[PB63 Spoilers] Ginger and Lazteuq find a way to peace

[Charriu]

Also I see I have to teach my tracking tool to recognize bulbed techs as well as Oracle and Liberalism techs.

[Cornflakes]

Well played! From my viewpoint it looks like to handled the politics excellently. I think you made the exact right choice in not jumping in against me when Supderdeath and MJMD attacked. By the time that I stabilized and pushed them back you had achieved a commanding GNP lead.

I thought that your border with MJMD would end up dragging you both down and out of the running, but you two kept things remarkably cool despite that long border.

[Ginger()]

Big Trongle Demands Sacrifices:

I had a curiosity that I never ended up investigating; in the late game where base yields start becoming more valuable than modifiers, how does Police State versus Representation stack up? Throughout the last several turns I was running Representation rather than Police State, motivated largely by Mercantilism being an obvious choice. I briefly ran Police State and Free Market, but a near universal embargo made that stint fairly pointless pretty quickly, so at the end of the 5 turn civic cooldown, I swapped back to Merc/Rep. But was I making a mistake, and how valuable is Police State? Does Pyramids really benefit from that ability to switch after you've researched Banking and are running Mercantilism? Which is better?

I was producing mostly military units in my core though, (new conquests were busy putting up courts), so was the use of Representation justified?
I tallied up the specialists by hand and applied modifiers, only a few cities had libraries, and the sum total benefit of Representation was ~156 beakers +/-10 with ~10 gold saved in civic maintenance. Happiness only affected the size 18 moai by one point, which could easily build a temple or colosseum. 
It's worth noting that without factoring in the 15 base-beaker boost to Rome's 5 scientists, being run through almost 300% modifiers, the total Rep gain was only ~100 beakers.

So how much would police state give? I repeated the hand counting, except this time I fed it through a spreadsheet. Halfway through I realized I had overlooked that in the last couple turns, before Ramk closes the game, it was ticking on without player input. As a result, spare beakers were dumped into Scientific Method, obsoleting every monastery. Thankfully excel google sheet made the correction easy.

   

As you can see, by the numbers, the Police State bonus isn't terribly impressive. It should improve when the new lands finish their basic infra, but until then it's weaker than the Representation. 
There is one problem with this conclusion though, because I was taking far worse GNP/Hammer trades by drafting and upgrading at the time of Mjmd and Bing's war declarations. So logically I should've been in Police State as well. However, like everyone's favorite labor civic, those actions were front-loading value, the Rifles came immediately—when the threat was highest, while Police State just increases the rate of the usual trickle. 

So, in conclusion, there is no conclusion, I'm still undecided, probably a mistake and should've been running PS. Then again, the numbers looked better long term, and I was going to have to take the terrible GNP/Hammer trades in the short term to rush out units anyways, because the priority was stabilize, not an increasing pressure campaign. Please let me know if any thoughts or comments you might have on either the basic question or the methodology of making the value judgment.

[Charriu]

The value of Police State, especially during war, increases a lot with war weariness.