Haram built the AP! Yowza. Interesting! Wow, I wish I had gone with my plan to build a temple in SRT! Anyways, we're actually building two Buddhist monasteries in our two biggest commerce centers simply for the beakers, so we should definitely try to spread Buddhism a bit wherever we can. (We should probably do this regardless so he can't boss us around with AP resolutions) An AP pair of Monastery + Temple costs 112 hammers and produces 5hpt with a forge, for a 22 turn payback time. That's really good!
Hmmm, I wonder if we should research Monotheism this turn and swap into OR on the last turn of our GA? We're building so much infrastructure everywhere so it might be worth it... actually, damn, we don't have Poly yet so we can't get it by next turn! Arrgh! Dammit, I wish I knew he was beelining this thing!
Speaking of Haram, he cheekily decided to scout our Moai city with a Trireme via a double move, grr. I guess he wants to see if I'm still paying attention. It turns out I am! As a reminder, when we were about to send a scout into his mainland on T98, he closed borders in response, and unfortunately we can't do the same here because we still have 1T left on the agreement - we'd have to declare war, which I don't want to do. Pisses me off a bit. So, I sent my chariot at Chinook into his borders there in response instead, because I know he won't like that.
We see Borsche is indeed settling Tsargon's island, as expected:
On the home front, we popped our GS for our Capital's Academy, we're starving down SRT, and that's about all to say for now. Next turn lots of stuff will happen because we switch back into slavery plus into Bureaucracy, and maybe OR too. I'll do some quick calculations on that right now.
We've been saving gold for the Academy, but here's our tentative tech plan:
I expect that we'll be able knock out one of these per turn.
Demos and Counts:
Demos:
Mmm, that CY lead. We're also inching higher on the soldier and hammer rankings, which is nice. Haram had a big MFG jump this turn because I assume he pre-built some buddhist buildings.
It's also interesting that the rival-lowest army count is so close to 2nd/3rd place.
Espionage Graph:
Haram might not have gotten Ziggurats up early, but they're still useful for him in that they cost 30h cheaper a piece. Figure he gets about 9-10 of them during his MoM GA, that's like he gained a whole extra turn of MoM GA production - like building the AP for free.
City counts:
19: Us (T98)
16: Haram (T103), Fennbandit (T108)
15: Dreylin (T101)
14: TBS (T102)
12: Jowy (T103), Borsche (T108)
10: Tsargon (T96)
6: Scipio (T96)
Whip Counts:
TBS: 97 pop total; 7 triplepop whips, 32 doublepop whips, 12 singlepop whips
The Blues Brothers: 74 pop total; 22 doublepop whips, 30 singlepop whips
Dreylin: 47 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whips, 2 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whip, 21 singlepop whips
Fennbandit: 42 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 9 doublepop whips, 12 singlepop whips
Haram: 36 pop total; 5 triplepop whips, 7 doublepop whips, 7 singlepop whips
Borsche: 34 pop total; 2 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whips, 12 singlepop whips
Jowy: 34 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 6 doublepop whip, 10 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 20 pop total; 1 quadruple pop whip, 6 doublepop whips, 4 singlepop whips
Scipio: 5 pop total (5 singlepop whips)
We're gonna give the wheat away for awhile once we hit size 16; not sure if we should bulldoze those mines right away though, as we want to pump some missionaries and ships outta this city ASAP, plus a temple and a wharf. I'm still really kicking myself for missing out on OR...
Also, hmmm...
This stuff is probably going to mess with TBS, in which case, more power to ya man.
Demos/Counts:
Demos:
Haram's MFG keeps going up and up... really hope he doesn't chain this GA via the music artist or something, as that would turn into an insurmountable hammer lead for quite awhile. He just birthed a GS in Shalloq, but that's probably going to be an academy in his size 15 moved-capital. I wouldn't be surprised if he switched into Bureau before his GA is done.
