Scotland is better at production than Germany.
There's clearly a lot of variance between games; and while one would submit that the Scottish ability pushes the player to build IZs and Campuses, I would be hard pressed to believe that +10% production in ecstatic cities only will be substantially better than having hansas and effectively cheaper districts.
Let's just use your numbers for a minute.
Here's what I mean:
Now, the question is, after accounting for the extra boost on an ecstatic city scotland has (i'm assuming all your cities were ecstatic) why do your scottish cities on average have an extra 12 base production than your german ones did? Scotland doesn't have an ability that gives them more base hammers, so it must be the map, city placement, trade routes, etc.
Let's use a little clearer example. Suppose we have scotland and the dutch. Same map seed, identical city sites. Who can achieve a higher
base production? Well, for any IZ scotland can place, the dutch can place the same IZ,
or they may find a better spot next to a river. (They may also be able to place some polders where scotland can't build anything.) So we would expect that on the same map, the dutch would have better base production but never worse- because they could mirror every single scottish move and sometimes come out ahead with the rivers.
Okay, so, with germany, same map seed, etc, the difference comes down to the tradeoff between the extra ecstatic boost and the advantage the hansa can generate over an IZ.
Ecstatic difference:
An ecstatic communist city has a base 1.25 production multiplier. A scottish version of that is 1.35. The actual advantage is 1.35/1.25 or 8%.
What would you say an average city IZ spot is? 3 mines? We'll say 6 production including craftsmen card. Any two german cities that are within 5 tiles can
always get +10 hansas. Obviously, this thread details superior combinations so i will just be very conservative and say 12 is the average achievable. So this back of the envelope figuring says that the hansa advantage is +6.
Is +6 better than +8%? Well, using some algebra, we can deduce that
1.35*X = 1.25*(X+6) > 1.08X=X+6 > X=6/.08
are equivalent when a city has 75 base production. More base production and the dge goes to scotland, less and it would go to germany. Neither of your games had average cities reach this level. I am tying one hand behind the german back, though, since you can do much better with hansas than a puny +12.
BUT, the scottish advantage declines when we add in some other potential factors (work ethic, Amundsen-Scott, colonial cards, casa del cont. bonus, robber barons) because that diminishes the relative boost +10% is granting. If you see the numbers i posted, even with half my trade route slots full, I was still pulling an average of 129.9 in my top 15 cities. But even overall, only rostock, hamburg, and uruk produced less than your average scottish city, and those were because they were newly founded and a captured Ai city.
The actual production masters are probably either the aussies abusing liberation bonus+outback stations (highest prod number on the screen) or the aztecs' district rushing ability (synthetically converts a post serfdom builder to 75% of a district cost,) which is stupidly good. Themed Kongo artifacts can also be pretty potent, but not like those other two and it's a lot harder to do reliably.
The german advantage of having production advantage captured in a district, though, is that it isn't terrain or population bound to the same extent, which makes it very reliable.
