(I need a special Devil's Advocate hat, this perhaps =>
) Imagine however, if in addition to those 6 settlers we also had 750
worth of galleys, warriors workboats and a granary. Eg, 3 galleys, 6 warriors, 6 WB, granary.
It is situation-dependent. If we have a pile of small islands each with 1-2 seafood (e.g. Grifftavian's test save), then the situation is ideal for the Pyramids cycle. Each new settler gets marooned and fends for itself. The first couple over-whip to get out warriors and WBs for the next couple. They'll get happy again during the Caste phase, no big deal.
If we have a bunch of large islands/continents (e.g. my first save) then we need more infrastructure support (workers, warriors). This is attenuated if the land is jungle and we can't work it until after we trade for IW - all we're doing is staking a claim with the settler. Then again, if the second city is on our (sic) mainland, it can do a fair job of getting out infrastructure support, because it has access to improved
-tiles that new cities won't.
One defect of the Duckweed-Pyramids is that we have time during the building to tech CoL or MC, but maybe not both. Barb galleys seem to start arriving from about T150, and they're worse in the many-islands scenario that suits Pyramds, per above. That suggests MC first, but OTOH, doing CoL second risks losing the religion, and risks some mad religious zealot (yes Izzy, I'm looking at you) starting Philo and jeopardising our run at Liberalism.
Ok... back to the Oracle idea - CoL vs MC:
We are Organised right? Cheap courthouses. it strikes me that a better barb defense than triremes is quality fogbusting. And what better way to fog bust than to build cities. Code of Laws enables two excellent methods for continued expansion: 1) cheap courthouses, 2) Caste system merchants/scientists. 1) is great for the whipping phase, 2) for after that.
Yeah, I did some of this following on from my early Oracle tests. I was getting the Drama/Lib(Nat)/Gunpowder/Optics trees all teched at around 1000AD with a marginal navy built from 7 or so cities. That doesn't feel fast enough.
Another thought - CoL so fast will almost certainly give us the confu religion. What sort of whipping output might we get if we had the
to grow up to 8 each cycle?
Edit: I tried to investigate the 8/4 whipping cycle for fast expansion using a spreadsheet. Starting from size 4 with a granary and lighthouse, in 16 turns the city can produce 112
for whatever, 1 worker and 1 settler. Works out at 22
/turn total. I think I might be looking too far to the future, but that's pretty exciting
From 8/4, assuming sufficient
/
and granary, one gets 180
from the whip, regrowth at (effectively) 21/23/24/26 with
excesses 14/13/11/11 working the four food tiles plus nothing/GHmine/both mines/mines+coast, so growing at 1.5/1.8/2.2/2.4 turns. Call that 8 turns. During growth, the GHmine got worked for 6.5 turns and the PHmine for 4.5 turns, so 20+18
. Then there's 7 turns working the mines for 7
while building stuff. We work the central
tile throughout. So every 15 turns we produce 180+38+49+15=282
. So I estimate at most 19
/turn. We do get some dribbles of
from the 7th and 8th people working coast tiles. We do continue to grow through the 7 turns (16
/turn), so we'll snowball faster regrowth and eventually a 5-pop whip - on what?. It's better to channel that food into workers/settlers. This increases the effective
/turn somewhere higher than 19... so I'm roughly agreeing with that 22
/turn estimate - perhaps it's a bit low.
The marginal return from whipping cycles should decrease with increasing population, because the re-growth phase takes longer for more food per population, and so the conversion of
to
is less efficient. It's worse in our case because our 5th to 8th population are not working great tiles, and 7 and 8 are really somewhat poor.
For comparison, a 6/3 cycle with granary has 135
from a whip, regrowing at 20/21/23 with
excesses 11/14/13, so growing at 1.8/1.5/1.8 turns. Call that 5 turns. We got 2 turns on the GHmine for 6
. Then we work 10 turns on the four food and two mines for 70
. We get 15 from the central tile. Total 135+6+70+15=226
, so 15/turn. Plus food excess of 15/turn during a
longer post-growth phase. So the 6/3 cycle is somewhat less effective in total, but requires less
/
support, starts faster, and
cooperates much better with a second city sharing tiles (because the second city gets a food tile for 2 turns/cycle).
I'm pretty confident a 6/3 Paris and 4/3 Orleans will outperform an 8/4 Paris and 2/1 Orleans.
Obviously, I'm now a convert to the "second city on mainland" idea