Thanks Tarkeel! Had some thoughts jotted down before seeing the start, going to have a think about it now.
Pro is essentially 1g per city, until we hit currency when it becomes 2g per city. Plus it has some ok late game scaling, but it's a long time away. Most early game traits give roughly 30h to a city in their earliest phase when it hits the snowball the most. I'd consider 2g per city competitive with that if you got the full value immediately, but not when Currency is so far away. And the extra gold is less important after Currency too, free gold is most helpful before that. Even that analysis is assuming we never get foreign trade routes.
I had forgotten about America, we could play that. I've played a SP game with it and I definitely think it's broken.
On a smaller map, where the you are forced to build more military relative to the size of your empire I can see Agg getting somewhere. But fundamentally, some of the power budget for Pro and Agg has to go to the promotions and I really don't value those. It is a hammer multiplier on military, but if you're building enough military for that to be valuable then something has probably gone wrong, or it's an unusual game type.
The main things you will see people do with GP is golden ages, bulbs and trade missions in the mid-late game. I think GPs in the early game are underestimated though, particularly when combined with Phi.
With early scientists you have
-Academy
-Maths Bulb, on the way to Currency
-If you already have an Academy then even settling the GS is quite good too (especially if you get the Mids)
If we do go for Phi America, I'd love to try for Mids and settling a bunch of GS.
Its harder to get any other type of GP in the early game, but they're generally even better than the GS options: GM - Trade Mission or Currency bulb, GE - Rush Wonder or Machinery bulb, GP - Shrine.
Just to try illustrate settling the value of a settling a GS, since it would probably be a bit of a contentious decision. Suppose the first GS goes for an Academy and the 2nd is settled (in practice we might go the other order). Then the settled GS is getting 10.5bpt and 1hpt. How many hammers would you pay for a building that does that? 200h seems like a very reasonable number, even ignoring potential growth in the future from more mulipliers/Rep. If we are paying 200gpp for that then 1gpp=1h. And each Phi scientist is getting you 7.5gpp = 7.5h, 3b. That's an amazing tile we'd love to work.
In general, everyone tries to get even better value from the Great People, so gpp are more valuable than that. But the thing with Phi is we want to start getting value from our trait quickly so we need to find good uses for them as early as possible. Especially if you combine with the Pyramids and even more free gpp from America I think settling can work really well. Late game with Oxford/Rep/Emancipation/Factories it scales to 6hpt, 29bpt. Talking myself into this combo here ...
Regarding Cre - there's always the fear when you pick it that you'll just be settling first ring resources and won't need the border pops. But almost every time I have picked it, it's allowed me to settle a different dotmap that gets more resources in each city. Even vs other border popping methods like missionaries, allowing you to save those hammers for later helps the snowball, and getting the 2nd ring resources 5t faster is quite valuable too.
