mabraham
Deity
I ran another Pyramids test on Grifftavian's test save. This time I got a brain, settled in place built 2WB, WB 1-whipped onto WB, worker 2-whipped onto lighthouse, galley 2-whipped onto monument, Pyramids. I settled the second city 3E and did a Duckweed-style settler 3-pop whip max-overflowing onto Pyramids, while tile-sharing a couple of turns to the second city on the corn per whip cycle. I got Pyramids T155 (275BC) with four side cities settled and one more ready to settle. I had Maths/Alpha/Monarchy/MC/IW, all the backfill techs except useless Horse Riding, and two thirds of Currency. An AI beat me to CoL while I was teching MC, which was my primary trade tech, as well as barb-galley defence.
One critical improvement was that I managed to have enough food at the start of the cycle so that the whip at size 6 went down to 3 and immediately re-grew to 4. The side city got one turn working the corn then, and then usually a couple more towards the end of the whip cycle while I switched off the corn to work a grassland forest so that I got some more raw , didn't wastefully grow , and didn't fail to work good tiles when they could be worked. I also delayed the two later forest chops as much as I could, and was lucky to trade for Maths to pick up 15(=2 turns) on the last chop.
Stats
Hammer values are only for the Pyramids, and exclude those from chops - effectively this Pyramid was size 645, not 750. Whips occurred on T70 and every 15 turns until the last one.
Ignoring chops, overflow in and final whip, this delivered 6.8/turn to the Pyramids. It's 7.6/turn counting overflow in and final whip. It's 16.4/turn average counting the five settler builds. This is lower than my previous average rate (17.2/turn) because I had less overflow in, finished with one population point more, and spent less time at the peak output after T95 or so.
The 6.8 number is a the one that I think people can usefully use as a lower bound in (say) a Colossus-building scenario, if they want to. The mines and trades will be up by the time we got MC+forge up somewhere.
Post-pyramids saved game
I did try a run sneaking out a second worker rather than donating food to the second city, but it was poor. There's not enough work around for two workers early enough, and if you don't get the second out early, the rot.
One critical improvement was that I managed to have enough food at the start of the cycle so that the whip at size 6 went down to 3 and immediately re-grew to 4. The side city got one turn working the corn then, and then usually a couple more towards the end of the whip cycle while I switched off the corn to work a grassland forest so that I got some more raw , didn't wastefully grow , and didn't fail to work good tiles when they could be worked. I also delayed the two later forest chops as much as I could, and was lucky to trade for Maths to pick up 15(=2 turns) on the last chop.
Stats
Spoiler :
Hammer values are only for the Pyramids, and exclude those from chops - effectively this Pyramid was size 645, not 750. Whips occurred on T70 and every 15 turns until the last one.
Code:
Turn Population Hammers Delta-hammers
70 4 0 -
72 4 9 9
87 4 113 104
102 4 225 112 (health trades and both mines were online by now)
117 4 331 106 (somewhere before this I gave the side city an extra corn turn or two to get to size 2 faster)
132 4 442 111
147 4 553 111
155 3 649 96
The 6.8 number is a the one that I think people can usefully use as a lower bound in (say) a Colossus-building scenario, if they want to. The mines and trades will be up by the time we got MC+forge up somewhere.
Post-pyramids saved game
I did try a run sneaking out a second worker rather than donating food to the second city, but it was poor. There's not enough work around for two workers early enough, and if you don't get the second out early, the rot.