[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[picklepikkl]

Thank you for explaining your thinking! I haven't done much (anything, really) with workshops or any of the *mills. I hadn't realized they could be so potent if given the correct context.

[Commodore]

Thank you for explaining your thinking! I haven't done much (anything, really) with workshops or any of the *mills. I hadn't realized they could be so potent if given the correct context.

State Property is one of the first really big things most of us learned about when we reached late-era multiplayer. It's pretty underwhelming for the bog-standard cottage->cottage->draft single player game, but dem hammers:

[Sullla]

Hello folks. scooter has kindly allowed me to act as a teammate and dedicated lurker for his thread in this game. I don't plan on playing any turns, but knowing me, I might have a few things to chime in about every now and then. Let me start by talking everyone's head off about late era starts.

I'm probably one of the few people at Realms Beyond who's played a good number of late era starts. Although it's been a long time, I have played them against other humans in team MP ladder games. My specialty was Medieval games; that's the setting that I know the best. However, I did play some Industrial era starts, which I think puts me ahead of most of the community, and spent even more time discussing them with Speaker (who played a ton of them over the years). I tried looking for some links about Industrial era starts online; there used to be a blog called Fastmoves which discussed these things from a ladder perspective, but it seems to have disappeared into the Internet ether. That means a lot of this knowledge is in my head, and in the heads of some of the Civ4 MP ladder junkies, and not available anywhere else.

There are a lot of things different about the later era starts that aren't immediately obvious if you haven't played them before. Here's a couple that jump out:

* Worker labor is ridiculously in demand at the start of the game. You start the game with 3 settlers but only 2 workers. Then each of your three cities begins at size 3, so that's 9 tiles that can be worked. But it's even worse than that - each city also starts with a granary, so they'll be growing faster than at the start of an Ancient era game, and every resource can be connected immediately. Plantations, wineries, quarries - they're all fair game. You can also build workshops, watermills, windmills - everything other than forest preserves. The demand for improved tiles outraces the worker supply in the worst way imaginable.

* The happiness cap is almost irrelevant. All happiness resources can be connected immediately, plus cities start in Industrial era with a Forge and Market, so all of the happiness resources also get doubled in all cities. Then everyone also gets a free religion at the start of the game for even more happiness. And all the civics that provide happiness are also available from the start of the game: Hereditary Rule, Representation, Nationhood, etc. In a worse case scenario, the player can even run the culture slider for additional happy faces. This changes the gameplay significantly.

* Slavery + cottages gets overwhelmed by actual production. Scooter and Commodore have already made this point above, but it bears repeating. Late game workshops buffed by Caste System and State Property make any green part of the map a production powerhouse. Every city starts with a forge, and factories/power plants are only two techs away. Furthermore, units and buildings in the late eras are too expensive to make whipping very effective. Slavery is only situationally useful, not the One Right Choice it is in Ancient era starts.

To get a sense of what this looks like in practice, it might be useful to read scooter's Modern era dual games against dazedroyalty from five years ago. Here's the main thread: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=4102

Continued in the next post...

[Sullla]

Let's talk traits and civilization unique abilities in this post.

Spiritual is the godly trait in late era starts. This is the trait that should be tops of the list, for a couple different reasons. The first is that every turn is extremely important in late era starts; these games simply don't last as long as Ancient era starts. You don't want to be wasting any turns to Anarchy if you can avoid it. Second, there are so many more civics available in the late era starts that the ability to swap between them at will becomes more powerful. Seriously, just about every single option could be situationally useful in an Industrial start. The power to flip between Police State/Vassalage/Theocracy for military buildup and then go immediately into UniSuffrage/Free Speech/Emancipation/Free Religion then next, then into Caste System/Mercantilism/Pacifism for Great Person generation... well, you get the idea.

Even better, Spiritual is the one trait that can flip into Serfdom at will without being punished for it. Serfdom is variant material for a normal game, but it's incredibly useful for late era starts when there are so many tiles to improve and not nearly enough workers. Other traits have to run the risk of being unable to whip while running this civic - not Spiritual though! You can run Serfdom and easily pop into Slavery or Caste System (or whatever) at any point in time.