City counts:
19: Us (T98)
16: Haram (T103), Fennbandit (T108)
15: Dreylin (T101)
14: TBS (T102)
13: Borsche (T109)
12: Jowy (T103)
10: Tsargon (T96)
6: Scipio (T96)
Whip Counts:
TBS: 101 pop total; 7 triplepop whips, 34 doublepop whips, 12 singlepop whips
The Blues Brothers: 79 pop total; 24 doublepop whips, 31 singlepop whips
Dreylin: 47 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whips, 2 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whip, 21 singlepop whips
Fennbandit: 44 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 10 doublepop whips, 12 singlepop whips
Haram: 36 pop total; 5 triplepop whips, 7 doublepop whips, 7 singlepop whips
Borsche: 36 pop total; 2 triplepop whips, 9 doublepop whips, 12 singlepop whips
Jowy: 34 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 6 doublepop whip, 10 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 20 pop total; 1 quadruple pop whip, 6 doublepop whips, 4 singlepop whips
Scipio: 5 pop total (5 singlepop whips)
Man your civ looks superb.650 beakers at this stage s excelent.Nie to have a capitol which is realy good for burocracy,so much time passed since i had one...
Anyway just excelent your civ, how you will capitalize from this to get a dominant position?
Hey, thank you! PBEM63 had a nice bureau cap but it didn't help much...
As far as capitalizing on our position to win the game... good question! The answer is that we're gonna whip a bunch. Let me explain it lots of words:
First, an overview of our game situation:
The way I see our situation right now is that yes, our civ is pretty great, but only in the sense of its long-term potential. Our population and land area is huge, but that won't win us the game by itself; we have to turn it into something first. Our GNP is great... but we don't have a real tech lead yet, because just 20 turns ago we were one of the most backwards civs.
However, we haven't even come close to our potential yet. First of all, remember that 5 of our cities haven't been alive for 20 turns yet; some of the more recent ones just finished up their granaries. All of these cities are gaining at least +7fpt or more. We're not even working half of our tiles yet! We still got some good stuff to go even in our most developed cities too. For example, Compass is just in this turn, and Wharves bring in +2c per tile - already about +40 commerce within 5 turns, plus get C1 Triremes. Broadly speaking, here's what our infrastructure wishlist looks like:
"Excess" hammers are stuff that we'll put into military and wealth builds... 1800 hammers is about 36 horchers, for reference. Not that we're actually planning to build 36 horchers.
This is a bit of a pessimistic estimate, in terms that I think I'm lowballing our whip and hpt estimates, and high-balling the amount of infrastucture we'll want in the next 20 turns. (By the way, if you're curious, I estimate OR would have cost about 400g over the next 20 turns and saved about ~550 hammers in total, assuming we spread it to at least 13 cities fairly quickly; definitely preferable, but whiffing it is not as tragic as I initially believed).
Anyways, the main goal of all this infrastructure is to increase our income so that we can reach some Real Techs, with the secondary goal of increasing our MFG as much as possible to prepare for a future war. The biggest ticket items are AP buildings and Courthouses. We only have 1 CH so far, as we just gained CoL recently, but lots more are following soon. OTOH, we've done a pretty good job getting Mints up, with 12 done by EOT T112 (3 finishing this turn), with at least 5 more to come soon. Our GA was great here... we doubled 0%/100% gpt/bpt and ended at about the same MFG after the GA as we had when we started it. Finally, we have just 2 AP buildings right now, and I'd love to make that about 20. I bet Haram already has at least 20 given the way his MFG has been skyrocketing the last few turns...
