhile, but that's the area we're planning to backfill with the spot I showed earlier that we're passing up for now.  I paid 64 gold for another tile so that the districts will, eventually, pack a little tighter.

Over by Chocolate River, I clear a second jungle for an industrial district next to the theater district.  The chop puts us 3 turns from finishing the theater, but it will be a long wait for the I-zone.

Also, the spearman moved off the barbarian camp again.  I do love a sucker!  He's not quite dead this turn, but it's real close:


T80: Construction comes in.  I switch civic research back to Games and Recreation, which will complete in 1 turn.  Incidentally, if we felt like building campuses, Recorded History is just barely over 50% done.  The next tech is Sailing, so we can improve the Crab near Osaka (which still needs a name).

I do some more scouting near Chocolate Crab.  This feels like it should be our next city along with the fish peninsula (Spitted Fish?) over by Rio de Janeiro.  Production might be a little weak, but the growth potential is unreal:


A scouting force appeared in the south.  Everybody panic!  I wish I had a better handle on sightline rules, because I'm genuinely afraid for my settler here:


I decided to play it safe and turn back.  Settlers are pretty valuable, and I'd rather waste some time running away than get got because I was feeling lucky.  We can take an escort out the next time we move to settle there, and take a safer route on top of that.  Besides, Chocolate Crab is looking really good right about now, and the spot I passed up is along the way, too.

T81: Games and Recreation completes.  Next is Defensive Tactics.  Sailing also completes: for now, we're going to sink points into Engineering.  If we want to boost it, we can build some walls.  I'd suggest Chocolate River as the target, since it's near Brazil, but we have many priorities, and that's 80 hammers that only matter if we are attacked.

The slinger definitely sees us now, since we're both on tundra hills, but it crossed a river, so it would take 2 turns for it to reach us worst case.  With the scout swinging around and probably trying to come back through the mountain pass we went through, I'm turning my settler back around on its original path again.  We'll be hugging the mountains because the hills give us vision, however:

(note: this is before moving the settler.)

Interturn, the slinger wandered back into the fog.  Big sigh of relief.

T82: Iron chef completes its industrial zone.  I suddenly realize that, in worrying over the settler in the south, I forgot to change civics: I meant to put the settler-building one back in.  Our culture output has gone up a bunch with completed theater squares in Chocolate River and Wheaties, so we're taking a 1-turn jaunt (was 2 turns, last I checked) over to Military Tradition so I can change civics.  We'll need it eventually to get to the merchant republic.

Wheaties moves on to an industrial zone.  (I also notice I forgot to re-micro the tiles for production, but we're not housing capped at the moment, so that doesn't seem like a huge loss.)  Chocolate River will be putting another turn into a worker before switching over to building a settler.  It's currently at +3 amenities because I forgot Classical Republic gives happy cap for a single district, and it's growing aggressively despite only having 2-food tiles.

We also have a surplus of Sugar, so I sell one to Pedro for 15 gold + 7 gpt.  We're also way up in ecstatic land and I expect to bring more chocolate online soon enough, so I also sell a chocolate to Gandhi for 18 gold, 6 gpt, and open borders.  I'm not sure we'll use the open borders, but if he's going to offer, who am I to refuse?  Hilariously, we are now up to 42gpt despite not using any of our trade routes for it.

Finally, in the saga of the wandering settler, I hope these slingers don't get any clever ideas, or we'll have to run away really fast:

(Up north, we finally cleaned up the barbarian camp after turning the scout into a pincussion.)

T83: With the completion of Military Tradition, Chocolate River switches off the builder it put a turn into last turn onto a settler.  Now that the settler civic is back in, the expected completion time is 11 turns.

T84: We are informed that we have, in fact, kept our promise to the Brazilians not to settle near their borders.  It's a perfect time to settle near their borders again!

Our trade route in Chocolate River finally completed.  There are various foreign routes we could take, (Delhi and Agra offer 6 gold and a faith; Rio offers 1 production, 3 gold, a culture, and a faith) but I want to get Osaka off the ground as a city, so the next route we're doing is from there.  We might even get another bridge out of the deal, but I fear the road will just lead to the other side of the river from Iron Chef.  Unfortunately, the production loss in Chocolate River will delay the settler a turn, but growing in 3 turns onto a 2F2P tile should make up for it.

Engineering is almost at 50%, so research switches onto Shipbuilding.  We'll need that eventually for mass production, which leads to Industrialization.

T85: Iron Chef completes a theater square.  It's 5 turns to do a settler.  I'd like to lay down an encampment, because it boosts a lot of stuff, and the city grows in 2 turns, but I think we can afford to wait for it to grow back to size 7 afterward to do that.  (I'm not sure what happens if you drop under the required population for your districts.)  We need settlers first.

