Well, golly darn.
I don't understand why the copper wouldn't be hooked up. It'll be accessible via galley without passing through Gandhi's culture--what's missing? Without the copper bonus, yeah, we're sort of SooL on SoL. I was not advocating using our sole GE on SoL, and agree we need to save that for Mining Inc.
The times I gave for researching were for "currently ... at 100%." Sorry if that wasn't clear. I'm not thrilled with trading away Constitution, either, but Printing Press isn't going to get us anything other than Gunpowder, if we're lucky (see below).
Astronomy (1600 base beakers on normal speed)--note that we have some beakers already invested
Printing Press (1200) --> Replaceable Parts (1600)
Gunpowder (1000) --> Chemisty (2000)
Education (1400) --> Liberalism (1200) and Economics (1000)
Nationalism (1600) --> Constitution (2000) and Military Tradition (1800)
Once Broberg's borders pop, please check on the copper just to be sure, but assuming we're out of luck and that we're dropping the Democ/SoL idea, what's our tech plan? Beeline to Railroad? We'll need Gunpowder for that, although once we get the horses back (pretty soon) it might be better to build stables somewhere and then a few knights rather than muskets. If we beeline to RR then we could skip Printing Press and wait for someone else to tech it, while we research the cheaper Gunpowder. I don't know what to do about trades. We could tech Printing and probably get Gunpowder, but nothing else other than some gold. We could trade away Constitution for Gunpowder and Economics, but that helps the AI even more, and what we'd really like is to get Chemistry and Astro, too. Just for discussion, should we research Military Tradition next to buy time for the AIs to research other stuff and/or become more willing to trade it so that we could get more benefit when we trade Constitution (or perhaps trade MilTrad instead)? Astro and Econ don't really do us much good until all the AIs have them and switch out of Merc'lism. If we went the MilTrad route, ideally we'd be able to trade it or Constitution for Gunpowder, Econ, Printing, and Astro. FWIW, next on the Scientist bulbing list after Printing is Chemistry, though I still prefer settling over bulbing for now.
It's frustrating that our economy is so weak. Courthouses will help but it's really the lack of foreign trade that's killing us, and that won't change until the AIs drop Mercantilism. I assume that'll happen when they get Astro and/or Economics, right? Putting Oxford in Seaside would be nice for the many reasons noted, but [edit: if we use the Great Eng to rush it] then we might never get Mining, Inc. If Moscow doesn't get Oxford then it would be open for Heroic Epic, which would be pretty awesome.
Just for grins, what about revolting to slavery toward the end of the GA, but leaving enough time to do our final revolt (I have no idea what the required interval is)? We could whip a university in Seaside and maybe save enough turns that building Oxford by hand wouldn't be too painful. Yeah, we lose a lot of beakers and GPPs and can't run Caste System. We could also whip stuff in several secondary cities (uni's, banks...); they're not going to pop GPs for quite awhile anyway. Even with the ton of specialists we're running, most of our beakers are coming from commerce, so maybe we need to concentrate on economic buildings. They'll be even more important once we get foreign trade going. I don't really think that going to slavery is a good idea, but ...
While we're talking about civics, were we going to stick with Bureaucracy after the GA, or switch to Free Speech (+100% culture, +2 commerce from towns)? If Moscow isn't going to build the SoL then Bureau becomes less attractive. We may not have enough towns yet to make Free Speech optimal, but the culture boost would make the Hermitage in St Pete even less important.
On the GPs, we're saving our 1730 GE, and have a 1738 GS and 1740 GS. Next will be 1752 (6 turns) in Seaside (see
BL's GP schedule.) If you buy the argument that we should wait to do more tech trading, then we should not bulb Printing and instead should use the 2 GS's to build academies in Seaside and Moscow. [Edit: Oops, forgot we need to burn a GP for the 2nd GA starting in 1748. OK, delay one academy until 1752.]
One other detail: Roosevelt is pleased with our civics, but -2 because of our religion. I don't know how/when the game computes diplo relations, but at the end of the GA we could drop Islam first (before changing our civics) and hope to get those 2 relations points back, which should put us at Friendly with Roose and help our trading. Then we do the civics swap the same turn. The game mechanics probably don't work that way but it's something to think about.
[Edit: In BL's post 406, the hypothetical beaker bonus from SoL in Moscow and Seaside didn't include the base 1 in the multiplier. Moscow should be 19.2 (not 13.2) and Seaside 12.6 (not 6.6), (and the two last cities total 15 rather than 14 if you want to be really picky) so the total benefit assuming 7 mainland cities is 74.4 instead of 61.4. Not a huge difference. Let's not completely forget about the SoL; once we get copper, it might be worthwhile to partially build for the gold payoff if we can get Democ on the cheap.]
And the GP pops are working out just as you'd hoped (although I was hoping for a 2nd Great Eng 
). I haven't opened the save but here are some thoughts. We should probably wait as long as possible to trade stuff to give more time for somebody to tech Printing Press for us. In fact, after the switch to Representation we might think about just teching it ourselves so we could get that second academy up sooner. I'm not sure how to analyze the tradeoffs, though.
Regarding SoL, yeah, I've been pushing for that since we'll have 8 mainland cities (and 2 more once we nuke Gandhi), the copper bonus, and our Industrious bonus for wonders. Moscow should be able to crank it out in perhaps 25 turns. We're planning to save the Eng for Mining Inc since we have 2 gold, 2 silver, 3 iron, 1 copper.
