I have learned from TMIT's Let's play (I recommend viewing this, see thread in S&T for link) that RA are biased against picking a tech that has beakers invested in it. I'm all for exploiting this.
This is not 100% certain, because I had 1 turn invested in Metal Casting (1 of 12) and it still picked that over all the 5 turn items that had nothing invested. I think we should just do all the low cost ones to improve our chances, although I suppose we can invest a turn in each of the ones that remain when we get close to turn 120.
I don't like annexing, courthouses take a while to build and have high upkeep too. While you're building the CH you suffer lots of unhappy. Raze/rebuild might be better? Settlers aren't cheap either but we save gold at least. Some buildings we want to keep will be lost by razing too ofc.
I am a big fan of keeping puppet forever. I am not sure people realize how incredibly powerful it is. I played a large continents map, where I only had about 4 cities, and puppet-ed the rest. After winning once, I went back to my save and did not build the utopia project, just to see how far I could take it. My culture output was so high, I was getting a new policy every couple turns, all the way up getting every single one (not just 5 paths, but all of them).
You get full gold and culture output of all the puppet cities, without the social policy cost, and the only downside is you do not get to decide what is built. That is not that big a disadvantage, especially if you put in enough trading posts that the city will more than pay for itself. I actually find that puppet cities are much more efficient, and let your empire grow faster quicker than real cities that you found.
Our rules put us in an ideal situation for that, because we are not even building troops, so the only thing that we can build that puppets will not build are workers and settlers.
Prior to the big patch, puppets would even build wonders (and projects, I had one start building the utopia project after it had built every building it could build), I do not know if they fixed it now that they do not build buildings that consume resources (such as factories). I think puppets no longer build things like barracks, making them even better. Either way, I think puppet cities are great, and I would advise keeping them puppets forever unless there is a very very good reason to change it.
When you have 10 cities with temples and especially the later culture buildings but only 3 or 4 of them count against your social policy cost, you can see how it gives you a net win. All we lose out of doing this is a slight inefficiency of the order the buildings are built, and slightly less gold than if managed directly (although still a lot of net gold per city if we put in enough trading posts, I would convert all mines on puppets to trading posts, unless there is a resource).
We should also get markets soon, so the puppets will start building them, as they tend to build them rather quickly.
-Iustus
. I am OK to let you a couple of days to get it in anycase. Tell us if you manage it. Or I can swap you, I will try to see where Rusten has gone (apparently he wasn't exactly exited by civ5, maybe he changed his mind).
I hope he will help us for this game still 
), it's just it feels "cheap"... but as it seems I am the only one proposing annexion, we can puppet everything 
)
