Strategic benchmarks and rules of thumb

[Resident Mario]

While it's easy to place yourself in the context of your current game I still have a hard time "comparing" my experiences between games because of how "slippery" turn-based timekeeping is. I've heard a few different quotes as to things you should have by so and so turn on so and so difficulty, and I'd like to hear them. Maybe we should even "compile" them in one place?

As an example: one metric maddjinn seems to use in his LPs is BPT > turn number in the beginning of the game.

Oh and another one I tend to follow, try to get your cap to six pop before you hammer down a settler.

 

[Plumfairy]

I think the kinds of benchmarks you're referring to rely on having maps of a certain type. (e.g. Not scarce resources, none of the funky but interesting map types like Ice Age, etc.) Some folks might be able to provide benchmarks for those conditions, but I would encourage you to try playing suboptimal map types. (or completely random maps, which sometimes result in the same thing) You're not likely to beat your records for quickest victories, but you'll end up with more varied & more interesting games.

 

[Makavcio]

I've seen over a dozen of threads where people listed such guidelines. If you are really bored, go search the forum for them and make a compilation post
In my opinion, the whole idea of such timetables is misbegotten. Everything depends on your starting location, interactions with barbarians, city states, other civs and of course, the most important factor of all, luck.
If you really want some rules of thumb, you always need to be the tech leader on king and bellow, catch up with tech in medieval era on emperor, catch up in renaissance on immortal and go ahead of everyone else in time for science victory on deity. If you can meet these requirements, you don't need to worry about anything else because you either had already met them, or your tech level destines you to meet them.

 

[SirPepsi]

There's too much wiggle-room. It really does depend on your particular situation, who you're playing as, what you're aiming for, what difficulty you're on, etc.

 

[peddroelm]

firaxis or some modder could help comparing/benchmarking different strategies

you would need the game to provide some graphs like

total accumulated gold /turn
total gold spent
total accumulated hammers generated/turn
same for...food/faith/culture/science/tourism ..
+ some metric to measure military might / turn (or just a list with icons - 2xwarrior, 6xcb ... )...

great persons generated until turn
turns in golden age until turn
total population per turn / nr settled cities at turn

And make those graphs visible and exportable each turn ...

And then you'll be able to compare performance ...