Haram, of course, is the big problem. Our MFG is really good at #2, but... Haram's is even better, at roughly DOUBLE ours in the last turns of his MoM GA. Dreylin, Fennbandit, and TBS are all roughly tech-parity with ourselves, but Haram's got at least 2 classical (Monarchy&Friends and Calendar) and one Medieval (Theocracy) up on us. Haram and I, two peas in a pod, eh? I'm also quite worried about Dreylin... if I had to break it down, it'd be like 80% Haram, 19% Dreylin, 1% Fennbandit. (I think the English will have their attention pulled elsewhere, for the most part)
So, to gain a real advantage, we need to somehow get a leg up on Haram, or at least get our legs high enough where he can't put a leg up on us. (meaning, we can invade someone without him stopping us) How to do that? First of all, consider that he just switched out of Caste and into Bureau, Slavery, and HR. Note *NO THEOCRACY*, but that he stayed in OR. That means he's also inclined towards infrastructure. And, unfortunately, he's got a leg up on us there. Subtracting the hammers he put into the AP, but including the fact that he's been in OR, has 30h cheaper courthouses, and had his forges up sooner, I estimate that he's up about ~60h in infrastructure compared to us. On top of that, comparing a guestimate infra wishlish for him compared to ours, I think that he'll gain an additional about 1300-1400 hammers over the next 20 turns as a combination of stuff he doesn't have to or won't be inclined to build, hammers he'll save from HR, and his extra hpt income. Yeesh. I mean, just look at this MFG graph, it's absurd:
However, even with his nice size 15 capital w/ academy and his extra GA turns, I don't think that he'll be able to keep up with our economy without wealth builds. So, all those extra hammers aren't really as intimidating as they first appear. On top of that, our first couple of Fin-enhanced wharves will neutralize his advantage from the Colossus, and then everything on top of that is just gravy. And I think he'll really want to keep up with us in economy or else he'll have problems later. The CY graph shows why:
Note that even though Haram spent about 10T in caste and produced a GS, he doesn't have a dip like Dreylin or I do. What that means that either a.) he thinks he can somehow slip the music artist past TBS, or far more likely that b.) that he's saving his 2nd GA for the Taj, in order to chain 3-in-a-row. That race will start in about 20-25 turns from now, so he has plenty of time to let a GS/GP pair trickle in. We need to be super careful about not letting him get all the good Ren-era first-to stuff; letting him get one is bad, but if he gets Taj+Lib+Econ Merchan and fires off a 48 Turn GA just before he gets to Chemistry, well the game might as well be over.
So, that perspective brings me to three major strategic questions:
1.) TBS is going to conquer a shitload of land. Do we try to hinder him... or help him?
2.) Tsargon will eventually be dogpiled. When? Do we need to be ready to jump in within 20 turns or can we wait?
3.) How do we best deny Haram the early-Ren first-to bonii?
My thoughts:
1.)
No, we don't hinder him, and in fact if we can help him at all we should. TBS has an absurdly huge army right now, essentially double the size of the #2. However, he has yet to take cities from anybody he's warred with, which is by now half the map. Why? I think the answer is that he's about to conduct TWO very slow wars in opposite directions and needs to go into it with a huge power advantage because any reinforcements that come will be very late and likely outdated by the time they arrive. (and he better bust his ass because there's at least 3 civs who are 1 tech off of macemen)
So, who is he warring with? Well, the first and obvious answer is Scipio, and he probably has a huge SoD truding towards Scipio right now. Who else? I think Borsche:
This is the same spot I've got Big Mama Thorton at, which captures fish (looks like Borsche settled his SRT area weirdly, to avoid the fish for some reason), gems, a wet jungled rice, and two floodplains. Awesome city once you get borders popped. More importantly, with a plant here TBS can gain at least 5 cities on this island. Assuming Tsargon has one (he has horse hooked now) and Borsche has two, it seems unlikely that he'll let them gain a foothold here.
At any rate, not that I want to see Tsargon, Borsche, or Scipio beaten up, but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing if TBS gets bigger. First of all, even if he ends up with a 25 city empire by T140 or whatever, he's still waaaaay behind on infrastructure and economy and seems to be cashing his GP on immediate benefits rather than GAs. If it comes down to us vs TBS in the lategame, I don't see how we can lose without making some sort of big mistake ourselves.
In addition, if TBS gets bigger its not our problem. TBS and Scipio are the two civs on the map we don't immediately border in some way. Thus, it is *everyone elses'* problem to deal with him, particularly Haram and Dreylin, the two civs we're concerned about. If they're busy dealing with the 800 pound gorilla, then that's great for us.
2.)
I think it's unlikely that we need to be ready to invade Tsargon's mainland within 20 turns. First of all, Tsargon does have construction, thank god, and has recently started to whip some. Second, Dreylin doesn't seem interested in attacking. His power graph has closely matched our own and ours has been rising more from forges and pop than the sparse units we've been producing. I don't understand why he didn't leap at this opportunity... ToW praets are pretty good considering that there's no Agg civs, and Tsargon's absurd jungle plant almost seems like an invitation to invade him. I figure Dreylin must have sort of other bee in his bonnet, something else out there that's bothering him... he *is* TBS's northern neighbor, so it's possible that he's concerned that he's a possible invasion target. But even then, why not make more troops?