Serfdom civic also synergizes very nicely with the worker boost at Steam Power, one of the first techs that can be researched in an Industrial era start. Here's the chart of what that looks like for Normal speed:



Long story short, I heavily suggest picking a Spiritual leader.

Imperialistic is also an excellent trait as scooter mentioned. Settlers are very expensive at ~300 shields apiece, and Imperialistic makes that much more doable. More production also comes from hammers than from food, relatively speaking, in the later era starts, which is another plus for Imperialistic. That said, in my personal experience this trait is not as good as Spiritual's insane flexibility. I would weight a Spiritual leader over an Imperialistic one for this game.

Philosophical I do not weight as highly as scooter does. Yes, it's a useful trait, but significantly lower than the first two traits discussed here. Great Person bulbs just aren't as useful in the later eras, when they produce 1000 beakers out of the 2500 or so beakers it takes to research a tech. Similarly, an Academy's +50% research is less useful when you can build a library, university, and observatory straight from the beginning of the game. The +100% Great Person points is also a less useful ability, when anyone can pop into Caste System and Pacifism to get their own +100% GPP on demand. Don't get me wrong, there are some neat little plays that can be done, and Great Person are needed to found the corporations (which are very much in effect here). There's also a couple of strong wonders in Industrial start, such as Taj Mahal, Statue of Liberty, Pentagon, and Kremlin. But again, the relative value of Great Engineers, Great Scientists, and so on are all lower in the later era compared to the beginning of the game. Great Prophets can't even lightbulb ANYTHING this late on the tech tree! The double speed universities is actually one of the best aspects of Philosophical for these settings, as they are pricey and very nice to have. So again, not a terrible trait, but not top tier in my opinion.

By the way, don't underestimate the speed at which tech will move in this game. Yes, it looks really slow at the beginning when just starting out, but it picks up in a big way. All cities grow really fast, and every tile can be improved with much higher yields than you'd see in an Ancient era game. The value of Great Person lightbulbs is not as high as they appear at first glance.

For the rest of the traits, Financial is greatly undercut by the lategame emphasis on production. It's often better to workshop everything and simply build research than try to grow cottages, since the games don't last that long in the later eras. You'll need to run Emancipation to get cottages to grow in any kind of reasonable time span, and that's a weak civic when Caste System, Slavery, and Serfdom are the other choices. Financial is far from the king in these settings.

Expansive is even worse off, as every city starts with a granary and harbor, plus they all start with an aqueduct, making the +2 health less useful. The +25% worker production is the main reason why I would want this trait, and it's just not enough in my opinion. Creative is flat out terrible for an Industrial start, as it's easy to pop borders (Build Culture). Double speed libraries and theatres is the only benefit - not worth it.

Organized gets double speed factories and courthouses, but loses the faster lighthouses since all cities start with them. The cheaper civics are OK, I guess - very useful if going the corporation route, but I think most of us would agree that State Property + workshops is better in most circumstances. If not going the corporation route, Organized is pretty meh. Industrious is probably the single worst trait in late era starts, with forges already present in every city and relatively few wonders still to be built. If you want to snag Taj Mahal or Statue of Liberty, you're probably better off going Philosophical and doing stuff with Great Engineers instead. Furthermore, the +50% to wonder construction starts to look pretty paltry when every city has +25% from the forge, and can get factories/power plants shortly down the road. Industrious is a stay away trait.

Aggressive is surprisingly good in late era starts. Barracks are one building that you never get for free, they provide happiness with Nationhood civic, and the double speed drydocks are actually really nice too. Add in the free promotion on all of your Gunpowder units, which combines very nicely with a lot of the lategame XP boosting civics, and you have a solid trait. Aggressive makes it *MUCH* easier to get Commando units, and they can be gamechangers in these settings. Remember, late era games don't last as long as Ancient ones, making the economic traits somewhat underemphasized compared to their normal state. Charismatic is similarly useful, but I'd argue that it's not as good as Aggressive in these settings. The happiness bonus is pretty irrelevant with so many lategame resources available to be connected, and the cheaper promotions, while nice, are simply outweighed by other options. (Although it can be really nice getting triple promoted units out, don't get me wrong!) I think Charismatic is a weaker version of Aggressive though.

