SnowlyWhite:
ce = a decent number of cottages in a couple of cities; ce pre liberalism = bureau cottaged capitol - the rest can do whatever.
fe = no cottages except 1 city tops
but running a gp farm is a common sense thing, not a trait of the economy; same as running some farms in a ce...
Essentially, you're saying that even though a good portion of your early game economy focuses on making food and creating a Specialist City for GPs, you're not running a Farm based economy? I don't see how that makes any kind of sense.
You're running a CE even though cottages in the early game contribute minuscule amounts of commerce to your total output?
Huh?
I'd take a bureau capitol with academy over any fe early game(provided there's some decent spot for a gp farm, which in 90% of the cases is)
Sometimes that good GP spot is your capital and there's no good place to go for cottages. What then? The simple fact that you can run Bureaucracy from Civil Service implies that this is no "early game."
Ibian:
A pure SE is just as bad an idea. Once you start getting all your GP from 1-2 cities, the rest are better off working cottages.
See, I don't agree with that. Until I can get the infrastructure up and working, I really would rather grow the population and whip out the structures. In fact,
futurehermit recently initiated a thread about mathematically figuring out when it's best to convert farms to cottages for a late game city - assuming it needed to grow and such.
The math guys figured out that any early growth of cottages that hampered city growth was detrimental because you crippled population for working MORE cottages. So it was more efficient to grow a substantial portion of the city towards a targeted max pop before cottaging over the farms, even though it took later in the game for the cottages to mature.
The thing I've found through playing the game is that working cottages
costs hammers and delays city growth. In Slavery, that city growth costs even more hammers that you could be putting towards infrastructure or units.
Use of Specialists early game is even more accentuated if you can snag Pyramids early and get access to Representation in the BCs. At that point in the game, 3+ beakers per pop point plus GPP production is pretty darned good.
Can't match that immediate output quite as fast with Cottages.
Let's say you
just got the Pyramids, changed Civics, and established a new city on River Grasslands. Put farms or put cottages?
I would say farms. I'm thinking you would, too, at least until you can get Monuments and Granaries up.
1 or 2 (my wonderspammer and my regular GP farm in my case). The more SE cities you have the more GPP will be going to waste for the sake of maybe a few more GP over the course of the game.
How many GPs you get isn't as important as
when you get them. Philo doesn't get you many more GPs than a non-Philo Civ. But it makes sure you get them
twice as fast. That's huge.
I would gladly give up 50% of my total GP allotment for a game if I could get all of those GPs on turn one.
Running multiple Specialist Cities allows you to tailor GP production and get them sooner rather than later.
Every single type of economy is food based. There is no such thing as a food economy. Or if you prefer another variation, all economies are food economies.
Farm, not food. I'll accept food though. Yes, all
sensible economies are food based. You could run a cottage/resource-specific-only economy, but it would suck.