mabraham
Deity
Ron's point of the forge in the Moai city... I'm not sure we will have time to build a forge in the Moai city. Even if we got 16 hammers in Moai eventually and thus 4 bonus hammers from the forge. This pays off the forge in 45 turns? Maybe this makes sense if we need the happiness from the forge but this doesn't seem likely since we will get spices, silk?, fur back, wine and probably silver if we settle near london. (Did you guys see the 2 fish and crab? near the 2 silver?) plus other traded for happiness if needed and then the cultural slider when necessary.
Agreed. Any forge we might build has to be built and have been around long enough to pay itself off before the time the major wars kick off. That was around T230 in the test games bc and I have played - so call that 60 turns to build and pay off while contributing to the war effort. So a forge in a city that produces x sustainable hammers over that time period makes sense only if
[pre]
60 >= turns_to_build + turns_to_pay_off
60 >= 180/x + 180/floor(x/4)
60 >= 180/x + 720/x
x >= 900/60
x >= 15
[/pre]
Since our best cities are producing only 10 for at least about 20 more turns, and we've got no workshops built yet, forges are not going to be worthwhile, even if you poke holes in my guess of 60 turns.
Note that people were talking about forge in Fish Hills back about T130. If you crunch the above equation, that makes sense only if Fish Hills had 9 hammers - which it wasn't going to have for much of the relevant period. So my analysis then is consistent with the above.