Thanks! I didn't notice the Cathedral nerf yet, so that makes sense.
In a huge map Cities only add 1.6 unhappiness per, so should I consider taking Cerimonial burial and having basically happiness neutral cities? (Combining with the 1 from city connections for net 0.1 unhappiness per city.)
Market spam seems a lot less useful now that most cities produce 0-1 GPT, is that really an effective use of hammers? It seems like it might be better to A) rush workshop or B) Amphitheater for more policies.
Thanks again! -Elliot S
Cerimonial burial is something I wouldn't bother with to be honest. Even on huge map, you don't want to expand too much (20+ cities). You're still playing on quick settings, and if you're spamming settlers past turn 80, you're actually hurting yourself. I once had a game where I had enough land for 20 cities, and 10 luxuries so I did as I thought I should do and expanded onto all that land. Problem I encountered is 1) it's hard to defend your last cities and 2) your capital suffers from being low population, therefore you don't get your trade connection gold. Without trade connection gold, you can't afford your other nice buildings, and therefore are going to suffer for it.
Another thing is, you do not want an to build amphitheaters or any other cultural buildings aside from the monument unless you're going for a tourism victory. The gold:culture per turn ratio on them is worse than a monument, not to mention that you should be conservative about working specialists since having 10 stagnant cities is not fun.
Try this strategy with Egypt and you don't have to cap your cities at size 1 or 2. ^^
5% science penalty per city is the biggest nerf to ICS in BNW. Settle 10 cities with zero to no science output and try to reach techs that are suddenly 50% more expensive.
Yes, this strategy works to the fullest with Egypt and Askia, since you get your zero gold per turn temples. As for the science penalty, there are currently two solutions I have come up with.
1) don't settle up to your limit, C. Settle at C/2, 1 city per luxury, and then settle onto C once you have your first batch of cities up and running with buildings at least up to a library. If you get a city state ally, you can proceed to settle a bit closer to C. Ideally though, you shouldn't settle more than 7 cities early on. 7 is a good number, since usually people settle up to 4, with tradition. With 7, you get just enough cities to be your "core" so when industrialism comes up and you get that 7 coal spawn, you have enough coal for a factory in every core city. So even if you spawn with 5 luxuries, you should only settle up to 7 cities at least early on.
2) If you spawn isolated or are confident that your neighbor isn't going to invade you (other side of the jungle/mountain/coast etc etc), rush to national college in your capital. Spawn a free worker, grow your capital out, build a grainary and library and then finally a national college. After that rush the Oracle immediatly, and use the free social policy as well as a second city with a monument to finish liberty track pre turn 60. Spawn a great prophet, build a writers guild in one of your cities, and then proceed to sprawl as normal. This build trades off early padogas and early game security for not falling behind in tech.
These two builds considered, it's a trade off between maximizing piety output with maximizing science per turn. If you go for the initial build and get 100 fpt, you can quickly have a university up in every city by time you get Education (which will come 10-20 turns later), where as if you delay your sprawl or limit your sprawl, you can have your universities up faster, but you won't have as much faith per turn (about 60 from my initial tests) to quickly build universities. All in all, the initial build works best for culture victory since having +2 tourism per building up as fast as possible is the difference between winning turn 120 or 180, whereas for any other victory type i'd consider playing some delay or limiter on your sprawl to maximize science.