SGOTM 11 - Fifth Element

[Dhoomstriker]

I think most of those are in the spreadsheet Dhoomstriker has sent me, but I need to make sense of it.

The "KEY INFO" row tells you a lot of what you need to know.

The only real info missing from the "KEY INFO" row is that I only mention the Scientists being hired in some parts of that text, while in other parts it assumes that you can look up a bit to the relevant values under the headings of "Total Scientists at current Size," "Total Scientists at (Current Size +1)," and "Total Scientists at (Current Size +2)."

There are a few NOTES in the row below that row which you should also read, to get a feel for the timing of the first couple of Great People and what options we have in terms of the timing.

The other data in the spreadsheet just helped me in coming to those values.

Note that you'll also have to scroll down to see which City a scenario is for. Below each City name, I put in a short but descriptive bit of text that helps you to figure out what the scenario is trying to accomplish, such as "Starve a bit," "Food Neutral," and "Grow +1 Size First," where "Grow +1 Size First" means growing the City by one more population point before hiring a ton of Scientists.


Values by hand

Changing the base values (and fiddling with different options by hand) seems easiest to me.

Sure, but as I suggested in my last message, if you come up with the Base GPP formulaically (the formulas should be pretty-straight forward to write, the trickiest part will be to anchor the cell values with dollar signs $), then you can copy and paste the columns multiple times and have all of the info laid out before you, instead of constantly having to recalculate the Base GPP values, which can get tricky because the number of turns at a particular Base GPP value changes over time for almost all scenarios except for the couple of cases where growth was stagnant from the start.


Your Approach

This is how I plan to go about it.
1. First, create an estimate of the total number of GPP that city can generate.
2. Use that to work out how many great people each city can generate.
3. Create a great peson ordering, which is essentially an assignment of cities to great person numbers. Mostly by hand, obviously with help from the spreadsheet. This will be a combination of when the great people would naturally be generated, and when we want them to be generated (insofar as we can practically re-order anything).
4. Check that the ordering and plan is practical and robust. If not, return to step 2 or 3 to fix it.
5. If it is robust, make a note of it, then go back to step 2 and try and see if there could possibly be a better plan.

That sounds fair, although I'd suggest that you check out the text in the NOTES area, as there are some tough choices to be made in terms of choosing where to generate the first 1 to 2 Great People, since we are so close to generating a couple of them in multiple Cities.


Your Questions

Should be easy enough, I just need to get the answers to the questions I mentioned earlier:
* End date estimate

End Date... ummm... I have no clue? Hehe. Okay, let's say that you have 40 turns in which to generate Great People, after which any that get generated will take too long to reach their destination.

To help you out, we currently have these Great People:
1. Great Engineer (for sure to be used on The UN)
2. Great Engineer (maybe used on The UN--probably don't count on it for one of the final four)
3. Great Scientist (probably count it as a write-off for being Lightbulbed)
4. Great Scientist (probably count it as a write-off for being Lightbulbed)
5. Great Artist (here you have the most flexibility--Golden Age, one of the Final Four, or Lightbulbing part of Radio or Mass Media. Remember that Lightbulbing using non-Great-Scientists is pretty inefficient, so Lightbulbing is probably the weakest choice out of the available options)
6. Great Scientist from Physics (okay, we don't have him yet, but I just wanted to say that we'll count him as a Lightbulber, so don't rely on him being one of the Final Four--even if we do take Electricity with Liberalism, we shouldn't RELY on him for one of the Final Four, although he would become one of the Final Four in that case)

* Current great person number

As I mentioned in one of my cross-posted messages, we're working on generating the Great Person worth 1500 GPP and I just listed the Great People that we have on hand.

* Correct base GPP values at food-neutral

Use my suggestion of a formulaic Base column, which simply takes as input a value from a Scientists column, multiplies it by 3, and adds to it 6 * the value of the "Parthenon?" column for Delhi, and adds to it 15 for Delhi or 1 for Grt Person Farm.