After moving the trader to Osaka last turn, I set the trade route this turn.  We get some wonderful news: the trade route goes across the copper hill and then crosses the river somewhere that is not, in fact, next to the city center of Iron Chef.  This means we will finally get a flat-land river crossing across another of our rivers!  (I may be a little too excited about this, but I've had to move a lot of units across that river.)

T86: Frosted Flakes completes a theater square and starts on a settler.  This city is growing faster than it can get tiles to work, despite being at 5 pop of 6 housing!  I guess that's what two marsh sugars (for 5 food each) and three grassland hills (so that's not net-negative on food, either) will do.  If we want it to really grow, we can build a granary, but, for now, we need the settlers.  Also, a fun fact: our culture rate is now actually higher than our tech rate.  We should look into building a campus or two, I guess.

T87: We meet Kandy, in our exploration.  Brazil is already suzerain with 4 delegates, so I'm guessing that's the only one they've met.  (Yerevan has 3 from England, incidentally.)  They want an inspiration for Mercenaries, which means we need to build another 4 land units.  4 more archers really wouldn't go amiss, tbh.

Iron Chef and Candy Mountain both grew a size this turn, and they're both now housing-restricted (50%).  In Candy Mountain's case, this means we need to build some plantations and/or build a granary.  In Iron Chef's case, a granary would help, but, honestly, it's adequately-sized for now.  In Candy Mountain's case, I'm laying down a theater district next to the industrial one for us to complete sometime, but we will eventually want to grow to size 7 so we can put down a campus as well.  There's a wonderful +3-adjacency spot for a campus, but it's on a jungle hill which we are currently working.  Growth is slow, too, between the housing problem and the fact that, while all its tiles have 2 food, none of them have more than 2 food.  That's a problem to resolve for the future, I think.  Also, while we could get the theater square in 10 turns if we start on it now, the industrial zone at Candy Mountain actually completes in 7 turns at this point, and with only 8 (+10% from amenities at the moment) production, completing it is a 25% boost.  Our civic rate is incredible, so I'm not feeling the value of trading hammers for culture at the moment.

We also finally mine the copper near Osaka, giving it an even more impressive amount of production.  This city will be a monster if we can ever get it off the ground.

I found Nagoya, in the east, and immediately rename it "Rice Bowl":

Getting a builder to it is going to be a pain, so I rushbuy one for 375 gold.  We've got the cash to afford it.
There's an obvious place for an industrial zone next to three hills, so I reserve it.  Perhaps I should have put in a theater square first, but I really want to put that on top of a forest here, so it will provide adjacency to any campus we might build.
However, with three grains nearby, the first build seems like it should be a water mill.  The first orders of business for improving the mercury and rice in the first ring.  That will leave us one extra charge, which could go into either a mine or cutting down the aforementioned forest.

T88: Shipbuilding is a little over half done, so I switched research to Iron Working.  We'll probably just research it out in the end.  Defensive Tactics completes next turn.

T89: I was going to go to T90 to get us on a round number, but this turn is the one where you can set civics, so I'm going to hand it off now.  That was 17 turns, so it's plenty, since we're planning to drop down from 15 turns to 10.  (It also, uh, took all morning and much of the afternoon for me...)

Some notes:
1. We will finish one settler next turn, a second one in 6 turns, and a third one in 9 turns.  Chocolate Crab is a no-brainer; Spitted Fish and Banana Crab (does that even work?) seem okay.  We should put at least one city north of Rice Bowl as well.
2. Once we land those settlers, and possibly before, we will need a bunch more workers (again!)
3. The following are boosts which we should want to get because they are things that are useful to do anyway: an encampment for Mathematics and Military Training; 4 more archers for Mercenaries; one more farm for Feudalism; a lumber mill for Mass Production (requires machinery, so will probably be missed this turnset); maybe a pair of campuses for Recorded History (a campus can replace the encampment for Mathematics)
4. Rice Bowl is near a bunch of mountains.  We may want to start planning ahead for a national park or two.  This involves not improving certain tiles because we expect to want to have them unimproved later.  Similarly, north of Rice Bowl and east of Osaka, we can almost certainly get another national park, but we need to place the city in a way that it reaches, because national parks require 4 contiguous tiles "in a diamond shape" (which I suspect has only one orientation, but we can experiment with that) that are all within ownership range of the same city.  Also, while peaks are great for it, at least one tile needs to actually be walkable.
5. I wasn't feeling inspired, but someone needs to give the idiots from Osaka a better name.

[Ruined Everything]

Nice set of turns.

