[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

So I logged in to look around a little more, and I was greeted by a welcome sight.



Yes please! I've been logging in after Dreylin a couple times since we've met in case he decided to offer, and here it is. Picture dump time! I turned off the interface to make it easier to see.





Looks like Dreylin gets gems as opposed to our incense. I'd definitely prefer that given the free forge, but whatever. BRICK. We may be able to avoid post-draft unhappiness in Cotton with a resource trade.

Looks like he went for a pretty different dotmap. His cities are better, but they're spread far wider. I'm mainly surprised by all the roads so quickly. I'm hoping he'll lag behind in tile improvement as a result. I'm not sure he had much of a choice - by settling the way he did, very few resources were first-ring, so he had to sit and wait for borders to pop. It is pretty impressive that he's already spread his religion, unless he got a free spread via roads. Overall, I definitely prefer our opening, but I guess we'll get to find out in time.



Another Brick-gripe: man Dreylin's corn-iron-sheep-horse region is a lot more settle-able than ours. Wish we had the wider land strip like that since water tiles are pretty bad with no Moai available. I'm sure there's map things that favor us, but what's the fun in finding and pointing those out . This looks like the spot where Donovan settled. I guess we can expect a copper in the fog up by this lake.

That's Gaspar and Noble over here to the east. They're effectively our southeastern-ish neighbors it looks like. They're obviously a good team, but I still think they came away with the worst leader/civ out of the 7 that were chosen. Considering they had to win a coin flip to get theirs and we didn't, maybe I'm just wrong on that. But I think their opening will be painfully slow. I don't know that we'll have lots of early contact with them, though. Donovan and Dreylin are closer, and whoever is across our version of this landstrip from us will be closer to us too. Basically, I don't think we'll share a border with them anytime soon.



The most important revelation for last. So our capital is definitely on a shared ocean with somebody, although not somebody's capital. So that takes our desire for a Galleon or something up a few notches. We definitely want to figure out how good this island is, because there's this one, and there's the equivalent northeast of our capital. We definitely want a foothold on these for defensive purposes. A neighbor gobbling them all up and being able to threaten our core just can't happen. Obviously we still have to balance that with all the other land up for grabs. Just something we'll have to think about going forward.

Anyway, value of navy just incremented a little bit. Same for the value of a fort on the desert hill next to the gold. Interesting stuff for sure.

Obligatory pokes at Brick aside, this is a really interesting map layout. I'm a fan.

[scooter]

Turn 258

Didn't expect the turn to roll right after I logged in, but it did. So I went ahead and played. I chose not to end turn just in case the maps changed any of our builds for this turn. I'm sure we're fine, but I figured the flexibility can't hurt. (I'll end turn tomorrow night unless you do it sooner.)



Well without Open Borders, we now know this scout will hit a dead end pretty soon. I think it's still worthwhile to try to get a look at Donovan's city here. We'll have to do it carefully though to avoid exposing ourselves to a Rifle shot if Donovan's feeling particularly grouchy.



Seems like our best bet here is to head west now and figure out who is Dreylin's geographic equivalent of Donovan. It's either that or request OB from Donovan and trek over to Gaspar, but I'd rather keep uncovering tiles and let Dreylin uncover the area around Gaspar. Since he's already shown willingness to trade maps, we may hit him back up in 8-10T or so to see if he's gotten ahold of Gaspar's maps, and maybe we'll have his other neighbor's maps as return value. At some point though we may not want to swap with him that much, because ideally we'll check out the island between us before he will. That's far more likely to be a conflict zone with Dreylin than anything on land.



Burned a turn of scouting to make sure there was no seafood down here. I didn't think they'd be placed here because it'd be pretty awkward, but I think it was worth checking.



The tile shuffle resulted in a timely 10F surplus to get us straight to sz4. The pigs will go back to Steam Engine next turn so that it can go straight to sz5.



We've got 4 foods hooked already (5 if you count farmed floodplains) with another coming next turn. Scroll up and compare that to Dreylin who's got just 1 food hooked (crabs). Advantage to us I think.



Demos are a byproduct of being tops in population - we whipped less than most people, so we've grown more. We were dead last in GNP at end of last turn, and finishing the plantation jumped us up quite a bit.

-------

As I said, turn is un-ended currently. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the maps we received.