What does that mean for this particular game's choices then? Based on what I've written thus far, I think the Spiritual leaders are the ones to choose between. I like three of them:

* I like Montezuma of Germany a lot, arguably my favorite of the lot. Spiritual is great, Aggressive is deceptively good in these settings, and Germany is an excellent civ for an Industrial start. The panzer is a tank that kills other tanks, and yes, we'll definitely reach tanks in this game. (You might think cavs would be the key attacking unit for these settings, but by the time anyone can build up a production base, most civs have machine guns or infantry, and even cavs struggle against them. Renaissance games are the ones where cavs are the dominant unit. In all the Industrial games I can remember, tanks were the ones that tended to decide the outcome, and the panzer is really good in this one particular niche.) Plus Germany even has a useful unique building for these settings, with their Assembly Plant that builds at double speed and allows 4 Engineers instead of 2 Engineers.

I also like this pick for metagaming reasons. RB generally thinks that Aggressive is a weak trait, and that's rightfully so for Ancient games. It's a lot better in this settings, plus paired with the uber Spiritual trait, plus paired with a civ that's actually quite good for an Industrial start. When was the last time someone played as Monty and had success in a non-modded game?

* I like Gandhi of Khmer next best. This is less because of the Philosophical trait and more because of the Khmer Baray. Every city starts with an aqueduct, so that's +1 food from the baray in every city, forever. Not bad, eh? However, I think that this will be a very popular metagaming choice, meaning less likely chance to land this pairing. That drops it down my list somewhat.

* I have Brennus of the Vikings third. Charismatic is pretty meh, but Spiritual is the godly trait, and the Viking unique building Trading Post (+1 movement for ships) is very, very good indeed. I'd be pretty happy with this setup as well.

* Asoka of Aztecs is the weakest of the four Spiritual picks. Slavery is simply not that good in late era starts, making the Sacrificial Altar weaker than a lot of people would expect. I don't think Organized is all that useful either; it's certainly OK, but there are better options. I'd only consider this because it's the last Spiritual option available.

* Out of the Imperialistic leaders, I don't like most of the choices. I think I'd actually take Genghis Khan's Agg/Imp of America as my top pick, although I don't think America is still all that great, even with these settings. (Too late stuff even for Industrial era start!) None of the others impress me very much. For the non-Spiritual, non-Imperialistic leaders, I would consider Darius of the Dutch and Peter of India simply because of their civilizations, not their leader traits. The Dutch Dike UB could be really good on this map if there's a lot of water, and India's Faster Worker is of course always great. However, I don't particularly like the traits attached to either of those civs, and as we've generally seen over time, good traits tend to beat out good UU/UB. (Starting techs are the other big factor, but of course are irrelevant for this game.)

I would recommend Monty, Gandhi, and Brennus in that order, and then don't have strong feelings after that. Of course, this is scooter's game so he can ultimately do what he thinks is best. Let me know if you have other questions I can try to help answer.

[scooter]

Lots to think about here, appreciate it . I'll think and reply on trait stuff.

Any thoughts on dotmapping this? It's much tougher than I expected. I'm so accustomed to thinking about dotmapping in ancient mode, but the requirements are far different here. Seems like generally speaking I want something like:

1) a northwest city claiming wheat-sheep-iron (possibly on plains forest that gets them all first ring)

2) a southwest city claiming deer/pig and maybe dye. (perhaps directly in between pigs/deer)

3) a central city claiming 2 or 3 of crab, gold, incense. (either SIP or 1S)

While ignoring the southeast corn/iron. I'd like to plant on one of the plains hills, but I don't think either one makes much sense. Any thoughts?

The other considerations are ensuring that the first city settled is best able to use Bureau, and also possibly trying to rig the holy city dice roll to land in the ideal spot.

[scooter]

Some questions and thoughts.

*Do you agree that the value of State Property outweighs the chance to found a corp? Sounds like yes, just curious.

