Favorite National Wonder

[muxec]

Ironworks. Voted for it as it helps you build the world wonders before the competitors.

If you find an uninhabited island full of forests late in the game national park is a pure win! Especially with caste system.

 

[mrt144]

Ironworks. Voted for it as it helps you build the world wonders before the competitors.

If you find an uninhabited island full of forests late in the game national park is a pure win! Especially with caste system.

I have never seen this happen.

 

[popejubal]

I'm pretty sure that's it's generally inefficient to purposely try and run two GP farms.

This is true. It is less efficient to run more than one GP farm than to have the same number of total Specialists/Wonders in one city instead of spreading them across 2 cities. In games where the secondary cities earn significantly fewer GP points per turn, it is possible that they will never catch up to the primary GP farm and their GP points will be forever wasted.

It's also less efficient to build military units in cities other than the HE city. I build units in my secondary military production cities too.

The fact that it's less efficient doesn't mean that it isn't effective. Even if I end up devoting 2 extra cities entirely to GP production and I ignore all other aspects of those cities, I still won't be losing money on those cities because the specialists are going to bring in science/hammers/gold/etc and even if I end up with just 2-4 more Great People over the course of the game, it's still going to be worthwhile because I'll get those Great People sooner than a person who has only one GP farm.

I would certainly get more total from those cities over the course of the game if I built cottages instead of less efficient specialists, but the fact that I'll get my specialists early will allow me to push forward quickly to a beeline tech and allow my empire as a whole to achieve the broader strategy that I set out toward in the beginning of the game.

I find this much more necessary than in smaller maps because of the added emphasis on bulbs that I have on larger maps. Bulbs between Machinery and Communism/Biology/Steel are much more significant than ones that I get after that critical expansion period and anything I can do to grab those bulbs earlier makes a difference.

Also, when I have fewer cities, devoting 3 cities to Great People generation is much more of a hardship than when my empire is bursting with land.

 

[Iranon]

getting 2-4 additional Great People requires quite a bit of secondary GP farming... I did the maths for an analysis of PHI once.

Assumptions were: starting from 0 GP at the same time, with the prime GP farm having the National Epic and twice the base GPP as the secondary ones (probably helped by a few wonders).

Having more than 3 cities contribute meaningfully to the total GP produced required heavy emphasis on GPP multipliers (to prevent the main GP farm from running away and rendering the secondaries irrelevant); in a real game this would be worse because the main GP farm would have a head start.

For those who want the numbers... the total GP produced after 4000 base GPP had gone into the main GP farm in the format of regular/PHI or Pacifism/both:

main farm only: 11/14/16
3 secondaries: 14/17/20
6 secondaries: 15/19/22
10 secondaries: 15/21/26

 

[popejubal]

getting 2-4 additional Great People requires quite a bit of secondary GP farming... I did the maths for an analysis of PHI once.

I remember that thread. I tend to run 2 secondary GP farms on a huge map and I also push harder to get as many GP points in my primary GP farm as well just because it takes sooooo looooong for me to get the next Great Person that I'm looking for. That last point probably accounts for 1 of the total additional Great People over the course of the game, but the point I was making is that I get more of my Great People sooner and that has a huge impact on my huge empire. I actually find the impact of Lightbulbs on Huge maps to be more significant than the same Lightbulb on a smaller map just because I need to get the gears of war moving earlier to ensure my neighbor's conquest compared to a smaller map where I don't have to move my army as far or take as many cities before my opponent gets the countering military tech.

I find that Huge maps have a smaller window of opportunity for me to take neighbors' cities and I also find a greater return on investment when my invasions are successful. Because of that, several Great Person Farms running in parallel is an important part of my Huge map strategies. I'm not talking "specialist economy" - just cranking out a bunch of Great People to drive me to the military breakpoints.

After a certain point in the game, I'll generally Workshop/Watermill all the non-special tiles in the secondary GP farms and turn them into massive production powerhouses.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

I have never seen this happen.

By "late game", he might just mean post-Astronomy. I've seen heavily forested islands that are uninhabited around the time of Astronomy. Wait too long, though (late game), and they are assuredly inhabited. But that also means you only want to develop the non-forested tiles and hold off until NP is available (which could get costly)