@Denkt : Yes you make a good point. I will have to look at that. It should be easy enough to compare once the science stuff is done.
RA's are easy to compute so long as you know your BPT, and to keep things simple, assuming you are not being averaged with your partner (IIRC that means your BPT is higher then his ??? Could be the otherway as I can't trust my memory).
In my playstyle I tend to keep as many people as friends as possible aswell, so I guess we play the game similarly.
That said I beleive S.K was playing on standard map size so that limits you to 7 RA's at one time, and given they last X turns (hmmm can't rmemeber how long they last, I think it is 30 turns on standard) that puts a hard limit on how many you can get.
Also as you now need DOF's for RA's it will pretty much mean everyone will have to like everyone in order to get the full amount, otherwise you will be friends with one of their enemies which has diplomatic repercussions.
As far as farms go. IMO there are diminishing returns the higher your city population gets.
As the growth amount is continually increasing, each citizen needs to make more per tile to retain the same growth rate (via extra food, policies, buildings etc). Otherwisethe growth rate drops. If the growth rate drops then the net benefit also drops.
Following this line of thought, there will be a tipping point where gold (hammers/whatever) becomes a better proposition to food. No idea where that lies but it will be there somewhere IMO.
In a sense the arguement about more food= more people = more gold is analagous to the more cities = more culture = more policies.
Eventually the policy cost gets high enough that you cant maintain the city culture penalty for a given city. I think (and I stress it is conjecture at this point) that the same holds for growth. Perhaps with buildings/wonders/CS/etc you can keep it in check all game ? IDK.
Personally I love big cities, and try to grow my cities regardless, that said though I do not believe this is necessarily the best use of resources once a certain (albeit unknown) city population is gained. I think the capital is probably an exception to this, given the large multiplier you get to gold via monarchy, and food via (landed Elite I think and Maritimes).
Also trading posts allow you to direct a puppet's citizens effectively whereas farms do not. At the moment I have too many Civ thought experiments on the go
, S.K Science thread and my own AI diplomacy/strategic project, otherwise I would look more into this to see if there is a calculable tipping point.
There is always a delicate balance in civ between developing a city now for greater future efficiency VS drawing on immediate city benefits, then leveraged for greater future efficiency. Very hard to qualify, let alone quantify
Out of interest Denkt what do you think your BPT would be once Research Labs are completed, in a typical science game that you were doing well in ?
I am interested to see how others BPT (and science milestones) differs from S.K. If you feel like providing further info (ie the crucial science milestones (university, rationalism, research labs, etc) and BPT at those times, please do as it would be good to have multiple data sets to draw from). This goes for anyone reading and interested in this thread.
If you are interested, please refer to SK original post for the milestones in question, and provide BPT + Turn Attained at those points.
Hopefully I will get some down time during compiles at work tonight, and can finsih factoring in the RA compound effects.
BTW In your previous post you mentioned RA's affecting Academies, I think you meant it the other way around ?
Apologies for the WALL OF TEXT