*Sounds like you think I'm overvaluing Phi, which is very possible. The point about being free to use Pacifism + Merc at any time to get your own faux-Phi is a good one, not to mention all the other benefits of Spiritual. I also did try a test game as one of the Phi civs (not Gandhi), and it definitely felt a bit slow. I found it hard to get out the great people for cute plays while also keeping up a respectable growth curve. I'm going to try one as as Monty or Brennus and see how the pace compares exploiting civics.

*I still like Gandhi best, but you're right that so may a lot of people. I've been going back and forth on whether or not to try to outguess people. Picking not-Gandhi may give me a very high chance of getting exactly what I want, but man it's hard to pass up Gandhi here.

*Building a Commando factory is not something I had really thought about yet, but you bringing up Commandos got me thinking. I've never actually built a Commando factory before, and this sure would be a fun time to try. Assuming I picked aggressive, to do that I'd need 17xp on new units. If my mental math is correct, Barracks, Vassalage, Theocracy, West Point, Pentagon, and 2 settled GG would do the trick (or 3 if I whiff on Pentagon). It's something to consider. I'd need Monty to pull it off to freely swap in and then back out of Vassalage/Theocracy, but it's awfully tempting. Combine them with Panzers and that's GG for some poor neighbor.

*Thinking on India and looking at this start - there aren't a whole lot of forests/hills here for the fast worker to really shine. In fact, spiritual serfdom may actually be faster in terms of laying down improvements. So I'm definitely softening on that a notch. Fast workers still rule, though.

Finally, here is the fastmoves article you were searching for: https://fastmoves.wordpress.com/2010/02/...trial-era/. I've actually had this bookmarked since that Modern duel you linked.

[Sullla]

Yes, that's the article that I had in mind. I'm surprised that all the searches I did for "Fastmoves blog" didn't manage to turn it up yesterday. Very useful reading for this game. There are some key differences in the settings that Shizanu was playing in that article, of course: It's written under the assumption of a 3 vs 3 dual teamer game. A lot of the stuff in there won't apply to a 7 player free for all game. For example, I don't think anyone is going to ignore teching completely and mass endless cavalry. Like scooter said, that works when you have one team to defeat, but it will be a losing strategy here.

Similarly, the valuing of traits and civilizations has to be measured with those settings in mind too. When Shizanu writes that Imperialistic is the best trait, it's under the assumption of one of the three teammates taking Imperialistic and then gifting settlers to the other two players. I'm not convinced that the same logic holds when outside of a teamer game. (Of course, I could always be wrong here!)

It's also very important to keep in mind that the Shizanu article is written under the assumption of Quick speed, not Normal. A lot of the worker dynamics change with the faster game speed, such as roads only taking 1t on Quick speed when in Serfdom civic. And that sample game with pictures is not really replicable, as you're not going to get Justinian (Spi/Imp) of India (Fast Workers), which is basically the best combination possible! Our map here doesn't seem to have that many forests, which means that chopping won't be as important of a factor. That said, the article does make some excellent points, especially about the importance of naval power. Everyone can build galleons from the start on this map, and boating attacks are very viable. Defending could be very tough indeed. (Also, anyone who reaches Combustion first will be essentially invulnerable at sea. Another major issue to consider.)

Going back to your specific questions, first dotmapping:



I would drop the capital immediately on the starting tile. It grabs two very strong resources (pigs and gold), and two more useful resources (crabs and incense). The obvious suggested move would be a tile south to found on the plains hill, but that trades a grassland tile and the incense resource for three water tiles, which doesn't feel all that useful. More importantly, it moves the city off of the river, which is a big deal since levees are only one tech away and they are very powerful indeed. Unlike an Ancient start, where that would be pointless, the +1 production from the plains hill tile will get outpaced by the +5 production per turn from a levee. (And of course it also avoids wasting the first turn of the game by moving; if we don't have a Spiritual leader, this doesn't matter of course.) It's a close call but I like the starting spot a little more, especially if we can get a Spiritual leader.