[Sullla]

That map information was very helpful in understanding how the terrain is laid out. I'm glad that Dreylin agreed to do the exchange with us. As you said, we can more or less predict what the whole map looks like now. It's a great setup, thanks Brick. The only minor nitpick is that gems resource at Dreylin's start. It's simply better in every way than incense: same food value, same commerce, +1 production, and effectively +1 happiness since all cities start with forges. But that truly is a minor issue, and I'm very happy with this setup.



Based on the Land Area number on the Demographics screen, it looks like most of the other teams did something similar to Dreylin and settled for more land / less water than we did. Or at least with less tile overlap that our cities. We end up with the same capital, virtually the same second city, but Dreylin's third city is clearly a lot stronger than ours in the long run. But the tradeoff is that his cities are much slower to get developed, especially because all of his food bonuses are in the second ring. Dreylin has been stuck building roads in these early turns because he was waiting for his borders to pop - not good. As scooter pointed out, Dreylin has one food bonus connected: the crabs resource. We have the crabs, the pigs, the deer, the wheat, and a farm on the floodplains tile, which is virtually a food bonus in its own right. As a result, we're well ahead in population, especially at the capital where we're size 4 compared to Dreylin's size 2. And I'll bet we probably have more workers running around too, since we complete our eighth at end of turn.

For me, the clincher on settling was the presence of that pigs tile in the second ring of the capital. You just can't ignore a 6 food tile and wait 5 turns for borders to pop to the second ring. (If only we could have used the Build Culture bug, heh. Would have completely changed our city placement.) We had to place Cotton Gin in such a way to get it in range immediately, and all our development plans proceeded from there. I'm very happy with how it turned out - I've tended to have very good results when the first couple cities are close together and can trade tiles back and forth. We've been trading the pigs and the floodplains back and forth quite a lot already, and we'll keep doing so.



Here's a zoomed out view of the island between us and Dreylin (and Noble/Gaspar). Incidentally, the mirroring of the map means that there's another similar landmass just to the northeast of our capital. We can see one tile of it (a grassland hill) if you look at some of our other screenshots. I agree that this pushes up the need for a naval unit pretty significantly. Scooter, what if we substitute a galleon in place of the library after this worker chop completes in the capital? They cost about the same, with the galleon being slightly cheaper. I think the galleon is the naval unit that we want, as we'd like to be able to ferry an explorer over to each of these islands in the near future. The only other place we could build a naval unit would be in Cotton Gin, and it has to do its library first, plus it's our lowest production city by far. So I think it has to be the capital, and if we're going to get a ship any time soon, it would need to be right after this worker completes, before we start settler production.

We're also only missing a trade connection to Dreylin by a single tile, the fogged tile that I boxed in white. It's too bad that he didn't uncover that one. However, if Dreylin roads the sheep and the wheat tiles west of Llamas, that will also give us a connection down that river. It would be nice to have 2 commerce foreign trade routes, although not critical.

By the way, I don't agree that it will take a long time to meet Noble/Gaspar. Our explorer in the southeast is going to run into them in about 5 turns. Add in whoever we're going to find to the west of Dreylin, plus whoever is across the water to our northeast, and that's 5 of the other 6 teams met. I'm also kind of glad that the isthmus between Noble and Dreylin is stronger than the isthmus near our capital, as it will likely encourage Noble to push expansion in that direction first. If we could get some kind of unattractive border zone between us, that would help out for sure.

I don't think Dreylin has played an especially good opening thus far, and I'm confused by what he's doing in terms of research. He's still saving gold, now up to about 170 gold at +30 gold/turn. He's also in Universal Suffrage, so it's clear he intends to spend that money. (I wonder why he doesn't run Representation while saving money and then go to UniSuff to spend it? Dreylin is Spiritual.) What exactly is he going to do with that money? Rush-buying isn't all that effective without the Kremlin in place. He's already well past what it costs to purchase a worker (108 gold) and settlers cost, umm, 1300 gold each. I can't imagine that running non-Representation specialists is doing much for his research. What's his plan?! In any case, having what looks to be a weaker neighbor nearby can only be a good thing for us.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts about the galleon vs. library build in the capital starting next turn. I can update the micro plan if we decide to change our mind on that. I've also left the turn unended for the moment.

[scooter]

Lots to discuss, so here's some scattered replies. I think we're on the same page for a settler build, and yeah there's definitely room for improving the settler date by a turn or two.