Anyways, we'll still continue building up some units, but nothing to go crazy about. Some more Swords on Ships for now, and then some cats and maces when the techs for those come around. ToW Swords are pretty decent generic units and can double as defenders if we need to push away some sort of opportunistic strike.
3.)
I think that if Haram is indeed saving his GPP for a GA around 25T from now, then we can kiss the Taj goodbye. Like, we should just forget about it, at least so much as building it for real. (if there's a way to fake him out though, we should do that). But, there's no way can we beat a Pro/Ind civ in a MoM GA on straight-up hammers, unless we happen to land a lucky GE, which of course we'll try for.
So, that means we want to go for Lib, using it to grab the Econ Merchant. We kind of want Lib anyways, as it's a prereq for Communism (and thus the Kremlin), and Economics makes sense too considering that we'll want an early Banking for half-priced Banks. We probably should aim to have a GS ready slam a bulb into Education... but also stay focused on building infrastructure and growing our cities onto more Fin tiles. If we start whipping troops like TBS does and Haram does not, then we risk him getting all 3 of these bonuses and then overrunning us with uber-Pro workshops around T180.
And, I think that will be Haram's gameplan. His western neighbor is fairly strong, his eastern neighbor is fairly strong, his northern neighbor is fairly strong, and his soon-to-be southern neighbor is very strong. His prospects for a Medieval-era war are poor, so he'll want to wait until he has a mega advantage, and that means a Chemistry beeline.
So yeah, long story short, our plan to capitalize on our position is to "just whip a lot of buildings or whatever."
T112 Demos/Counts:
Demos:
First shot is the end of our turn, before Haram played; second shot is after he played, and switched into Bureau:
317 hammers per turn, cripes, and that doesn't include his OR bonus. OTOH, his GA gold-saving rate in Bureau was only 266gpt; with an unknown amount of wealth builds included in that. (and I'm fairly sure he's indeed saving gold this turn because his new GS won't be able to build the academy until next turn at the earliest) Ours is still higher than that... *after* the GA! :D
City counts:
19: Us (T98)
16: Haram (T103), Fennbandit (T108)
15: Dreylin (T101)
14: TBS (T102), Borsche (T112)
12: Jowy (T103)
11: Tsargon (T223)
6: Scipio (T96)
Whip Counts:
TBS: 105 pop total; 7 triplepop whips, 36 doublepop whips, 12 singlepop whips
The Blues Brothers: 88 pop total; 1 triplepop whip, 26 doublepop whips, 33 singlepop whips
Dreylin: 54 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whips, 4 triplepop whips, 8 doublepop whip, 23 singlepop whips
Fennbandit: 45 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 10 doublepop whips, 13 singlepop whips
Haram: 40 pop total; 5 triplepop whips, 9 doublepop whips, 7 singlepop whips
Borsche: 37 pop total; 2 triplepop whips, 9 doublepop whips, 13 singlepop whips
Jowy: 37 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 7 doublepop whip, 11 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 20 pop total; 1 quadruple pop whip, 6 doublepop whips, 4 singlepop whips
Scipio: 7 pop total (7 singlepop whips)
TBS's whip onslaught has finally cooled down a bit. OTOH, we've whipped 14 pop in the past 2 turns (including our first triplepopper of the game!) and we're just getting started. only 78 more pop to go in the next 19 turns!
Two important bits, only one of which is in the log. The first is that TBS (likely, based on his score increase) finally grabbed his Great Artist from Music. Leaving it hanging there was making me pretty nervous, heh. The other bit is that Haram dumped a bunch of EP on us again, blegh. He got up to 117/52 until I just said fuck it and put 20% slider on him, to bring us to 117/144. This costs us 100g. Well, I guess Haram can damage our economic edge a bit this way. Gives me flashbacks back to PB22, when Gawdzak was so obnoxious in the same way. We need to squeeze out some courthouses as fast as possible because an EP lead of 27 won't last very long at all, even if we maintain 100% on him at all times.
Other than that, things are fine. We just knocked down Compass, Calendar, Construction, and Aesthetics in 1 turn apiece, and in the next 4T we'll do Polytheism, Literature, Monotheism, and Monarchy. After that we build up gold for Guilds, which will be about an additional... 10 turns maybe? And finally Banking after that. That will put us right before the GA.