Yellow dot with all the good first ring tiles in play looks like the best spot for a second city based on what we can see right now. (This would also be a nice spot to land the Holy City, and get those borders pushed out in all directions.) I don't know about where to put the third city; probably need more information from the explorers to see if they turn anything up. The corn/iron spot would be my tentative suggestion right now, since it does serve as a canal city and would make for a very good Moai spot. But there are likely better spots out there (anything with more land tiles and similar resources would be preferable).

I excluded the plains sheep and the plains deer from this dotmap, as both of them are weak resources with only 3 food. I wouldn't worry about the dyes that much either; we will have +2 happiness from the gold, and +1 happiness from incense, and +1 happiness from religion, and probably +3 happiness in our early cities from Representation. That gets cities up to around 10 or 11 happy faces by my count. We won't be hitting the happiness cap for quite some time, so we don't need to bend our dotmap around getting the dyes in the first three cities.

Other issues:

Do you agree that the value of State Property outweighs the chance to found a corp? Sounds like yes, just curious.

My gut feeling is yes, although I don't have any firsthand experience to back that up. The corporations are at their most powerful in Single Player games where you can convince the AI to trade you every corporate resource on the map. They're relatively balanced when you only have 10 sushi resources as opposed to 35 or whatever. State Property is also a lot easier to set up than the corporations, with the building of the executives and moving them around from city to city.

I also have to mention my experience in Pitboss 6, the Medieval teamer game where we ended up losing to the Cultural victory. What ended up being overlooked somewhat in that game was just how well oledavy's team had done economically. Speaker and I went for Assembly Line and factories, while they went for State Property and mass workshops. It turned out that they had made the correct call, and we had made the wrong choice. They would have beaten us with their superior production base in the end, if we both hadn't lost to Lewwyn's cultural play. That's one of the lessons I learned from that game, and it's very valid here. There really isn't anything in Civ4 that can compete with the ability to turn every grassland tile into a 2/4 yield.

I still like Gandhi best, but you're right that so may a lot of people. I've been going back and forth on whether or not to try to outguess people. Picking not-Gandhi may give me a very high chance of getting exactly what I want, but man it's hard to pass up Gandhi here.

Gandhi feels like a very RB pick to me, for whatever that's worth. I'm never sure how much to metagame these things either. For the record, I also think it's an excellent pick, but as I said, more so because getting a free baray in every city feels incredibly good. Unfortunately, I feel like there's a good chance three or four other teams will be thinking the same thing. So... this is where it's nice that I don't have to make the tough calls for a change.

I would be interested to hear how your comparison game with Monty or Brennus goes. I honestly think that the Great Person route is a bit of a trap for this setup. I might be proven badly wrong on that, of course...

Building a Commando factory is not something I had really thought about yet, but you bringing up Commandos got me thinking. I've never actually built a Commando factory before, and this sure would be a fun time to try. Assuming I picked aggressive, to do that I'd need 17xp on new units. If my mental math is correct, Barracks, Vassalage, Theocracy, West Point, Pentagon, and 2 settled GG would do the trick (or 3 if I whiff on Pentagon). It's something to consider. I'd need Monty to pull it off to freely swap in and then back out of Vassalage/Theocracy, but it's awfully tempting. Combine them with Panzers and that's GG for some poor neighbor.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I was thinking for lategame stuff. Of course, it's important that you pick someone who isn't going to fall behind economically or all this is pie in the sky dreaming. I just don't think Aggressive actually falls behind by that much in these settings, nowhere near as much in a normal game, and then it opens up a lot of interesting stuff that wouldn't otherwise be available. I'll reiterate my point that Aggressive also provides half cost drydocks, which are sitting right there at Steel tech and should be another very important building in this game.

What are your thoughts on first tech to research? My initial gut reaction is Steam Power for the levees and the worker speed bonus (allows for incredibly fast tile improvements when combined with Serfdom; see chart in previous post), but that's not on the Communism or Steel/Railroad lines. I don't suggest Steel first, because I don't think it does all that much on its own, and Steam Power is a requirement for railroad anyway. Communism beeline is very viable, but that does require going through Scientific Method first, which is an utterly useless tech, and so we won't see any benefit until we've sunk about 4500 beakers into techs. Remember, Great Scientists only produce 1500 beakers and Great Artists 1000 beakers; they won't knock that much out of that path.