* After more thought, I still think the drafting thing with Nationhood lines up too well not to do it. Doubling the size of our military is too good to pass up, and it will let us settle more aggressively at a time when most teams will have little to no military. The build timings also line up really well, with the capital just growing and Cotton Gin sitting around working specialists, plus we're drafting off of unimproved tiles anyway. I think it's very worthwhile even at the loss of 5 turns of Bureaucracy commerce.

Yeah, I agree. There's just too much obvious value here.

We're also only missing a trade connection to Dreylin by a single tile, the fogged tile that I boxed in white. It's too bad that he didn't uncover that one. However, if Dreylin roads the sheep and the wheat tiles west of Llamas, that will also give us a connection down that river. It would be nice to have 2 commerce foreign trade routes, although not critical.

Hah, I didn't catch that white tile. That said... the good news is that since we're in Merc and will likely stay there for awhile, this actually doesn't matter . That said, it would be nice to have the route so that we could get a gems/incense trade in the next 10T or so.

By the way, I don't agree that it will take a long time to meet Noble/Gaspar. Our explorer in the southeast is going to run into them in about 5 turns.

I was probably unclear - I meant that we likely won't share cultural borders anytime soon - they're a less immediate neighbor to us than a couple other people. I think we'll share borders with Donovan first because it's valuable contestable land. Whoever is to our east will likely settle towards us for the same reason. Taking Dreylin for example - I don't think he'll share borders with Donovan very soon because we'll likely nab the land between the two of them first because we care about it more. Same rationale as NoGas is to us as Dreylin is to Donovan.

(It's moments like these where I can briefly understand Commodore's famed love of cylindrical maps. Keeping everyone straight is a little nutty sometimes.)

Scooter, what if we substitute a galleon in place of the library after this worker chop completes in the capital? They cost about the same, with the galleon being slightly cheaper. I think the galleon is the naval unit that we want, as we'd like to be able to ferry an explorer over to each of these islands in the near future. The only other place we could build a naval unit would be in Cotton Gin, and it has to do its library first, plus it's our lowest production city by far. So I think it has to be the capital, and if we're going to get a ship any time soon, it would need to be right after this worker completes, before we start settler production.

Finally, the most important part. Yeah, I had the same thought about squeezing in a Galleon. Basically, we'd be trading some beakers (plus probably 1-2T worth of levee hammers and tile improvements down the road with very slightly delayed Steam Power) for map knowledge. I think that's a trade worth making. When settler production starts, it's going to happen fast and furious. When that happens, we need to know exactly how important/valuable the islands are. Cotton Gin will take an eternity to build anything of consequence, so Steam Engine is definitely going to have to build any navy we want for the forseeable future.

Here's a different question. Which island do we care about more? Are we more interested in getting the island south of us bordering Dreylin, or are we more interested in the island northeast of us bordering an unknown neighbor (Pindicator, Boldly, ReallyEvilMuffin). We'll probably scout that northeast island first because it won't require a fort to get our Galleon there, but I'm thinking further down the road when it's time to actually settle one of them.

[Sullla]

OK, yeah, Mercantilism. That wasn't my smartest post there.

The northeast island is more critical because it allows someone to boat our capital. We need advanced warning/defenses in the body of water to our northeast more so than the body of water to our south. Of course, depending on the actual lay of the land, the calculations could be flipped if we would find really sweet terrain on the southern island instead. My tentative guess is that we want that amazing red dot spot to the north for our first city, and we probably start heading for the islands after that. All highly dependent on our neighbors, of course.

I'm going to try and tweak our micro plan tonight to work off of the assumption of a galleon build in the capital and see how that affects things. We might be able to get into Nationhood a turn sooner, which would be good since it lets us get out of it a turn sooner, when the capital is a larger size and working more tiles. I'll see what I can figure out.

[Sullla]

OK, I worked on this setup for a little while this afternoon. Try this micro plan, listed as Third Plan on the Google Docs spreadsheet. The short version of this setup is that we revolt into Nationhood a turn sooner, revolt out of it a turn sooner, and grow the capital to size 10 a turn sooner. First settler now done eot 274 with chop, can settle the red dot location on Turn 276 with a little roading. I also love some of the timings that we hit with this plan, I'll explain the details in a minute. The tradeoff is that we're losing out on a fair amount of commerce to do this, dropping the gold tile at the capital for quite some time, and also dropping the incense tile for a few turns as well. The assumption is that foodhammers and fast expansion are more valuable that commerce in the early stages of this game.

