mabraham
Deity
Neither are we spending EPs as fast as we are teching. 100 EPs is much larger than 100 beakers if spent on stealing a tech in a favourable position like ours. Something like a factor of three, depending on bonuses and trade potential. 100EPs is worth very little if we have lots and it is not all going to be spent soon.
I think spending EPs for tangible benefits is fine.
There is no such stated commitment, but neither is there any commitment to use slavery for any shorter period. See http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11009001&postcount=2147 for a guesstimate of 30-40 turns to get to bulb Scientific Method. I think that's an underbid - and it will be longer the longer we spend in slavery.
Given that Taoism for OR won't get to some cities for 5-15 turns, and we'd want at least two whips in most cities, it doesn't make sense to change out of OR before about 20 turns after we start it. We probably want to whip a university in at least our slowest city after getting Education and before switching out of OR, which is at least 20 turns away. We're going to change out of OR when we switch to Bureaucracy+Caste+Pacifism, and that probably requires stealing CS from an AI, which could happen any time in a 10-40 turn window. We probably want to have stolen Guilds and to have built workshops to justify Caste - again 20+ turns. There's a whole pile of unknowns, but somewhere in the 20-40 turn range is a realistic guess for when we might switch out of slavery.
The missionary limit is a good point. I think it is likely that we can juggle things so that we tend to have 2 missionaries on queues and one moving, or one on a queue and two moving. This is easier when there are two focal points, because we tend to get shorter average travel times. I think Gems and Washington are likely to build only one missionary each, and Stone City will build several. That gets Taoism spread to our critical cities pretty fast, and they're the ones who are getting useful forges whipped soon.
I think the rate of spread is slower by more than 2 turns per city, because a missionary takes at least 2 turns to travel between relevant cities on our imperfect road network. I estimated about 3-4 turns per spreading in my post, hence 45-60 hammers. Then there's the faster AP, to get faster hammer buffs on any monasteries we build.
Earlier forges return earlier forge bonuses (so another 15 hammers for a few turns), returning earlier courthouses, returning more EPs on Southern witches for helping find out what they are doing.
I don't accept your ratio, so the point is moot. I might be tempted for 1200
... That's 14 cats and 14 axes.What we are "wasting" here are the last 100-140 EPs that we have sitting around our bank, because we will not feel any loss until we have spent all the rest of it. Spending that pile might take 50 turns. In 50 turns' time we might have a half a dozen courthouses, so 100EPs is about 8 turns of passive espionage. Or we could have a quarter of a courthouse right now (using your numbers) or a third to a half of a courthouse right now (using my numbers) to get that courthouse and whatever we build next 10 turns faster - returning 2EPs and 2
per turn for that 10 turns.If you told a 21 year old boy he could forego his pay check from his last year of work in return for a brand new luxury car now, it's worth considering. The money is not likely to be of critical value at age 60, but the increased reliability of transport, decreased maintenance on a car and increased status with his peers could be worth a large amount to him at age 21
(later of course as I don't have the save on this computer).
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