What about Steam Power first, then a Great Scientist lightbulb into Scientific Method to race to Communism second (?) I'm curious on your thoughts here. We won't be getting the first-to benefits unless we take a Philosophical leader, keep in mind. I would personally probably give those up and simply go hard growth curve with Spiritual + early Serfdom/Steam Power super workers.

[Ichabod]

About aggressive and commandos, the best unit you could get commando with 17xp and aggressive is the Marine, right? Because it's only free C1 for melee and gunpowder units. CHA would give commando tanks and cavalry more easily. Or am I making a mistake somewhere...

[scooter]

About aggressive and commandos, the best unit you could get commando with 17xp and aggressive is the Marine, right? Because it's only free C1 for melee and gunpowder units. CHA would give commando tanks and cavalry more easily. Or am I making a mistake somewhere...

You're half-right. The second-best aggressive commando is the marine, but if it gets that far - Mechanized Infantry are gunpowder units, so they're fair game. There's a decent chance someone will have the game well in hand by that point, but if it's not us... They could be quite the space race equalizer if commando and produced en masse. That said, even commando Marines are pretty solid because by that point, most people will have railroads. 1 movement point is enough to do the trick at that point if the opponent isn't very careful as to where they place railroads.

CHM would definitely allow commando tanks which is even more powerful, however it would require getting 20xp as opposed to 17xp, and it will take a lot longer to acquire the extra 2 GG to get there. So I think Aggressive is slightly better here, especially since in Montezuma's case, the non-commando Panzer is still pretty brutally tough.

I would drop the capital immediately on the starting tile. It grabs two very strong resources (pigs and gold), and two more useful resources (crabs and incense). The obvious suggested move would be a tile south to found on the plains hill, but that trades a grassland tile and the incense resource for three water tiles, which doesn't feel all that useful. More importantly, it moves the city off of the river, which is a big deal since levees are only one tech away and they are very powerful indeed. Unlike an Ancient start, where that would be pointless, the +1 production from the plains hill tile will get outpaced by the +5 production per turn from a levee. (And of course it also avoids wasting the first turn of the game by moving; if we don't have a Spiritual leader, this doesn't matter of course.) It's a close call but I like the starting spot a little more, especially if we can get a Spiritual leader.

Yellow dot with all the good first ring tiles in play looks like the best spot for a second city based on what we can see right now. (This would also be a nice spot to land the Holy City, and get those borders pushed out in all directions.) I don't know about where to put the third city; probably need more information from the explorers to see if they turn anything up. The corn/iron spot would be my tentative suggestion right now, since it does serve as a canal city and would make for a very good Moai spot. But there are likely better spots out there (anything with more land tiles and similar resources would be preferable).

Nice to hear you agree with the two spots I was tentatively thinking. Good point about the plains deer and dyes - I think it's probably better to claim more land than worry about that. I've got some good news and bad news.

Bad news: Moai is not buildable on Industrial start. Civilopedia says Ancient only (that seems crazy - surely Classical or even Medieval ought to be able to build it) for Moai. So iron + dry corn + tons of coast looks pretty bad. Can always just fort the desert hill to get the canal. That's a little tedious, but it's better than settling a bad spot.

While we're at it - National Epic and Heroic Epic are both also not buildable, which really surprised me. The cutoff there is Ren start. Apostolic Palace is buildable which surprised me. Not sure that matters too much for our purposes, but it may surprise some folks who didn't do a test run.

Good news: The levee actually impact 7 tiles and not 5. When I first counted I saw 5 too, but I realized after you pointed it out that the floodplains and grassland are both eligible for the boost too. So to me that confirms SIP as the capital. I think if we improve pigs/crabs and maybe farm the floodplains to push the city vertical, and we can workshop literally everything else. That + Bureau should allow us to get settlers out at a reasonable pace after not too long.

Yellow dot can flex a little if necessary when an Explorer gets up there to take a look. There does look like there's the end of a river between the Wheat and Iron tiles. If it's especially nice up there, 3rd city can even go up there.