OK, now the details:

* I went with a Galleon following the current worker build in the capital, as we were discussing earlier today. The galleon finishes a turn sooner than the worker, eot 260. That opens up a revolt into Nationhood civic (and Pacifism) on Turn 261.

* Once we're in Nationhood civic, the operating principle is growing the capital as fast as possible. We're running at +11 food a lot of those intervening turns, and +12 food (!) for some of them. Of course, the capital isn't doing a whole lot else during these turns, as there has to be some tradeoffs, and the result is we're not getting much production or working our two high commerce/low food resources (gold and incense). In addition, we also have to have enough food available to grow Cotton Gin to size 6 (twice!) so that it can draft out two rifles in the 5 turns that Nationhood civic is available. This is some of the most entertaining worker and city micro that I've done in a long time, and I was microing every single food to hit the numbers we needed. I'm quite proud of the result here, we had just barely enough worker labor to pull it all off, including throwing down a couple of farms at timely moment, and connecting the incense on the exact turn that Cotton Gin needed it to avoid becoming unhappy. We also draft Cotton Gin on the same turn that we flip back to Bureaucracy (make sure to draft BEFORE doing the civics swap!)

* Seriously though, Serfdom workers are godly. We're saving a ridiculous amount of worker turns while putting these tile improvements down. In particular, knocking watermills down from 7t each to 5t each is amazing, since we're building a lot of watermills. All of those saved turns add up in a hurry.

* The general plan for science is to save up gold while we're not in Bureaucracy civic, and then start spending our accumulated treasury when we flip back into the civic (which also coincides with us working the gold/incense tiles again). I have us running a single turn of 90% science on Turn 260 for our last Bureaucracy turn, then 5 turns of 0% science to build up 170g while in Nationhood, then back to 100% best rate after returning to the Big B civic. In other words, it's essentially the same thing as saving up before finishing a library or Academy, just doing it with Bureaucracy civic swaps instead. Does that make sense?

* Here are my favorite timings in the plan:

Turn 260: We finish the Galleon in the capital at 64/64 and the second missionary out of Telegraph, then flip out of Bureaucracy and Organized Religion the next turn.

Turn 262: Five workers combine to create a 1 turn watermill on a tile that can be shared by the capital and Cotton Gin.

Turn 264: Cotton Gin works a bizarre tile configuration to finish the Library at 72/72 production, allowing us to start working a Scientist specialist a turn sooner. We then have exactly enough food to grow to size 6 the next turn, and can draft on Turn 266 before pulling the civics swap back to Bureaucracy.

Turn 265: Three workers throw down a farm SE of the capital, which we need to hit the growth targets. That was a late addition to the plan, and thank goodness for Serfdom civic for making it all possible.

Turn 266: Incense connected just in time to keep Cotton Gin from going unhappy from the second draft.

Steam Engine: The capital grows at end of turn 261, 262, 264, 265, and 266. That's size 5 to size 10 in six turns! OK, the food costs are cheaper here (80% of the normal rate), but still pretty cool, right?

Here's what it looks like in the sandbox:



The yellow tiles can be shared between the capital and Cotton Gin, so I prioritized improving them first. It's a bit tricky to see, but we have 5 completed watermills in this screenshot. The next area to improve will be the little river shared between Telegraph and Cotton Gin; I was positioning workers to head in that direction at the end of this micro plan. The ability to share tiles has helped a lot.



The capital after finishing growth to size 10 and starting on our first settler. It says 9 turns, but it will actually complete in 7 turns once our workers finish doing their thing. We're a single turn of worker labor away from finishing a workshop on the grassland tile 2 west of the incense, so that finishes T268, and there's a worker about to road the plains hill tile by the river, so that will finish T269. Add in the forest chop on the tundra, and we'll have that settler done in 7 turns (maybe 6? Can't remember the exact math).

We also finish our Great Engineer at eot 268 from the capital. That knocks out about half the remaining cost of Steam Power tech; I think it finishes in the late 270s. We can always fiddle with Build Research or Build Wealth there when we get closer to the finishing date. Second Great Person, which will be roughly 80% Scientist and 20% Engineer, will pop out shortly thereafter from Cotton Gin, which we'll probably use to accelerate us towards Scientific Method. (Third Great Person for a Golden Age, perhaps?)