You don't even need to account for the National Epic anywhere, as Mitch has changed a "1" to a "2" in the "Total" formulas for Grt Person Farm.

Actually, you probably WOULD NOT want to use dollar sign $ anchors, since you'd want the Base column's values to change relative to the relevant Scientist column's values, so these formulas should be incredibly easy to write.

* Correct current GPP value

See row 258 of the spreadsheet that I sent to you, which breaks it out by City but then has the value copied and pasted for each scenario of that City, as I'd planned to do a formulaic approach but Mitchum's already got that part done.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Ok, I've made some sense of it. I've got the starting numbers. They're lower than Mitchum's estimates, I gather this is because we've been growing instead of generating GPP these last few turns (and because Dehli generated an actual great person as well)? I have the base values, and indeed all sorts of variations on them.

Both of your theories as to why the numbers are different are both valid facts, but I cannot say 100% for certain if these facts are the reason why the numbers are off. But, barring any calculation errors or wishful thinking on Mitchum's part, then yes, I'd say that those 2 reasons are why the numbers would appear to be off.

Consider it to be an investment--many Cities can now hire an additional Scientist after having grown for those few turns.

I still don't know how many great people we've generated so far already, this should be pretty easy for someone to check but hard for me from work.

9. We're working on our 10th one. The 10th one will cost us 1500 GPP, a number which we have almost reached in all of Grt Person Farm, Three Clams, and Crabs.

And of course the end date estimate, which is the hardest part. I don't even have the foggiest ball-park clue on this which prevents me from getting anywhere; if I at least had an idea within 10 turns it would be good. I'd then need to subtract the number of turns it will take to get the great people over there, which I'm not entirely sure of either but at least can estimate.

Let's give you 40 turns max from now to generate the Great People. The time after that point will be used to logistically transport the Great People to the Fur.

The sooner that you can realistically afford to switch into Theocracy, the better (so aim to start playing with numbers where the "Pacifism?" column is 0 from the beginning and only add some 1s to that column if we really can't meet our targets within those 40 turns). Yes, it sucks that we ran Pacisim while growing and will potentially switch to Theocracy now that we're ready to run GPP, but that's the scenario that you should work towards, and if it's failing, then you'll have to add a few turns of running Pacifism and thus we'll know the minimum number of turns that we'll have to remain in Pacifism. Make sense?

 

[Mitchum]

@ Dhoomstriker

The picture is quite complex with many moving parts. Having access to the save (preferred) or screen shots would allow us to see things like how much food is in the food basket, which tiles are not being worked, which tiles are being worked that can be switched to scientiests to eek out a few more GPP, etc. Can you post screen shots of the relvant cities or just post a save?

Regarding formlas for the base GPP, I can add and subtract 3 quite easily, so this won't be an issue (assumes you and Irgy can do this as well). I guess what you're saying would help the up player to know how many specialists should be hired, so I can see the benefit. I'll make the change.

For me, great people generation is more important than 2 experience points for our military units. This game is still being gated by science, not military or conquest. I think we should only run Theocracy for 5 turns while we finish off all units in the queue and then switch back immediately to Pacifism. Really, it's this first wave of units that are the most important and will see the most action, right?

 

[Mitchum]

The reason that the GPP are off in my spreadsheet is that I assumed for simplicity (knowing that it was wrong) that we would be runing the same number of specialists that were in BLubmuz' final save. Dhoomstriker fired a bunch of specialists and hired farmers instead, which is why the values were off.

 

[Mitchum]

I found some errors with my spreadsheet. Standby.

 

[Irgy]

The picture is quite complex with many moving parts. Having access to the save (preferred) or screen shots would allow us to see things like how much food is in the food basket, which tiles are not being worked, which tiles are being worked that can be switched to scientiests to eek out a few more GPP, etc. Can you post screen shots of the relvant cities or just post a save?

