Planting Great Engineers

You should be manually adjusting all citizen assignments, both those working city tiles and those working specialist slots.

I never plant unless I foresee taking Freedom and finishing it quickly but culture and OCC wins are so boring, god.

Rushing a wonder saves hundreds of hammers. It would take forever for a manufactory tile to yield me the same number of hammers as a wonder-rush. By the time a manufactory finally gets in the black for hammer yield vs the missed rush, your city is probably lagging where it would be thanks to the delayed benefit of the wonder / delayed utility of everything else the city needed to build after the wonder.

The game is a race. Use the engineer to sprint a few turns ahead. That will snowball a lot more meaningfully than a mediocre hammer-yield-tile will.

Also I never have a GP sitting around for whole eras waiting for a rush use, that would be counter to the logic above. But I'm micromanaging my GP production so they pop at the same time they are useful rather than according to the governor's whims.

Sadly, regular (i.e. non-Freedom finisher) planted engineers are not much better than a 4-production mine you get reasonably early with chemistry, not to mention the 5-point mine you get with Communism. I used to plant Engineers often, but I'm not convinced at all of this strategy. Not that I played recently.

It's like a lot of GP tiles, the yield is just too low to consider planting it. I will do it on very rare occasions if I pop one on accident *and* all the wonders are gone(I'm not sitting it around for 2 eras lol) but otherwise I just burn it on some wonder. Like Bibor I used to plant them but changed my mind.

Non-scientist GP tile yields really need to be buffed in comparison to what you get by burning them. Custom Houses are garbage, Manufactories are mediocre at best, Landmarks are cultural-only(although to be fair maybe they should be this way). I guess that could make the Freedom finisher kind of silly, but only culture games finish it and Freedom isn't going to be around much longer as an SP tree anyway

Manufactories aren't that bad. All GP, even scientists, generally won't repay their settle cost unless you get them very early, that is true. But benefit of manufactories is getting high hammer output without overly harming growth (plant on grasslands). We can praise population growth and science all day, but there is a clear difference between a low-hammer city against a high-hammer city.

The counter-argument is, of course, that if you settle the city in a good location to begin with (horses/cattle, stone, etc) then you can get similar results without needing to work engineer slots and planting GE's.