Ok, so now that we're planted we can actually get some info out of the demog screens, so lets dig around and see what we can see... I've not really tried to do this sort of thing before, so I've got a few questions for those of you reading this, lurkers feel free to chime in
Here's a copy of the screen.
At first glance they look pretty good. I've circled a few things there. First up in red, we're leading the world in GNP
That's a great early game indicator there
Ok so that's got more to do with us being cultural, and actually I'm a bit confused by the numbers I'm seeing here. We're listed as 21 units of GNP. By my reckoning we should be at 8(palace income)+2(tile income)+4(culture)+4(Espionage). Now there could be a research multiplier on AH, since we've got a prereq for it, but even so that should only be 1 or 2 GNPs. What am I missing here? Anyone?
Also note that we're tied for 1st place GNP so noone who's creative is working a water tile, (I count three other teams which have the potential for it). The average is 17 GNP, so I think it's safe to say pretty much everyone is running 1c at the moment (the positive offset of the cultural teams is pulled down by Morgan who still hasn't settled yet).
Moving on we've got crop yield, we're listed as equal 2nd here despite having the same yield as the opponent best. Note the average is 3, so some people are running heavy hammers, or they've settled without a food bonus in the first ring of their capital. I would guess that the hammers are being produced for workboats, unless someone is running for Stonehenge out of the gate
Question: Why are we second place? Is this because we waited a turn to settle?
Actually I forgot to highlight production, but that tells a similar story. We get an extra hammer since we've settled on a plains hill, and we're fifth in production, so 4 other civs are running heavy hammers. People making workboats or expansive civs on worker builds are the likely candidates here. Question: Do the hammer bonii show up on this number or not? an expansive civ running 4 hammers on the city management screen should be investing 5 hammers into the worker build. Which number shows up on the demog screen, the 4 or the 5?
The final thing I've circled in the population screen. Again the weird thing is we've got tied pop with best opponent, but are now 3rd place. Does this include food in the box for breaking ties? I wouldn't think so, but there's something strange happening here.
I guess most of my questions are really on tie breakers for the various categories, since it's early days there's not too much else to get from these numbers. One other calc I did was check the number of land tiles from the domination limit numbers, I get something in the range of 4500 tiles. We'll have to check how this compares to a regulation Huge map, maybe we can tell how much water we should expect to see (My first guess? not much)