We don't have a test save, so the best we've got is the real save. I think Dhoomstriker's in bed now so if you want to see it just have a look. Personally I'm not going to be interested in that level of detail until I'm trying to make a final evaluation on the practicality of a few likely scenarios.

Regarding formlas for the base GPP, I can add and subtract 3 quite easily, so this won't be an issue (assumes you and Irgy can do this as well). I guess what you're saying would help the up player to know how many specialists should be hired, so I can see the benefit. I'll make the change.

Don't get too carried away changing things, I've already started working with the one you posted before

Given that...

I found some errors with my spreadsheet. Standby.

It might be easier for me to just fix my version if the errors are easy to explain. It looked right to me. I don't care too much about the turns we've already run, I've just pasted in the values for T258 and will go from there.

For me, great people generation is more important than 2 experience points for our military units. This game is still being gated by science, not military or conquest. I think we should only run Theocracy for 5 turns while we finish off all units in the queue and then switch back immediately to Pacifism. Really, it's this first wave of units that are the most important and will see the most action, right?

The main reason we want to run Theocracy is for diplo points rather than for military particularly. Almost all the AIs have Theocracy as their favoured Civic.

 

[Mitchum]

Here is the updated file. The error had to do with the formulas that were copied down. They were still pointing to the top row. I've fixed this error, addded the specialist column and input the current GPP and specialists for each city.

I'm going to bed, but I'll look at the actual save tomorrow. I didn't know that Dhoomstriker had posted it (I knew the test save was a goner as soon as BLubmuz started his turnset... ).

Good point about Theocracy. I had forgotten about the favorite civic thing. Does this build over time or do we get the full amout right away (or quickly)?

 

[Mitchum]

We don't have a test save, so the best we've got is the real save. I think Dhoomstriker's in bed now so if you want to see it just have a look. Personally I'm not going to be interested in that level of detail until I'm trying to make a final evaluation on the practicality of a few likely scenarios.

You're going to need the save to do anything meaningful. Dhoomstriker has not posted a save yet and the one BLubmuz posted is old. Dhoomstrker grew most of our cites and has not hired back many specialists yet, so the current GPP rate (looking at the F1 screen Dhoomstriker posted) is smaller than it could be in most cities.

My last file has the correct values for the current GPP and GPP/turn. The GPP/turn is one of the levers that we can pull (in addition to launching a golden age and/or switching out of Pacifism), so we need to fully understand how much control we have over this input.

 

[Irgy]

I've got all the info I need in a spreadsheet he sent me. Playing around with it now.

One thing I am interested to know though is the mechanics of the Theocracy bonus. In particular how many turns we want to run it up to the end of the game to get enough of a bonus, and whether running it earlier counts for anything or not.

 

[Irgy]

Ok, some initial observations:
* Generating 2 great people in 3Clams is unfortunately just not practical. Once it's generated one, it's too far behind the other cities to catch up. I tried scenarios of pacifism running almost the whole time, a golden age, and pop-starving (which didn't help much anyway), delaying the great people from other cities to get a cheaper great person from 3Clams later, and it just wasn't enough. Increasing the number of turns doesn't really help much either, the best chance would be for it to generate a cheaper great person (the 2400 one was my ideal target), and adding more turns to the finish just means holding back all the other cities from reaching 2400 for even longer, which becomes an increasingly silly thing to do.
* This means we want to delay the great person from 3Clams, by getting one in Dehli and GPFarm first, so that the one it does generate is one of the more expensive ones (if it's only generating 1 great person it might as well be a more expensive one).
* So, 8 great people as per the plan below is just not practical:

If our plan is for:
1. Three Clams, Grt Person Farm, and Delhi to each spawn as many as 2 more Great People
2. Risaia and Crabs to each spawn as many as 1 more Great Person

However, it's looking like 7 great people, as per that plan without the second in Three Clams, may be possible. It's still a stretch though for a 40-turn target.

