Rough payoff times and exchange rates

[AutomatedTeller]

what does rep have to do with it? I'd think it has a lot more to do with being expansive and/or philo. I'd kind of guess that having rep would make it fewer, rather than more, actually, as you'd get cities up later...

[luddite]

Between 4 and 15.

what does rep have to do with it? I'd think it has a lot more to do with being expansive and/or philo. I'd kind of guess that having rep would make it fewer, rather than more, actually, as you'd get cities up later...

I'm trying to come up with a theoretical model for what a pure specialist economy looks like during the first 100 turns of the game. I was just assuming no one would be silly enough to run pure scientists without using rep. But yeah, in theory you'd get the same number of scientists that way.

[NobleHelium]

Specialists are at least competitive with non-financial cottages without Representation. Hasn't experience and some of the numbers in this thread shown that?

[luddite]

Has anyone ever run pure specialists (and no cottages) without rep?
I do agree they could be roughly competitive with pure non financial cottages and no specs, but both are pretty miserable.

[pindicator]

Between 4 and 15.

I feel like Krill is copying a page from my pb7 math

[SevenSpirits]

Random research question- how many great people do you think a full-on specialist economy with representation would get by turn 100? Does 13 sound reasonable (with 3 of them going to golden ages)?

I don't think you'd start 2 golden ages before t100 to be honest. Some data:

in pbem23, Novice and I ran a pretty pure rep specialist (both scientist and merchant) economy and had produced 10 gps at t100. We were SPI and ran Caste and Pacifism quite a lot, and had one golden age t73.

In pbem29, Novice and I ran a combination rep scientist and colossus coast economy and had produced 9 gps at t100. We were PHI and only ran Caste and Pacifism during our golden age, which we started on t88.

In both cases we started a second golden age several turns later (in 23 with Taj and in 29 - by necessity due to lack of spiritual - with 2 gps), at the end of which I think we'd produced another 4 (or would have produced, in the case of 29). So based on that you're either off by 3 GPs or 12 turns. ish.

[NobleHelium]

Has anyone ever run pure specialists (and no cottages) without rep?
I do agree they could be roughly competitive with pure non financial cottages and no specs, but both are pretty miserable.

Nobody ever runs no cottages. But running 1-2 cities worth of cottages and rest specialists counts as an SE if you ask me. mackoti did precisely this in both 23 and 29. (I have no idea why you guys thought he had a substantial number of cottages in 29. Slightly more than N7, sure, but nothing remotely close to a real CE.)

[SevenSpirits]

Nobody ever runs no cottages. But running 1-2 cities worth of cottages and rest specialists counts as an SE if you ask me. mackoti did precisely this in both 23 and 29. (I have no idea why you guys thought he had a substantial number of cottages in 29. Slightly more than N7, sure, but nothing remotely close to a real CE.)

Not cottaging everything doesn't make it a specialist economy. By t100 I think he produced 4 gps. That's as much as you'd want with a cottage economy to be honest. But he built fewer cottages and more mines/farms because he already had extra economy from GLH, and worked quite a bit of coast because the land was pretty dry.

His economy was Bureau + GLH for the most part and this let him focus heavily on hammers elsewhere.

[luddite]

I don't think you'd start 2 golden ages before t100 to be honest. Some data:

in pbem23, Novice and I ran a pretty pure rep specialist (both scientist and merchant) economy and had produced 10 gps at t100. We were SPI and ran Caste and Pacifism quite a lot, and had one golden age t73.

In pbem29, Novice and I ran a combination rep scientist and colossus coast economy and had produced 9 gps at t100. We were PHI and only ran Caste and Pacifism during our golden age, which we started on t88.

In both cases we started a second golden age several turns later (in 23 with Taj and in 29 - by necessity due to lack of spiritual - with 2 gps), at the end of which I think we'd produced another 4 (or would have produced, in the case of 29). So based on that you're either off by 3 GPs or 12 turns. ish.

Thanks, that helps a lot.

This is how my model looks at the moment, with 10 bulbs for the specialist economy. The blue, green, and brown represent a pure CE, with all research coming from cottages- the blue is the ideal scenario of financial and all riverside cottages. I didn't include bureaucracy, golden age, printing press, or any building bonuses, though.

Basically the number of cottages grows steadily, with the rate increasing quickly at first (starting from turn 30) and then slowing down, tailing off with about 80 cottages at turn 100. Those cottages develop as they would normally, taking 45 turns to become a town. I subtracted 1 beaker per cottage as maintenance.

For the SE, I set the number of scientists equal to 1/3 the number of cottages that the CE would have. For simplicity, I gave them all a x2 GPP multiplier, hoping that the turns without any multiplier would roughly equal out the number of turns with a x3 or x4 multiplier. I put all the GPP together instead of trying to break it apart by city, so that's probably why it overestimates the number of scientists produced (on the other hand, 1/3 the cottages probably underestimated how many scientists you could get). Then I assumed each great scientist would be used for an 800 beaker bulb.

The results look weird, but they do get you some of the behavior you might expect. Rep Scientists are significantly ahead of non-rep scientists, but most of their value is from the bulbs. Financial river cottages are way ahead of non-financial non-river, with river non-financial roughly in the middle.


I think I can make them look a lot more realistic by making a couple of reasonable guesses. First, I assumed that a financial cottage economy would start off looking mostly like a financial non-river cottage economy, but then would grow like a river-fin CE after adopting bureaucracy, so I switched it at turn 60. That should also (very roughly) account for golden ages. Then, I guessed that the rep specialist economy would have to delay a lot of its bulbs for the right techs to become available, so I moved back most of the bulbs. I also included NS7's research line from pbem23 for comparison.



The results are... reasonable? I think? At any rate, it agrees with my instinctive guess that a financial cottage economy would lag a bit behind the rep specialist economy from about 50-90, and then catch up and surpass it. But using some combination of cottages and specialists is going to be better.

Oh and the "non-river non-financial cottage economy" corresponds pretty well to me and Pindicator's research in 23 .

edit: this one has "7 bulb" which has more regular scientists but only 7 great scientist bulbs. That might be more realistic.

[Krill]

I don't think you'd start 2 golden ages before t100 to be honest. Some data:

in pbem23, Novice and I ran a pretty pure rep specialist (both scientist and merchant) economy and had produced 10 gps at t100. We were SPI and ran Caste and Pacifism quite a lot, and had one golden age t73.

In pbem29, Novice and I ran a combination rep scientist and colossus coast economy and had produced 9 gps at t100. We were PHI and only ran Caste and Pacifism during our golden age, which we started on t88.

In both cases we started a second golden age several turns later (in 23 with Taj and in 29 - by necessity due to lack of spiritual - with 2 gps), at the end of which I think we'd produced another 4 (or would have produced, in the case of 29). So based on that you're either off by 3 GPs or 12 turns. ish.

Not cottaging everything doesn't make it a specialist economy. By t100 I think he produced 4 gps. That's as much as you'd want with a cottage economy to be honest. But he built fewer cottages and more mines/farms because he already had extra economy from GLH, and worked quite a bit of coast because the land was pretty dry.

His economy was Bureau + GLH for the most part and this let him focus heavily on hammers elsewhere.

See, my original post wasn't that far off either, Luddite