Muddy Waters is lookin' sick with its wharf installed. We're also building the Sweetdragon Papaya:
We're building the SP hoping to complete it, so that we can abuse Pacifism in our GA and then swap out into FR by the end. That said, I sure ain't gonna complain about 49 failgold per turn.
Haram's also got a size 16 capital now. TBS's is at size 15. I wonder if they picked the same spot? And I wonder what that spot is?
Demos:
In each case demos are pre-whip; we've whipped, like, a lot in the last few turns. 27 pop in the last 4 turns, I believe. We're still growing faster than we whip!
Haram's post-GA MFG is completely insane, christ. I think he's pretty close to hitting a ceiling though... 16 pairs of AP buildings will increase his MFG by 82 by itself, and he's gotta be close to that soon. I hope. Our difference in MFG is something like 2 pop worth of whips a turn, which is worth something like, I dunno, 28-30 food going into growth? For reference, on T114 we had 104 extra food (346 CY - 2*121 pop), while Haram had 58. So, it's really something like 74 vs 58.
Graphs:
MFG:
Haram has +50% MFG over me, while I have a big edge over Dreylin, who in turn has a big edge over #4. TBS is trapped down in the gutter. He's still taken no cities from anyone with his big fucker army!
CY:
GNP:
Haram looks spectacular here but remember that he has at least, like, 120 culture per turn or whatever. Not actually even an exaggeration. His gold-saving rate post-GA is only 203 gpt.
EP:
Pretty clean exponential slope here... which would mean that he's adding about 1 ziggurat per turn. We have just 2 CH right now, but we'll also be adding about 1 CH per turn or so for the next 6-7 turns I think.
Counts:
City counts:
19: Us (T98)
17: Haram (T113)
16: Fennbandit (T108)
15: Dreylin (T101), TBS (T112)
14: Borsche (T112)
12: Jowy (T103)
11: Tsargon (T96)
6: Scipio (T96)
Whip Counts:
TBS: 110 pop total; 7 triplepop whips, 38 doublepop whips, 12 singlepop whips
The Blues Brothers: 101 pop total; 2 triplepop whip, 29 doublepop whips, 37 singlepop whips
Dreylin: 62 pop total; 1 quadruplepop whips, 4 triplepop whips, 11 doublepop whip, 25 singlepop whips
Haram: 53 pop total; 6 triplepop whips, 13 doublepop whips, 9 singlepop whips
Fennbandit: 49 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 12 doublepop whips, 13 singlepop whips
Borsche: 37 pop total; 2 triplepop whips, 9 doublepop whips, 13 singlepop whips
Jowy: 37 pop total; 4 triplepop whips, 7 doublepop whip, 11 singlepop whips
Tsargon: 23 pop total; 1 quadruple pop whip, 1 triplepop whip, 6 doublepop whips, 4 singlepop whips
Scipio: 16 pop total (1 triplepop whip, 1 doublepop whip, 11 singlepop whips)
edit, updated for TBS and Scipio. Scipio just did 6 pop worth of whips: a single, a double, and a triple. Are these spite and/or dry whips? Is TBS finally about to take a city... 20-25 turns after he started building up troops?
Damn, I had a secret ultimate super-duper plan to deny Haram the Taj... by loaning TBS bucketloads of gold (we save gold at like 350gpt without wealth now, btw) and then hoping he'd randomly understand why I'd be doing this and then also decide that it was worth racing Haram for the big marble turd. But. looks like a.) Haram just founded Taoism already, T118, based on score increases, yikes, and b.) TBS has been teching the last few turns so I can't even make the damn loan offer!!!!!
arrgh, this was such a good plan too. well, it was in my head at least. for all I know, he coulda blown it all on racing us to lib.
now what the heck do we do. well, maybe I'm willing to wait 1 more turn... turn off your tech man, and I'll hook you up.