 

[Irgy]

Ok, here's my great person report, based on the eventually actually very helpful info in Dhoomstriker's spreadsheet (for all that it took a while to make sense of), and Mitchum's extremely tidy and well designed spreadsheet.

8 Great People
It's just not going to happen. The second great person from 3 clams is the bottleneck, and I can't make it work anywhere in the ballpark of 40 turns. The problem is that other cities keep pushing poor 3-clams' target up for the second great person, and to hold back and wait for it is just not realistic.

7 Great People
It can be done, but it's probably not worth it. The great people would come from:
2xDehli, 2xGPFarm, 1xRisaia, 1xCrabs, 1xThree Clams.
The bottleneck is Risaia. To cut a long story short, the best I can do is:
* T300 for the last great person (from Dehli, although getting it from GPFarm is probably possible too).
* Running Pacifism almost the entire time. I stopped for the golden age (it's better for pacifism and the golden age to be disjoint).
* Relying on the fact that if two cities would generate a great person on the same turn, the one with more GPP overflow will be chosen. I'm not 100% sure about this though. If it's wrong though, it pushes things out by a turn or two (or maybe not, if we're clever about it).
* Holding back significantly in a number of cities to stop them generating great people and putting the target up for Risaia. This would negatively impact our research rate.
* Population-starving like a raving lunatic to spam out great people once Risaia has finally generated one (including of course population starving in Risaia to get it out earlier). Basically each city takes a turn pop starving, while the others hold back to just miss out on getting their own great person first.

Delaying the date can help reduce the amount of population starving required, but pacifism can't be avoided at least up until Risaia's great person pops on T291, without not just delaying everything else but also losing even more beakers forcing the other cities to hold back for even longer. And it seems silly not to run Pacifism while population-starving the remaining cities, so the end result is nothing but either Pacifism or the golden age the whole time. There might be some gains by running pacifism through the golden age as well, and there's probably some tweaking that could be done, but on the whole it won't get all that much better.

Overall this option is possible, but realistically it's quite silly. I don't believe we'd get anything for the extra great person to make up for what we lose in beakers (holding back cities) and population (pop-starving). Plus the micro will be very tight will little room for either error or unexpected events.

6 Great People
This seems like the sensible option, and the great people can be generated quite comfortably. Dehli 's second great person is the bottleneck. Risaia generates no great person, and finishes with 2423gpp. Left to its own devices it would generate a 7th great person in another 25 turns, although GPFarm would then actually pip it at the post with a third. The great people come in the order of:
GPFarm T263, Dehli T269, 3Clams T274, Crabs T282, GPFarm T292, Dehli T? (see below).


This option involves running mostly Theocracy, almost no pop-starving (hopefully none), and very minimal holding specialists back (just a few in 3-clams, which we can make up the beakers from afterwards anyway).

The plan I have is as follows:
* Theocracy now, then 8 turns of pacifism from T263 to T270.
* A golden age from T271 to T282. This could be swapped with the pacifism, it doesn't matter that much.
* Dehli grows for 4 turns (with 3 specialists + 2 from TGLib), then works 8 specialists.
* GP Farm grows for 5 turns (with 3 specialists) then works 8 specialists.
* Crabs sticks to 6 specialists.
* 3 Clams works 6 specialists mostly, but holds back to 5 a few turns to prevent it overtaking Dehli and GPFarm (This only needs to be done partly because GPFarm chooses to grow. Switching to Theocracy straight away helps here though, as GPFarm still has the National Epic). It then moves up to 7 for a while to speed things up - not that it needs to, but it can.
* I have Dehli pop-starving, while running pacifism, from T292 to T296, to get the great person out at the start of T297. The good thing is, by then we'll have a better idea of whether this is actually necessary, and can judge whether it's worthwhile or not.

5 Great People
If we don't have a golden age, and run Theocracy for the rest of the game, we'll generate 5 great people without really even needing to try. Running the same settings as above but with no golden age and Theocracy we will naturally spawn great people in the following order:
GPFarm T263, 3Clams T272, Dehli T277, Crabs T292, GPFarm T299.

