Let's keep 32 cities, but only the ones in the mainland, beacause SoL has effect only on the continent where it's built. Assuming to use only sci specialist, it's 6*32=192*1.5 on average, it's 288. But i.e. for Paris it's 6*3.25=19.5 and the average will easily be 1.75 soon, since i think we want those salons in every city. Let alone the laboratories, which come very late. So the detour pays for itself in (4368/300) in 15 turns, assuming we don't build more research buildings.
But we can also run more free artists in our GA farm.
Last but not least we deny it to our opponents and maybe we delay their research of the tech, wich is dangerous if they adopt Emancipation too soon.
I don't think we have that good multipliers on average. We have 12 libraries, 7 unis, 1 oxford, 6 monasteries and 1 academy. Half of our cities doesn't even have a library built. Note that building a library and building a salon gives the same amount of bonus beakers from the SoL specialist. Assuming we have our current buildings, all cities on the continent that are currently built (32) and library built in every city. (Or 20 more library or salon built anywhere)
We get 6*32= 192 raw beakers.
32 library/salon, each gives 1.5 beakers -> 48 beakers
1 oxford, gives 6 beaker from this specialst
1 academy, gives 3 beakers
7 unis, each gives 1.5 beaker: 10.5 beakers
6 monasteries, each gives 0.6 beaker -> 3.6 beakers
sum= 192+48+6+3+10.5+3.6= 263.1 beakers
Note that I assumed 12 unbuilt buildings. It takes 19 turns to get back the beakers invested in Democracy.
We all agree that we need corps ASAP. Why would we postpone it 5 turns? I believe that getting mining inc 5 turns earlier easily cuts 3-4 turns on our finish date.
EDIT: it turns out that my estimation in the previous post was quite accurate
