Hey guys,
While there is a bit of a lull in the play, I thought I would post a quick analysis taking a look at the Scotland Yard (SY) vs. infiltrate question.
To optimize the benefit from Scotland Yard, you would ideally cottage up the capital early on and build up huge bonuses from the +100% ESP. Your game is far from optimal from this point of view (there is a floodplain in the capital without a cottage at turn 121
) although I can't really blame you since you didn't have SY in the capital
As far as I can tell, you popped your Great Spy at turn 91. You didn't steal your first tech (Monarchy) until turn 130. This is pretty typical in my experience since it takes a while to tech alpha, build spies, and park them in cities for long enough.
Anyway, I looked at all the saves and estimated how much espionage you could have reasonably run (either at a small deficit or usually a small surplus) assuming you had built SY. This is what I saw:
Turn 91: ESP total = 34 (15 from SY)
Turn 111: ESP total = 52 (19 from SY)
Turn 121: ESP total = 52 (18 from SY)
Turn 131: ESP total = 60 (18 from SY)
Turn 140: ESP total = 95 (25 from SY)
Turn 150: ESP total = 116 (29 from SY)
Now the interesting thing is you stole the following Techs early on:
Turn 130: Monarchy cost = 249
Turn 130: Feudalism cost = 580
Turn 140: Currency cost = 331
Turn 148: math cost = 207
Total espionage used by turn 148: 1367
Note: I added 10% to the cost to reflect higher prices for lower overall espionage points.
Espionage generated (assuming linear increases in espionage between data points)
Turn 91 - turn 130: 1927 (703 from SY)
Turn 130 - Turn 140: 775 (215 from SY)
Turn 140 - Turn 148: 835 (214 from SY)
At turn 130, you have roughly twice what you needed to steal monarchy/feudalism. Moreover, with SY, you are gaining espionage at a faster rate than you were using it.
For this varient, I think this is pretty typical. The lesson imo is because it is fairly hard to quickly use EPs, you can actually generate all you need in the early days from SY. This leaves you much better able to redirect your SY enhanced espionage at future victems because it is general EPs instead of dedicated EPs. Notice, by turn 150, SY would be enhancing your overall espionage rate by 33%! And this is without focusing much at all on cottaging up the capital.
One benefit of infiltration that you guys used was the ability to max out gold and still have plenty of espionage. This is definitely a benefit. I think you can still run gold at a surplus if you need to (you generated roughly twice what you had used by turn 148 anyway). However, it is a point to consider.
Ok, enough fighting the conventional wisdom that infiltration is best
I think in normal games that is almost certainly true. In this varient however where the EP slider will be high and espionage is everything, I am at least convinced SY is generally better.
Fun game btw!
GS
