Yessir! Here you go! I think making Natl Epic in Lyons would have worked better as Paris and Lyons could take turns spawning GPs, but even Paris alone generated plenty of them, not to mention all the free ones I picked up from Music, Physics, etc. I think it costs 100 GPs per GP till 1000, then 200 till 2000, then 300 till 3000, right?
So despite no tandem effect, I still spawned, not from tech but spawned, something like 14 GPs by the time I hit Refrigeration in 1565, and without adding extra specialists manually like in a traditional SE. You're right though--I should have farmed over more of Paris in the beginning, especially after getting hit by slave revolts and vermin and then whipping an axeman in it to control happiness and up my power rating. Heck, as you can see, poor Paris is smaller than Lyons, which I did heavily farm. They are both suffering from big health problems as I am furiously cranking out cavs from all my factory-enhanced cities and ignoring the hideous pollution effects until I get supermarkets from Refrigeration, as you can see from the research bar.
Note that I could simply bribe Ethiopia into warring with someone else and thus pull all my machine guns and infantry away from my western front and into the eastern front, where Justinian isn't THAT far behind... given about 20 more turns, he would probably have sufficient numbers of rifles to hold me off. So it's probably better to crush him now and have Ethiopia preoccupied. Rome is backwards so I would easily run over the entire eastern front. By the time I circled north I would probably be done with making more cavs and let the existing forces go on to attack Boudica in the northeast, while I retooled for tanks.