Overall, I'm very pleased with how this turned out, and I think it highlights the power of Spiritual civic for these late era starts. Still, I do wonder if maybe I'm being too clever here. Is it really a smart idea to ignore the gold tile for five or six turns to grow faster? Shouldn't you just work the best tiles available, you dummy? I dunno. I feel like the recent Realms Beyond games that I've been reading on the forums have heavily stressed expansion over sitting in place and teching, with a lot of successful games where people have a dozen cities at Turn 100, limping along at 10% research, and then recover their economy from there after a successful landgrab. With each city getting so many free buildings, isn't it better to pump out the settlers and not worry so much about GNP for the first few dozen turns? That's my read on things, but I'd love to hear your thoughts scooter.

[scooter]

Wow, that's some really great stuff . I knew you'd be able to refine my rough plan, but that looks better than I expected! I went ahead and ended turn. Dreylin revolted to Serfdom + Pacifism (he converted both cities already), so he's definitely aiming for a quick great person. I bet he's eyeing Taj. That explains lagging in tile improvements a little. He did improve two more foods this turn if the tooltips are accurate, so he is catching up slowly.

Anyway, on to your comments.

* The general plan for science is to save up gold while we're not in Bureaucracy civic, and then start spending our accumulated treasury when we flip back into the civic (which also coincides with us working the gold/incense tiles again). I have us running a single turn of 90% science on Turn 260 for our last Bureaucracy turn, then 5 turns of 0% science to build up 170g while in Nationhood, then back to 100% best rate after returning to the Big B civic. In other words, it's essentially the same thing as saving up before finishing a library or Academy, just doing it with Bureaucracy civic swaps instead. Does that make sense?

Did you test this to be certain? I haven't, but it sounds not quite right to me. If we have no science modifiers, it should be pretty much equal either way. Yeah you'd get more beakers out of Bureau, but you'd get less gold while saving in the pre-Bureau phase, so you'd turn down the slider sooner and it'd be a wash. The raw commerce count is the same either way. I think you'll find that later there wouldn't be much difference until the Library is built. Am I missing something? It IS Friday night and late-ish, so I wouldn't rule the possibility out.

* Here are my favorite timings in the plan:

Won't comment on all this, but it bears repeating - super impressive stuff here.

Still, I do wonder if maybe I'm being too clever here. Is it really a smart idea to ignore the gold tile for five or six turns to grow faster? Shouldn't you just work the best tiles available, you dummy? I dunno. I feel like the recent Realms Beyond games that I've been reading on the forums have heavily stressed expansion over sitting in place and teching, with a lot of successful games where people have a dozen cities at Turn 100, limping along at 10% research, and then recover their economy from there after a successful landgrab. With each city getting so many free buildings, isn't it better to pump out the settlers and not worry so much about GNP for the first few dozen turns? That's my read on things, but I'd love to hear your thoughts scooter.

I've been going back and forth about this. I'm not sure we can take away too many lessons from recent games because the circumstances are so different. I worry a little bit that we're slowing down Steam Power too much, for example. Steam Power does a lot - it either makes our workers uber, or it speeds them up enough to justify swapping into Caste and turbo-charging some workshops, for example. Not to mention a quicker levee which is worth a lot in the capital. That's a lot of future hammers we're giving up.

On the fip side, cities contribute far more quickly than normal at this level. Buildings are pre-built, and cities grow more quickly with discounted costs. Especially the city we're looking at which will probably be our second-best city with time. So sacrifices favoring expansion snowball harder than normal I would think.

So... I like the plan a lot, but finding anything possible to speed up Steam Power without sacrificing time on the settler build is my goal. I actually think building up a bigger gold bank prior to the Library will still come out ahead. I'll play it out over the weekend and find out for certain - I've got your Steam Power beaker numbers to compare, and I'll see how it comes out for me with building up more gold first, and I'll let you know what I find.

[scooter]

One last thing - how about building a Grendadier rather than a Rifle in Telegraph? We're going to draft 3 rifles, which means we'll have 5. If a barbarian city pops up near our red dot, it will definitely have Rifles in it. I think in that case we'd really wish we had 1 Gren too just to counter the Rifles. I just think we gain more flexibility from 1 Gren + 5 Rifles than 6 Rifles. As a bonus, it's also 8h cheaper.