I would be interested to hear how your comparison game with Monty or Brennus goes. I honestly think that the Great Person route is a bit of a trap for this setup. I might be proven badly wrong on that, of course...

I tried Monty, and it definitely feels zippier getting to use Serfdom constantly. I did the test on a randomly generated map and played it casually so it was hardly scientific, but I haven't had the chance yet to make a sandbox. I will in the next few hours. There's no question Spi will help growth and expansion a lot more. I'm pretty much sold on Monty or Brennus to be honest. Monty especially - I think drydocks will be a crucial early building. I've got a soft spot for Vikings, but I've literally never built a Panzer before in my life, so I'd really like to try that. I'm pretty confident we won't get Gandhi if we don't rank him first, and even then we risk losing out of Monty/Brennus if we lose the dice roll.

What are your thoughts on first tech to research? My initial gut reaction is Steam Power for the levees and the worker speed bonus (allows for incredibly fast tile improvements when combined with Serfdom; see chart in previous post), but that's not on the Communism or Steel/Railroad lines. I don't suggest Steel first, because I don't think it does all that much on its own, and Steam Power is a requirement for railroad anyway. Communism beeline is very viable, but that does require going through Scientific Method first, which is an utterly useless tech, and so we won't see any benefit until we've sunk about 4500 beakers into techs. Remember, Great Scientists only produce 1500 beakers and Great Artists 1000 beakers; they won't knock that much out of that path.

What about Steam Power first, then a Great Scientist lightbulb into Scientific Method to race to Communism second (?) I'm curious on your thoughts here. We won't be getting the first-to benefits unless we take a Philosophical leader, keep in mind. I would personally probably give those up and simply go hard growth curve with Spiritual + early Serfdom/Steam Power super workers.

I don't think we'll win the Communism race if we don't go Scientific Method first, but I also don't think we'd be a lock to win it with Spiritual anyway because Philosophical will have a much easier time at bulbing their way to Communism. With that in mind - we still really want Communism, but making our workers more effective seems better if we aren't getting a free spy for our troubles. It's basically a question of X hammers from extra turns of better workers vs Y foodhammers from extra turns of State Property. My rough guess is that X > Y due to how much more quickly we can get Steam Power. No data to back that up though.

One thing I noticed is that partial-bulbing Steam Power is an option. So we'll start in Mercantilism, and the only specialists available T0 is an Engineer or a Merchant. A trade mission sounds nice and all, but there's no way we could count on safely doing that early on, so the engineer is far more desirable as the first great person. I think someone will use that on Taj before we even get the engineer, but a better option may be to use it to finish Steam Power to get extra-early access to super-workers. I don't know off the top of my head how many beakers an engineer bulb produces, but it seems better than shelving an engineer for 30-40T waiting for a wonder for it to be ready for isn't that great either. (Or harming our growth curve to hurry a Library in to adjust the GPP pool.) A scientist second is almost certainly ideal to speed SciMeth along, but it will be pretty difficult to guarantee it.

That's a very long winded way of saying that SP-SciMeth-Communism does seem best unless we end up with a PHI civ, in which case I'd want to race to Communism and count on the spy golden age to make up for the late Steam Power.

Another very long post. I'm going to take a stab at a Top-7 list next.

[scooter]

Brick - not my final list. I'll bold it when it's final.

1) Montezuma of Germany
2) Brennus of Vikings
3) Peter of India
4) Genghis of America
5) Julius of Japan
6) Asoka of Aztecs
7) Frederick of HRE

I'm probably going to leave Gandhi off purely on a bet that at least 1 other players will rank him first. If I'm confident someone will definitely rank him 1st, I need to either rank him 1st or not at all so that I don't lose out on another choice. My understanding is that if the following happens:

My list:
1) Monty
2) Gandhi
3) Brennus

Opponent 1 list:
1) Monty
2) Brennus
3) <whatever>

And someone else takes Gandhi first... I believe in that case I would be relegated to my 4th pick. Brick can hopefully confirm if that's indeed how it works. So that's the rationale for leaving him off.