Is it better to have a rival when going SV?

[AlanC9]

In my last game (Continents map, Immortal) I was playing Trajan, starting on a continent with Hojo and Qin. The other continent had Gandhi, Tomyris, and Pericles, though I didn't know this early.) I took out my continental rivals and switched to SV (I find DVs kind of dull, honestly.)

But my final SV performance turned out to be a bit lackluster. With nobody seriously pursuing science or engineering and everyone else behind in era, I had to slog my way through a lot of crappy GSs and GEs. While it was nice to earn a few GPs I've never even seen in a game before, I'd have traded a lot to get Korolev or Goddard or somebody before the endgame. (I only ever got Goddard -- Sagan was visible but about ten turns away when I won.)

This made me think that I would have been better off if Qin had still been around earning the GPs I didn't want. I've got an archived save so I can test this, but I thought I'd ask if this was a thing.

 

[acegolfer]

Certainly a possibility. It will be a good experiment to replay from archived.

I play Deity and always run out of GS before SV.

 

[AlanC9]

My test was positive, but not overwhelmingly so. With Qin still in the game, I was able to get better GSs than I got before by passing tge bad ones to him, but I still couldn't advance eras any better, so the space-related GSs were just as hard to get. On the GE side, nothing changed. I don't think anyone but me had more than one IZ, so passing on bad GEs would have been counterproductive.

I could have performed better with GSs by running lots more projects, but I was trying to keep the playstyles relatively consistent.

 

[AlanC9]

Looking into the system a little closer, it isn't enough just to pass a couple of non-optimal GPs onto other nations. As the Mechanics of Great People guide points out, for real speed you need to shift the World Era (note that this seems to be the only place in vanilla where this concept exists.). More than half of the extant civs need to reach the new era to do this.

This was unfeasible in my test game without taking out a couple of civs on the distant continent. While India is typically a decent science civ, in this run they were crippled by barbarians early and never recovered (they would have been wiped out outright if barbarians were allowed to capture capitals). So world era never advanced , and the only way to get through all the early GEs was to earn them all.