I would not say I love King Richard's and I do not always pursue it but it can be worthwhile and often I opt to build it. It is on my list of wonders that are nice to have but not essential (along with Adam Smith, Darwin, and a few others). If I decide to build it, it almost certainly will go in my science city which is typically far larger than any other city in mid game. Furthermore, I only build it if I can do so early enough that I am far from Industrialization and when I have the vans but no higher priority wonder to build.I still don't understand your love affair with King Richard. It seems to me that the power of Trade makes up for the low shield output until Railroad, and then it expires almost immediately. .. What do you see as the benefits of KRC?
That was the case in this game. I got Engineering from a hut in -300 and built King Richard's in +1 before I had the Monotheism or Astronomy. There were no useful wonders to be built at that point. I had vans waiting for mono and built Michelangelo the turn after I got Mono (+260). I lost both Copernicus and Magellan to Spanish not because of lack of shields but because of lack of tech. King Richard's lasted till +1540 and built Shakespeare and Newton from scratch among other things (structures).
Ever since Peaster mentioned his ROI (return on investment) theory of Civ2, I have been a fan and use that for a quite a few of my build decisions. It does not work for everything, but when it does it is very helpful to evaluate one option vs. another.
For example, a marketplace costs 80 shields or 160g. It costs 1g per turn and it increases your tax and luxury output by 50%. If n of your arrows are going towards tax+lux, then your ROI is (0.5*n -1)/160. If n=10, your ROI is 2.5%. Experience has shown that 2% and below are poor returns, 3-4% average, 5% and above are very good. We instinctively know this and that is why we do not build infrastructure till later in the game when cities are larger. To get 5% from a Marketplace, you need 18 arrows going to lux+tax. Assuming a typical T3L3S4, your city would be producing 30 arrows. That is about the out put of a size 8 city with good arrow specials and a couple of routes or a size 12 coastal city.
Applying the ROI to King Richard's, the investment is 300 shields. If I build it in a city of size n, I will get n+1 extra shields. If my city is size 14, the ROI is 5% which is very good. The ROI will go up with city growth and maxes out at size 20 for a whopping 21 shields or 7% return. Of course, King Richard's does expire by Industrialization and when compared against things that do not, its ROI should be reduced to take that into account.
By contrast Adam Smith costs 400 shields. Assuming 2.5g/shield (which is what you need to pay for vans not wonders), that is 1000g. It pays for Libraries, marketplaces, temples, and harbor (and a few others like granaries, ancient barracks, and coastal fortress? which are rare). For Adam Smith to return 5%, you need 50g per turn. Assuming you have, on average, 2-3 of those structures in your larger cities, you need 17-25 large cities to get 5%. At the end of my game, Adam Smith was paying for about 70 such structures or a 7% return. (In mercurious style games with tons of well developed cities the return on Adam Smith goes through the roof near the end. It can theoretically approach 100%.)