The vast majority of cities are going to be health capped by coal, or they're building cap boosters that set the hammer payback 50+ turns away, when they could be making infantry.
You keep talking about building infantry.
However, unless you're actually using those infantry to beat something down, they're dead weight beyond what is needed for defense. On anything below deity, the #'s of forces needed for defense is laughably small...
What is your typical space time? What is your best space time when you really push it? I bet you're delaying your win by avoiding power...consistently.
Freak games. Wealth building to get tanks/space ASAP is viable if all the diplomatic cards fall right. In most games, you want an army.
I guess every deity/random/fractal start is a "freak game" now? Or are you just going to ignore ABCF running around with 1100 AD infantry on a very average start? Unconquered Sun putting up those 1400 AD tanks with...charlemagne on a coastal start? Rusten with 700 AD rifles in a gauntlet game meant to be hard?
Maybe the "freaks" are the players, who have largely advocated ALL of the hammer multipliers.....
Wealth building to get tanks/space ASAP is viable if all the diplomatic cards fall right. In most games, you want an army.
You are getting your army or diplo set LONG before assembly line, or you're dead. Besides, army requirements for simple defense are quite low...walling the AI stacks with 1/3 of its hammer investment is not uncommon.
Wealth building from muskets to rifles makes sense. But after this, it's not as appealing.
. Still wrong. Building wealth is at its STRONGEST when you have 100%
multipliers; it often turns the
multipliers weak enough to skip them. A lot depends on how you set up your empire, though. Lots of smaller cities + corps (or SP shops) benefit a lot more than a couple huge ones.
I don't wait that long for Mining Inc (again, I take it for granted), as it's usually from the IW. I do, however, like grabbing hollywood or the Eiffel tower with a great engineer.
Waiting for IW and only THEN starting to run engineer GPP is already long. Get one faster. There are ways and if you're creative, you'll think of them. Example: micro your GPP in each city such that the city running a forge engineer pops a GE later in the game, close to when you need it. This is the kind of micro even I can do (I play very quickly), so it's not like it's hard to plan out.
Then again higher_game, maybe the deity players are wrong. You could always come over to strategy and tips and show everyone how overrated coal plants are in that "izzy monarch fastest space launch" thread or the one started by nishant with justinian/immortal where the goal is "fastest victory"...although you won't be beating anybody in the latter with industrial tech .
When I play on immortal, I usually pick up enough great generals to make me question the appeal of coal. I used to settle them, but now I appreciate the quality of quantity. Stunt games on fluke maps aren't relevant (isolation comes to mind where coal is very nice).
1. You ignored the point made in what you quoted
2. You started talking about "stunt games", how is that relevant?
3. You started talking about "fluke maps", how is that relevant?
Magic is objectively superior to Yugioh.
Well you're paying attention at least
. You got me there...magic is WAY better ^_^.
1 engineer from the forge won't do much.
1 engineer is 3 GPP/turn. You have a couple options here:
1. Engineer wonders
2. Pacifism (even if it's your 4th GP, if you're willing to diligently run it in a junker city or a production city with enough food to support it, you'll get a GE in time)
3. Run it in your GP farm and hope you get lucky (when you pop 10+ GPs and have >15% chance engineer, you're playing odds-on...you can always run IW as a fallback if doing this approach).
It's all about planning. Deity HoF space racers, when I asked them, told me that mining inc was a key component of their wins and that they did their best to ASAP it.