Dehli will be at 1767/3000gpp, and due for one in another 16 turns if left to its own devices.

Conclusion
6 seems like the right target to me. 5 is also reasonable, as we can avoid the golden age, which saves a great person anyway. However I think the commerce benefits of the golden age make it worthwhile. Comparing the two, the golden age and pacifism mostly just help Dehli get to a second great person in reasonable time. The other cities will generate one on their own soon enough either way. On the whole, as I expected, the finer details aren't that important in the end, because for the most part the plans are quite robust to small changes (the exception being the 7 great people plan which is unstable and risky), the main thing that was needed was the population-stable number of scientists for each city.

The only thing to watch out for with the easier plans (5 and 6) is making sure Three Clams generates the 2100gpp great preson, after both Dehli and GPFarm have grabbed one first. Otherwise they have more trouble catching up to their second.

I've attached the plans so you can see my working in more detail. The 7 great people plan is a work of art, for all that there's plenty of tweaking which could still be done The others are fairly dull.

 

[BLubmuz]

Great job, Irgy
Mainly considering you can use only your forked tongue

I think 6 can be the way to go, with a GAge
Goin' for 5 without GAge gives the same result in terms of GP, but a bit more commerce and production can help, mainly if we run the GAge while building our military for Mehmed.

I'll take a look on your spreadsheet, i'm curious.

 

[BLubmuz]

Irgy, i looked to your spreadsheet.
I noted you added wonder(s)-generated GPP in row2, have you considered the +100% of NE for GPF? i hope to be wrong, but the formulas look the same for every city.

 

[Irgy]

Irgy, i looked to your spreadsheet.
I noted you added wonder(s)-generated GPP in row2, have you considered the +100% of NE for GPF? i hope to be wrong, but the formulas look the same for every city.

It's not my spreadsheet by the way, it's Mitchum's, I don't want to steal the credit for it. He added the wonder GPP too.

The formulae for all the columns are indeed almost identical, but you'll see that the GPF formula has a "2 + ..." where the others have a "1 + ...". I noticed because I wondered about the same thing myself. If that's not the case then it's only because I've messed it up somehow when fiddling with it, but I'm pretty sure it's right because GPF is gathering gpp pretty quickly.

 

[BLubmuz]

It's not my spreadsheet by the way, it's Mitchum's, I don't want to steal the credit for it. He added the wonder GPP too.

The formulae for all the columns are indeed almost identical, but you'll see that the GPF formula has a "2 + ..." where the others have a "1 + ...". I noticed because I wondered about the same thing myself. If that's not the case then it's only because I've messed it up somehow when fiddling with it, but I'm pretty sure it's right because GPF is gathering gpp pretty quickly.

Hmmm, right, the formula is not easy to read, i missed that variation.

I finally updated page 1 and rescheduled our final TSs.

I hope to hear something from UT, after his "i'm back" message he disappeared.

If we decide to go for 6 GPersons, it would be better run the GAge when we're building our military, then switch to Pacifism and back to Theo for the Diplo bonus.

IIRC what Dhoom said about the Diplo modifiers, if you switch religion or civics for few turns when you switch back you'll find the same attitudes you left before the first switch. I can confirm i've seen this with Zara in our real game.

Do anyone think it's worth to build the ChRedentor? We're spiritual, but switch civics and/or religion any turn can be of some value?

 

[Mitchum]

@ Irgy

Great job!! I was really hoping that neither of the next 2 great people would come from Delhi. We really want the next two to be Great Scientists and Delhi will have the lowest odds of this.

I looked at Dhoomstriker's spreadsheet but couldn't figure out what I was looking at...

@ BLubmuz

In my next iteration of the spreadsheet, I'll pull the National Epic bonus out of the formula so that it is easier to see.