1. Agree vis a vis archers. We're approaching machinery, so we should probably bang some out before we can only build super expensive crossbows.
2. Shame about the pyramids. Feudalism can't get here quickly enough.
3. Agree about claiming the crab peninsula on the chocolate coast next.
4. As ever, I agree about doing another worker, then settler push sooner rather than later.
5. Surprisingly, I can only find 1 good national park location. Do all of a national park's tiles have to be in the 3 tile radius of a city?
6. I would settle red -> blue -> green -> white -> (purple if applicable) -> yellow. This is all getting a little ahead of things though.


Since we're looking East, some thoughts on how we might settle it:

[Ranamar]

National parks are really finnicky.  I ended up making two in my Adventure 1 game, and these are things I learned, not all from reading the documentation:

1. It has to all be within one city's ownership.  If you flip some tiles to another city, it doesn't work.  Similarly, not being in a city doesn't work.
2. It appears that you cannot remove an improvement and send the land back to nature for a park.  I tried deleting a farm, although I may have missed on the charmingness of the tile.
3. At least one tile needs to be "charming" or better and walkable.  Well, they all have to be charming or better, but that's trivial for mountains.
4. They have to be in a "diamond" shape.  I have never seen this diamond not be vertical, which leads me to suspect that it cannot be non-vertical.
5. You can still work tiles that are in parks; you just can't improve them.

As for other national park locations... it turns out that swamp next to the mountains near Rice Bowl is currently "Breathtaking (5)".  Also, all the tiles south of that lone mountain have surprisingly good attractiveness, for being a bunch of tundra.  The other spot is just to the north of the mountains: that forest hill has high attractiveness, is passably productive, and is next to a bunch of mountains.  Unfortunately, building so that the mountains are in range conflicts with your red dot, and there really isn't much that can be done about it.  I suppose Rice Bowl could have been 1SW, but that's a significantly weakercity.

The swamp is, unfortunately also an extremely nice place to put a campus.  I'll leave it to whoever is playing the turns at the time, but making the swamp a campus and the hills next to it either a holy site or a theater district is very tempting. (A holy site would be necessary if we want faith, which we might, admittedly, need if we want to make any national parks; Naturalists cost a ton of faith.  That, or we can take some holy sites from Gandhi, although that does open us up to reconquest wars from him.)  The forested spot is good either as a theater district or Oxford University, if we think we can grab that.  It's the only flatland next to those tiles, and this is likely the best science city we will ever get because of the two mercury deposits in range.

Edit after taking a look in game...
You're right; the other ones are kind of underwhelming.  It does turn out that "charming" reaches all the way down to 2, though, so losing a forest point from a 3-pointer isn't too bad.  On top of that, they'll all get boosted up some more if we can manage to land the Eiffel Tower.  Also, building holy sites, theaters, and entertainment complexes next to our prospective park will apparently give it extra appeal.  This amuses me for some reason.  (Similarly, a holy site next to the green-highlighted one would not go amiss.)

Edit2: So, this is a demonstration of what is almost certainly a bad dotmap.  It manages to cover all the seafood, but the city that does is on the coast without fresh water, so we would either need to sacrifice a hill tile for an aqueduct or suck it up.
Coloration is based on appeal:

I drew an ellipse NE of the copper in the south because I wasn't sure which to pick, but, honestly, either of them is probably good.  There are swamps (farmable), a wheat to share with Rice Bowl, and tea beyond the swamps.  Even sacrificing the high-appeal tiles, it's likely a rather good site, especially for the space, and we can pave over the crappy flatland that we aren't using for parks.

Interestingly, the south seems to be doing that "untouched wilderness" thing, so, if we can figure out how to feed more cities down there, it could be worth exploring whether we can drop some cities there for parks if we decide that we need them for tourism.  (Alternately, lots of great works might just be sufficient.  It's a question of how many of the great artists we actually get.)

Bottom line: It's a frozen wasteland, but we need to explore the south, probably with the archer we have handy.  we know there's a barbarian camp somewhere there, and it looks like there are also good national park candidates, on land we really have no desire to use anyway.

[Ruined Everything]

Ranamar, how valuable are national parks? Is it worth moving the city in your dot map off the coast to guarantee us a 3rd one?

I generally think your dot map is great, but I'd consider putting those two cities north of Rice Bowl on the coast.

EDIT: Maybe we should settle to the West of Gandhi and put a national park over the Pantale just for the theme of things.

EDIT 2: Ranamar, your city to the south of Iron Chief definitely has to be where mine is if you want that national park on the mountain cluster south of Osaka if the city has to own all of its tiles, right?

EDIT 3: The whole 'only has to be +2 to be charming' thing is very good to know, thanks! That makes things way more flexible than what I initially thought.