Many years ago when people insisted Space Race was impossible on deity I used to gun for it ALL THE TIME, until everyone got sick of it and wanted something different. So that should tell you something.
Pre-BTS was a whoooooooole different ballgame. You could actually build the SE soonish with consistency, the AIs launched MUCH EARLIER with their obscene bonuses that BTS can't touch (usually), and space or getting killed were the only two ways you could possibly lose. I do not argue against pre-BTS space elevator for the record.
Unfortunately, just about all those images from those games are long gone now I think, but I'm sure there's people around who remember I would cap out to around 1400 to 1600 hammers a turn production. And this was WITHOUT a golden-age. So you may want to think long and hard on that.
Actually it requires neither long nor hard thought - you had so much production that SE would save you maybe a turn per part, if you couldn't just 1-shot it regardless. Remember, BACK THEN you could build SE using only technologies needed for space race. Now, that isn't the case, you'd have to tech robotics. But why would you tech robotics? You clearly have enough production to handle your tech rate and then some, banging out parts before you reach the next space tech. I doubt with 1600
/turn that 1) bothering to grab an extra tech and 2) building an extra building would help much in terms of speed in BTS. If you can come up with math to the contrary I'd like to see it, because at those kinds of
/turn, you can literally build any space part in 2 turns on normal speed (even without resources!), and most in 1. Are you also teching the likes of fiber optics and fusion in a single turn? You'd need 10,000's of bpt...not likely. The math here isn't making sense to favor SE in BTS...at least not yet.
Actually your comment is in line with supporting my argument against BTS SE ----> production is not the typical bottleneck, tech is...and having to grab an otherwise un-necessary tech to get the wonder really kills it. Even in the most cookie cutter state property or cottage spam mining-inc empires with a measly 10
turn corp have enough hammers! Take a boring 60 base
emancipation + state property city, slop in IW + lab, and you can build an engine in 10 turns :/. Teching fusion ahead of say composites allows enough of a head start on the engines that your little 50 base hammer cities can bang out casings in ~10 turns. Finally tech the weak ecology and have the IW city cram it in alongside the casings.
In other words, even an empire with very paltry production compared to your example can simply tech the space parts in such an order that it can finish them fast enough to keep up with technology rates of ~2000 bpt! For space elevator to win in the scenario I described above, it would have to shave more turns off final completion post-ecology than it took to research it, factoring in the cost of building it also. It's not likely to even catch up based on the beaker cost of robotics, and that's the point.
I can see how SE is devalued a bit in BtS, since the OF bug can really screw you over, also due to how AI's have been changed to go after Culture before you can launch now, etc. space races are quite less viable these days. I'll still do it the odd time when things work out just right.
IMO space is easier now than in vanilla. This is because AI space got nerfed to @#$%# hell. In pre-BTS, completing the space ship was an instant win. That's not true in BTS, and the AI has to hang onto its capitol for 10 turns. As expensive as sabotage is against a space elevator AI, 3-4 subs with nukes and a set of paratroopers takes them allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way back to 0 parts in a hurry. What's even funnier is, if you delete your units so the AI can't kill them, it thinks you have 100's of war success to its 0 and WILL TAKE PEACE THE FOLLOWING TURN, even if it has 5x your power. Seriously. I posted a game here a while back where I won as the 3rd civ to launch...and was dead last in power :/. I don't know how things were in 'nilla, because I wasn't a high level player before BTS came out. However, I doubt things were much EASIER than that!
Heavens, if you can be a era ahead of the AI in the level you play, obviously the Net will not give you a dime... In the same way that barracks will net you 0 XP if you never build units in that city. So barracks should be the worst building in the game , right?
The granary is obviously worse if you never grow your cities
.
Angkor Wat is the worst. It is nothing but a source of great prophet pollution, and to add insult to injury, you actually have to make the specialists yourself. I'll take the great library instead. I'll take anything else, instead. Angkor Wat is up there with the dog soldier as being so bad, you wish you didn't even have it. It might be something you grudgingly pick up for a lame cultural win game. That's about it.
It makes priests arguably the best yield spec in the game :/. They're not bad in rep at all. For a wonder GPP farm for settled great people it works very well too. I'm not going to advocate its use for shrines though, normally. However, that IS a viable use for it if you happen to bulb taoism on a continent with multiple people w/o religion (a rare situation, but it happens and you might as well capitalize when it does).
You're still building a bad wonder to get those Engineer Points, though, and the opportunity cost of getting that Engineer is not getting some other great person. And the first Great Engineer probably will just build a good wonder you should have been building before Hagia Sophia anyway.
Not to mention that consistently better alternatives such as hanging gardens, pyramids, and forge spec are available. H. Sophia is one of those things that's a little better in non-standard era starts IMO, though in its case still not impressive.
LOL @ the comment about Cristo being useless.
Indeed. It would probably be the most abusive wonder in the game if it came a bit sooner, and if we didn't have things like the UN or especially the Apostolic Palace, which is the single most broken concept that was intentionally placed in this game.
Deity game with 10 total empire pop and 20000 beakers behind the penultimate AI? No problem, because we got the AP! Diplo WIN!
So despite the cool espionage, diplo screw, and mere civic swap usage power of CR, it doesn't quite match up in "abuse potential" to the Apostolic "autowin" palace.
which makes me wonder (see what I did there? Ah whatever ), in regular game there is the mission into another solar system with our current technology and it has SE while you have mission to MARS which starts much later in Next War. Very weird. Anyone understands what I'm talking about?
No, but I do wonder why they attached SE to robotics in BTS, because it doesn't make sense and unless Obs can give us some useful math to show us that we're wrong, it made it an almost guaranteed bad play when before it was viable. In real life, the #1 greatest problem with a space elevator is that we can't make anything that can handle the tensile stress IIRC. Not sure how robotics would assist that outside of some very vague half-@#$ hand-waves. If a game is going to abandon realism, it should only do it because doing so adds balance or fun/depth! In this game, SE in BTS is sort of like global warming - questionable from gameplay AND realism standpoints. Ouch.