I don't think in makes sense to build the Cristo Redentor unless we have nothing else to build. It costs 1000 hammers with no bonus. It opens up with Radio, so we wouldn't be able to start on it until near the end of the game anyway. Plus, the benefit is nerfed since we're already Spiritual.

 

[Irgy]

@ Irgy

Great job!! I was really hoping that neither of the next 2 great people would come from Delhi. We really want the next two to be Great Scientists and Delhi will have the lowest odds of this.

Well, if we go for 5 then we could afford to hold Dehli back a little until after the Three clams great person, but I don't think it's worth it. We'll get 2 scientists fairly soon anyway, and not holding back in Dehli gives us a better chance of getting one there too. I prefer the 6 option as well (as does BLubmuz it seems), and that definately requires getting one of the sooner and cheaper ones from Dehli.


Re Christo, I don't think it's worth it, we've got other things to build. There's some clever tricks to be had with switching every turn, but I don't think we have need of them.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Having access to ... screen shots would allow us to see things like how much food is in the food basket, which tiles are not being worked, which tiles are being worked that can be switched to scientiests to eek out a few more GPP, etc. Can you post screen shots of the relvant cities

While all of that info can be gleaned from the Spreadsheet that I sent, I took some time to make some screenshots for you, as requested.

Remember, we just grew in most of these Cities, so the exact citizen assignment has not been worked this way. For example, Delhi probably could have removed its PHRiv Mine last turn (my fault--another reason not to play 20 turns straight-through--to help stop and re-assess), but I'm pretty sure that 1 of the GHRiv Mines was required for us to grow within that 1 turn, while the other GHRiv Mine has yet to be worked, as it was just "auto-assigned" upon growth and has not contributed to our empire yet.

Recall that we'll get +1 Health in 3 turns, so our Health Cap is actually 1 higher than what we have displayed in the screenshots.

Spoiler :

Number of Scientists (or Specialists) vs Base GPP

Regarding formlas for the base GPP, I can add and subtract 3 quite easily, so this won't be an issue (assumes you and Irgy can do this as well). I guess what you're saying would help the up player to know how many specialists should be hired, so I can see the benefit. I'll make the change.

Indeed, the math is relatively simple to come up with, but logically, it's easier for our brains to count the number of Specialists. It's not so bad for Cities without Wonders or 2 Scientists from The Great Library, as it's either a matter of multiplying or dividing by 3.

But it's nice to be able to abstract out the number of Specialists that need to be hired in a case like Delhi, instead of the UP player having to perform mental math just to "convert" a Base value back into the right number of Specialists to hire.

Thanks for updating the spreadsheet--the point is to let the computer do the number crunching for us so that we can have the data in a format that makes the most sense for our brains to analyse, allowing us to focus on the bigger picture, instead of getting bogged-down in mentally subtracting 15 GPP from Delhi's Wonders, then trying to remember if we need to subtract 6 GPP from The Great Library's Scientists or not, then dividing by 3... not too hard to do ONCE if the numbers remain static, but the whole POINT is that I think we should analyze ALL scenarios at once, and in very few of the scenarios are the number of Specialists that we can hire a static value.


Theocracy

For me, great people generation is more important than 2 experience points for our military units. This game is still being gated by science, not military or conquest. I think we should only run Theocracy for 5 turns while we finish off all units in the queue and then switch back immediately to Pacifism. Really, it's this first wave of units that are the most important and will see the most action, right?

Okay, I will buy your argument. However, the reason for running Theocracy ASAP isn't for improving our Military Units. The reason is because AT LEAST THREE of the AIs that we want to vote for us will like us better "automatically" just by running Theocracy for a number of turns. If we want Zara to vote for us, too, then that's FOUR of the AIs that will like us for running Theocracy.

That's a MAJOR FLAW in this game's design, if you ask me, as it totally favours a war-mongeror approach--constantly running Theocracy and just taking the game by force, and those that decided to go for war-mongering while baiting an AI or two into attacking them will likely get a very easy Diplo Victory as a result. It would have been better to have some AIs like Org Rel while others like Theocracy, so that it would take more effort for the SGOTM teams to decide which AIs to please.