[scooter]

TRIPLE POST. Just needed to confirm this or it would bother me.

* The general plan for science is to save up gold while we're not in Bureaucracy civic, and then start spending our accumulated treasury when we flip back into the civic (which also coincides with us working the gold/incense tiles again). I have us running a single turn of 90% science on Turn 260 for our last Bureaucracy turn, then 5 turns of 0% science to build up 170g while in Nationhood, then back to 100% best rate after returning to the Big B civic. In other words, it's essentially the same thing as saving up before finishing a library or Academy, just doing it with Bureaucracy civic swaps instead. Does that make sense?

Did you test this to be certain? I haven't, but it sounds not quite right to me. If we have no science modifiers, it should be pretty much equal either way. Yeah you'd get more beakers out of Bureau, but you'd get less gold while saving in the pre-Bureau phase, so you'd turn down the slider sooner and it'd be a wash. The raw commerce count is the same either way. I think you'll find that later there wouldn't be much difference until the Library is built. Am I missing something? It IS Friday night and late-ish, so I wouldn't rule the possibility out.

I went ahead and tested this. I did opposite of what you suggested and teched during Nationhood rather than saving (everything else was the same). I ran it to EoT266, and I ran 70% on my last turn so that my treasury balance would line up with yours.

Your totals: 520b, 159g in bank
My totals: 520b, 160g in bank

Basically a numerical rounding of difference. So that should confirm that we don't need to worry about toggling tech before/after the Nationhood stint. It's probably still worth trying to game our treasury for Libraries though.

[Sullla]

Thanks for the feedback, good discussion here. Trying to take these issues in order one at a time:

* Good to hear that it doesn't particularly matter when we run science and when we save up gold. I guess that makes sense since we have no beaker multipliers in place. If it doesn't end up mattering, then I'd suggest we do something similar to what I have in the sandbox, for purposes of sanity if nothing else.

* Grenadier does make sense rather than rifle in Telegraph. My thinking was that grenadiers are essentially useless on defense, and I didn't think we would be attacking anyone in the near future. However, you bring up an excellent point about barbarians being turned on for this game, and yes, having one grenadier on hand to deal with barb rifles would be very helpful. Since we can draft rifles and we can't draft grenadiers, that's likely the way to go. (Plus an Aggressive grenadier built in a city with a barracks can instantly take Pinch promotion, making it an even stronger rifle-killer.)

* So here's the bigger issue: research on Steam Power versus fast production of a settler. I looked into the possibility of getting a library into the capital somehow, and I don't see a realistic way of doing that. Not if we want that galleon build, and I think we do want that. Even if we slow down growth to size 10 by a turn, we still don't come close to finishing the library before starting on the settler. In order to finish the library first, we'd have to delay the settler by 2-3 turns, and I don't think that's a worthwhile tradeoff, not with the red dot location in the north being so strong, and us getting all those free buildings with each city, and with the red location bringing in more resources that increase the happiness cap.

Here's the good news: we can still get to Steam Power at a very decent rate through the magic of Build Research. For the lurkers who haven't seen what this looks like in a late era game before, here's our entire economic for this game down the road:



With workshops/watermills everywhere and production modifiers in place, Build Research produces a *LOT* of beakers. Add in State Property and Caste System and Electricity (watermill commerce) and factories and coal plants... well, you get the idea. Who needs cottages, eh?

But back to the current example. Scooter, I didn't make any attempt to do real worker micro, just used Build Research in Telegraph after the rifle/grenadier was done. I didn't do anything at all with Cotton Gin, only set that city to Build Research as well. It turns out that we have enough gold left over from my savings in Nationhood civic to reach Steam Power at eot 276, with the settler from the capital finishing eot 274. That works out decently as well, letting us finish the library while growing (which takes 2 turns) and then go right onto levee after that. If I remember correctly, I think we were looking at roughly Turn 276 anyway for a finishing time on Steam Power under the old plan. We simply get the settler done and grow faster under the current iteration.

Now there is a tradeoff here, which is that we're not building anything out of Telegraph or Cotton Gin by setting them to Build Research. However, we both consider Steam Power tech to be incredibly important, and likely worth this tradeoff. That levee in our capital will be simply amazing. So I think that's my answer: it's OK to delay a library in the capital and push growth -> settlers, by making up the difference with some research builds in the other cities.

What do you think? I may be guilty of falling too much in love with my own micro work here.