Before we get to the real game I think it would be good if SCT or Fred could detail how the "hammer research" process that one of the other teams used effectively in the last SGOTM works. In general we should have a startegy from the start of what key techs are required to get to the max research level. So even though Radio may be available for free from Liberalism there maybe a better tech that will speed us to Corporations and Assembly Lines faster.
As Fred said, hammer research turns hammers into beakers or gold at a 1:1 ratio. When a city builds wealth (available with Currency) or research (available with Alphabet), the hammers receive the hammer bonuses from forges, factories, plants, Ironworks, Bureaucracy, and State Property. Beaker bonuses and gold bonuses do nothing. So a city with a lot of workshops, mines, lumbermills, and watermills (and Mining Inc) can produce a lot of beakers or gold by building hammer multipliers buildings.
The question of whether to use a hammer economy in a city should arise during the midgame when we start capturing mature cities and can either build cottages or workshops. If a captured city already has a lot of villages and towns, then it doesn't make much sense to bulldoze them. But what of a city with none? With State Property, Caste Systems, Guilds, and Chemistry, workshops add 4 hammers to a tile with no loss of food. With State Property and Electricity, watermils add 1 food, 2 hammers, and 2 commerce. Compare that to cottages, which start off adding only 1 commerce, but eventually can grow to add 1 hammer and 7 commerce. A mature town with Printing Press, Free Speech, and Universal Suffrage is better for research than the best workshop or watermill. But cottages take a while to become towns (67 turns on Quick?). For each city, we want to calculate whether a hammer economy or a cottage economy will produce greater total benefit through the modern era.
The main buildings for a hammer city (forge, factory, coal plant) cost about the same as the main buildings for a science city (library, university, observatory, lab). However, a hammer city can build its needed buildings faster. On the flip side, being Philosophical will let us grow a lot of GSs, so we can build academies in a lot of cities, giving a commerce economy a bonus.
Other factors to consider are that 1) adopting Emancipation doubles cottage development speed and that 2) corporations don't work while in State Property. A cottage economy can overcome the initial advantage of the hammer economy fairly quickly with Emancipation. If pursuing this avenue, taking Democracy with Liberalism is a strong play. On a map with a lot of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal, Mining Inc can be a powerful addition to both the hammer economy and the cottage economy. But heavily-workshopped cities may face a food deficit when not in State Property. Sushi/CerealMills can sometimes make up this deficit.
I have become a fan of the hybrid hammer-cottage economy for space colony games. In this gambit, one wants to have enough hammer cities to build enough wealth to keep research at 100% from the midgame through the spaceship launch. As we saw in SGOTM08, a typical economy can convert 1 gold to more than 1 beaker, because of the greater prevalence of beaker bonus buildings. Maximum research speed is acheived by using wealth building and GM trade missions to allow deficit research with minimal gold reserves. The hammer cities are ideal places to build units in the midgame and spaceship parts at the end. So one may aim to have enough hammer cities to BOTH build enough wealth for 100% research AND build units and spaceship parts. As in SGOTM08, we can pre-build workshops over towns so that at the end, we can build a lot of SS parts simultaneously.
The one immutable truth in any space colony game is that no matter what type of economy one chooses, more land and more cities = faster launch. A top space race game should start out as a controlled domination. By the time the modern era rolls around, one should be nearing the domination limit. I'm happy to say that we have the master of controlled domination on our team: Cactus Pete.
). Any effort to put numbers on our actions would be most welcomed since intuition is not always good enough - particularly in a game that has been altered because this invalidates experience from standard games to some extent.