If we can't deny Haram the Taj, I think we need to pop an extra GS in our upcoming GA to bulb into Education, because otherwise we'll be in a race for lib against his GA economy, including shit-tons of wealthbuilds. Sucks, but better safe than sorry here. In that case, will our tech rate be good enough to hit lib before our GA is done? How many beakers do we need again? It's at least 10k, but I'm not sure on the exact amount. And anyways, if that's the case, we should probably give up on the Papaya, letting it sit for failgold, since we'd have the techs for those civics anyways. But then we need to get Philosophy before we kick off the GA, which means delaying the start of the GA, probably. In that case, can we squeeze out the NE before the GA starts? Looks like it might be close... Mmmmm... HMMMmmm...
Two part update. Right now, broader thoughts. Maybe later, if baby stays asleep (please), or perhaps tomorrow, I'll post a regular turn update for T122, including progress on our big infrastructure push.
Strategic Desire
Conquer some land, preferably land that doesn't leave us more vulnerable to attack. Ideally, we'd want at least 5-6 cities worth for an invasion to be worth it, and then be set up to gain 10-15 more.
Strategic Problems
1.) We're currently neighboring the two strongest civs in the game, hammer-wise, besides ourselves, Haram and Dreylin. (especially Haram) In order to go to war, take land, hold that land, and hold the land we have, we need to open up a window of power where we're able to do this. In addition, the free merchant at Economics is a huge threat to us, as Haram could use the Taj + the free great person to easily chain 3 12-Turn Golden Ages together.
Solution
We need to make a run at liberalism, of course. We have a choice of three targets:
1.) Economics. Although great economic tech (go figure!), the main reason to score this sucker is to deny Haram the Great Merchant. Unfortunately, it costs many more beakers to go down this road than our other options, meaning that we might be too slow to land it.
2.) Astronomy. Without considering the denial value of the Economics merchant, Astro is definitely the best choice. Astro does not have a prereq bonus, meaning that it costs almost 2000 (!!) raw beakers more than Economics. On top of that, it can be gotten much quicker... we could theoretically have Galleons in the water in under a dozen turns. We'd also want some sort of better land unit to go with them, but that's a problem for another time.
3.) Printing Press. The least desireable by a longshot but also the easiest to get to, if some freak happenstance means that we need to land lib ASAP. It's also a great economic tech for us, as we'll have around ~60+ cottage-type buildings around this point, most either at village level or above.
Our Bankroll
After this turn, we'll have about ~1900 gold banked, plus 360 more coming from Tsargon, plus maybe a couple hundred failgold from the National Epic, and maybe a couple hundred more from SP, if TBS beats us to it. So, that gives us about 2700g to play with. Assuming we can average about 25gpt in wealth builds during this duration, we'll have enough for 12 straight turns of 100% science, at about 700 raw beakers per turn ("raw beakers" means equivalent to what's shown next to the slider), and thus 8400 raw beakers in total. How close do we get towards our Liberalism Dreams if we turn on the slider on T122? Here's a table of tech prices:
Tech brainstorming
Code:
Drama: 491, 1PR => 491/1.2 = 409 raw beakers
Philosophy: 1502, 1 or 2 PR, at least 1 KTB => 1502/1.2/1.03 = 1215 raw beakers, 1042 w/ Drama prereq
Monarchy: 491, 2PR, at least 5 KTB probably => 305 raw beakers
Feudalism: 1292, 1PR, maybe 2 KTB? => 1016 raw beakers
Machinery: 1292, 1PR, maybe 2 KTB? => 1016 raw beakers
Guilds: 1932, 1PR => 1610 raw beakers
Banking: 1292, 1PR => 1076 raw beakers
Alphabet: 391, 1PR, at least 3 KTB => 299 raw beakers
Paper: 1085, 1PR => 904 raw beakers
Education: 3736, 1PR => 3113 raw beakers
Liberalism: 2820, 1PR => 2350 raw beakers
Optics: 1085, 1PR => 2729 raw beakers
Nationalism: 3736, 1PR => 3113 raw beakers
Printing Press: 3275, 1PR => 2729 raw beakers
Astronomy: 4202 beakers
Economics: 2820, 1PR => 2350 raw beakers
Totals:
Drama->Phi is out, since we're in a race, unfortunately.