As it stands, if we DO NOT run Theocracy, we're throwing away "easy" positive Diplo modifiers that most, if not all, other SGOTM teams that go for a Diplo Victory will be able to get.

The fact that I may delay completing a Military Unit or two until we get Theocracy (I'm debating whether or not to delay the Galleons but will probably not delay the Galleons so as to get them "in place" ASAP) is only really applicable if we're going to switch into Theocracy soon.

If we won't switch into Theocracy soon, then there's not much point in me "saving up" Military Units, other than for saving on Gold per Turn Unit Supply Costs, and then I'd only do so until our Galleons are in place (which again leads me to just wanting to complete the Galleons first, even without the Theocracy promotions).

40 turns' worth of Theocracy SHOULD be enough to fully please the AIs, but it is possible that this number can go up or down by 10 turns, based on the exact mechanics of the Shared Favourite Civic Diplo modifier bonus. It is worth testing before I play on, so that we'll know for certain.

 

[Mitchum]

Six Great People

We currently have 2 GS, 2 GE and a GArt. If we use the GAart to spawn a Golden Age, we'll have 2 GS, 2 GE and 7 others (6 + 1 GS from Physics).

Assuming we can self-research Scientific Method, how many GSs do we need to bulb most of Physics and most of Electricity? This should be our target if we hope to get Radio from Liberalism. According to Irgy's 6 GP plan, we'll have 3 more great people in 17 turns. If they are all GSs, we'll have 2 (current) + 3 + 1 (Physics) = 6. Is this enough? Is 17 turns soon enough?

Note: if we used all of these GP on bulbing, the next 3 plus one of the GEs would be needed as the Final Four.

Re Espionage: Does it make sense to start directing our espionage toward Saladin to know what he's researching? How many turns at 0% espionage would it take to see this information?

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Assuming we can self-research Scientific Method, how many GSs do we need to bulb most of Physics and most of Electricity?

2848 Flasks / Great Scientist is the current value, plus 4.5 Flasks rounded down for every population point that we add to our empire (adding 9 Flasks per Great Scientist for every 2 additional population points is a safe bet--not worth the cost of settling Whales but perhaps worth trying to grow some auxilliary Cities--although it might be better to just hire Scientist Specialists in a City like Ivory Towers instead of growing it, netting us far MORE Flasks than we could get by improving our Lightbulbs' Flasks).

Physics = 9360 Flasks
Electricity = 10530 Flasks

That's just under 3.3 Great Scientists to Lightbulb Physics and just under 3.7 Great Scientists to Lightbulb Electricity.

If they are all GSs, we'll have 2 (current) + 3 + 1 (Physics) = 6. Is this enough?

Yes, that would be enough. 5 Great Scientists will probably even be enough.

Is 17 turns soon enough?

17 turns might not be enough. Surely, Saladin will learn Education before then.

He knows Banking (as this tech does not appear under his Can Research column), so there is a strong chance that he is on an Economics beeline.

He also likes Military Tradition and Rifling, so may avoid Liberalism for a while.

But, he would have the OPPORTUNITY to go Liberalism, which is what I think the team feels most comfortable in assuming.


Using all of the Great Scientists on Lightbulbing

Note: if we used all of these GP on bulbing, the next 3 plus one of the GEs would be needed as the Final Four.

Well, I doubt that we will have time to be able to use 6, so we'll probably use 5 Great Scientists on Lightbulbing at max.


Espionage

Re Espionage: Does it make sense to start directing our espionage toward Saladin to know what he's researching? How many turns at 0% espionage would it take to see this information?

We don't have enough Courthouses for this endeavour.

However, I will use Irgy's trick of "fake selling" him Education (don't worry, I'll be extremely careful not to actually sell it and I won't have to check on EVERY single turn), just to get a feel for when he's close to researching it.