Commodore Wrote:Clearly, the HRE is your only real option.
Worth considering.

I would say it provides about 4 courthouses worth of benefit at around t65, according to my ORG evaluation. That is about 300h to be timeshifted, or 53b at the start.
But the drawbacks. Immediately you are down 27b just from tech costs, and also the two techs you start with are both useless for a while (another -18 IMO - having two useless techs is more than twice as bad as just having one).
So net value is +8b. It's competitive with India and France.