Economics beeline: Paper + Edu + Monarchy + Machinery + Feudalism + Guilds + Banking + Economics = 11391 raw beakers
Lib beeline: Paper + Phi + Edu + Lib = 7583 raw beakers
Lib Astro: Paper + Phi + Edu + Lib + Machinery + Optics = 9565 raw beakers
Lib PP: Paper + Phi + Edu + Lib + Machinery + Alpahbet = 8959 raw beakers
Lib Econ: Paper + Phi + Edu + Lib + Monarchy + Machinery + Feudalism + Guilds + Banking = 12606 raw beakers
We're pretty all the way to Printing Press, just short of Astro, and 3/4 of the way to Econ. This seems about about the right time to start slamming the slider.
As far as accelerating things go, we have a 100% chance of a Great Merchant coming in, uh, 6 turns, although this coulda been a 20% Great Scientist if we had wanted. A GS bulbed into Education gets us ~1950 modified beakers w/ 150 pop, which is roughly ~1625 raw beakers. We can translate those 1625 beakers into about ~1012 gold. We could def get better than that from a GM trade mission then - probably 1700g, perhaps even 1900g if we can find an appropriate foreign city. And, if we end up snagging the GM from Econ, then that doesn't even really affect our GA timing. 1700g is worth about 7 more turns at 100% science, or 5000 beakers. That's just enough to lib Econ... so the soonest we could hit that is 17T from now, T138, assuming that we can get the Merchant delivered before we run out of gold.
The Competition
So, that's our options. Next, lets consider our competition, Haram and TBS, to see which of our options are viable. First, Haram. He is very very very likely on a Taj beeline right now, and I think he'd start on Nationalism as I'm near 100% sure it was him who founded Taoism. His gold reserve is dropping much more slowly than it should, even assuming he has at least a dozen Zigs, so I think he's building a ton of wealth, maybe even as much 80-90gpt worth. His peak bpt's gotta be way less than ours though, so I'd wager that he won't have Nat for 6-7 more turns at least. From here, we can imagine two scenerios, based on whether he's got a GE coming. If he does, then we would be fighting against his GA economy directly, in which case he'd be making, like, 700bpt break-even, meaning he could hit lib in 9 more turns, 10 if he wants MT. If he has his NE up and has a scientist prepped, that could be 6/7 turns. So, the earliest we'd possibly need to finish lib is 14T from now. However, if he doesn't have a GE, then he'll take at least, like, 8-9 turns to finish the Taj? Meaning that he'd need at least 4-5 more turns. Taking a random guess on how likely each of these scenerios are, I'd put it on something like, 20% likely he has a GE, 20% he has a GS after a GE. (where do these probability numbers come from? good question! out of my ass! ) So, that's 80% for 20T, 16% for 17T, 4% for 14T.
Next, TBS. His economy is weaker than Haram or I's, but he's got much stronger GP generation, especially since he's in a GA. So, there's two threats here. One is that he goes for Lib by double-bulbing Education, while the second is that he beelines for Economics by double-bulbing Education - he has the mids so Banking for Mercantalism would be pretty appealing for him. So, we could knock off Education off the tech list, and I think he has HR already too. So that would drop him down to maybe 7500 beakers for Econ, 8700 to lib Econ. Next, the question of his break-even tech rate. I think this is probably something like... 500bpt in the GA, 300bpt after it? That puts him at 19T to grab the Econ merchant, or 23T to lib Econ, assuming he gets 2GS and then pops them both into Edu. How likely is that? Cripes, I have no idea. His GPP pool is gonna be all crazy so who knows. Like, maybe 50% he gets the double GS, and then 50% likely he even wants to race for Econ? So let's say 25% likely for 19T.
What do we actually choose?
Finally lets see which options are viable. Well, libbing Econ looks really risky. If I'm off by a turn on our side and one on TBS's side, we'd have about a 16%+25%=41% chance to lose that race. On the other hand, we could hedge our bets by barrelling down Paper/Education, backfilling Alpha to show everyone we have Education, and then trying to backfill the prereq techs we need to get something better. Maybe we get insanely lucky and TBS chases Haram down the Taj path and beats him, and then we can grab the Econ merchant the slow way AND lib Astro? Who knows. At the very least, we need Machinery on all three paths.
)
TBS's is at size 15. I wonder if they picked the same spot? And I wonder what that spot is? 
) So, that's 80% for 20T, 16% for 17T, 4% for 14T.