Well, that can be unfamiliar, but we are talking about a difference of 1 base commerce after corruption per town. So that is very much not huge. It is a bit relevant in despotism, but once you are a republic with 10+ cities of size 10+ it hardly matters.
If a significant portion of your population comes from spending commerce on the luxury slider, what happens is the following:
if every citizen spends 0.8 on entertainment but needs 1, every "starting commerce" will give you 5 content citizens. If you do not have it, you do not have it. Spending more on the luxury slider, does not change that.
If you are increasing the luxury slider and now every citizen spends 0.9 commerce on entertainment, you might end up with the same amount of content citizens as before. However if you now had another free commerce for the entertainment in this scenario, you now would get 9 additional content citizens.
Well, thinking like that does not seem sensible to me. The formula you used is a very rough approximation.
Analyzing the game to know what to do in certain situations or how certain actions affect the game without having to play a lot of hours to just get to the same conclusion.
The formula is by no stretch of the means a rough approximation; it is just the formula used in the game rewritten. The only approximation is the average commerce and the corruption. For the average commerce, we can ignore the center city tiles and the big bonus resources. Our goal is to grow the cities and see how much rising the luxury sliders brings us forward in the game with its increased population and the added commerce. The city center tile is already there, and as there is usually not more than 1 or 2 bigger commerce bonus tiles, we can assume that they are already worked even without an increased luxury slider.
One might argue about the different city tiles and for example the increased unit limit. However, we can also ignore that. We can just reach size 7, if must, by irrigating the tiles and put entertainers.
So that just leaves the question if the tile is a river or a coast tile, if it has a worked road, if it is in republic or democracy and what the corruption in the city are.
It may lead to wrong conclusions. Especially one needs to keep in mind that population cannot grow beyond size 12 for (usually) most of the game.
As it is the game formula, it will not lead to wrong conclusions. You see the relationship between the variables. The higher commerce and the luxury slider are, the bigger the impact from Just slight improvements in commerce. The conclusions are:
- Get republic, improving your commerce and reducing corruption
- Build FB early (C3C version)
- keep your cities closer to the capital
- build cities on rivers and near coasts to increase the average commerce
- raise the luxury slider as much as needed as long as less corrupted cities did not grow until size 12
- build roads and improve tiles
These are all things a good player should do and good players do that.
But analyzing the game in such a way will lead you to these conclusions and it will show you just how important these things are and what to look out for.
I had a chance to play some more last night (insomnia), and I remedied the worker problem so now they're laying more roads, mines &c., and clearing the jungle (more than I was happy with, but I've had worse. By getting rid of obsolete units I've kept costs down. My next problem is catching up on tech, which practically impossible to buy (they want too much, or just plain won't sell), and while my GPT situation is much improved I'm still behind on research because of insufficient funds ... I was shocked to see that while I'm still working on Theology, one of the AI civs is building Magellen's. I'm concerned about getting creamed by a tech-superior AI once they get Cavs (which will be way ahead of me at this rate).
Do not despair. If you are now improving, it means that your relative pace compared to the AI is improving, which means that the gap between you and them does not increase anymore and you did until now playing somehow suboptimal, so why should it get worse now when you play better?
If you are worried about cavalries, try to get gunpowder and see who has it, so you see your potential enemies. Try to get iron and horses to build knights. They have the same defence as cavalry, but a higher attack than their defence, so you can kill them with knights and knights are a fast unit so they retreat. Then when you get Military Tradition yourself you can upgrade them to cavalry.
Your cities should have a food surplus of about 4-5. Keep an eye on that so the commerce will grow faster. At this point, I would not spend excess money on tech trades, only if you can trade for a tech that others civs do not have and sell them for more money.
You should build library and marketplace in your cities. Barracks in most cities to produce military units, in those cities without barracks you should produce artillery. Of they are building wonders, that basicallY means that they are still putting hundreds of shields in things they might not need, and might not even get.
To be fair, though, I kicked the Wonder Addiction habit fairly easily, so I build very few, and only rarely the Great Library.
