Who's your favourite Great Person?

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Great Merchant is by far the highest yielding GP in "point value" terms, settled he allows working half an extra tile, in a wonder pump for example that's half an extra plains hill mine, 2h, if he allows working a gl hill mine it's +3h. A plains town, +1h +4c. All those numbers being bigger later in the game.

This math looks a little shaky to me. I would expect that, in most cases, you are moving a working pop from one tile to another (grassland tile to plains tile), or a change in an improvement (watermill to workshop), which is normally just a 1 hammer change. In some cases, it will mean converting a windmill to a mine (2 hammers). It's only going to be half a tile in cities that are food capped rather than happy capped, and I woudn't normally expect those cities to be your primary choices for attaching a specialist.

Great Engineers... are the most useful late game GP because settled they allow you to build projects considerably faster.

This doesn't look right to me either. I'm accustomed to having a production yield of 60+ base hammers at my wonder pumps in the late game (ok, so maybe that says more about the level of difficulty that I play than anything else). So an attached engineer is giving me a 5% boost... a project that would normally come in 21 turns can now be built in 20.

Your most expensive project is 2000 hammers. Forge + Factory + Power (a reasonable minimum configuration for a city trying to pound out a project) doubles the base hammer yield. That's 17 turns with 40 hammers of overflow. Add an engineer, and you've shaved off one turn (with 16 hammers of overflow).

A GE building rush in a size 20 city is 900 hammers. Running with a 3x multiplier, that's 100 turns for a settled engineer (who also has research vigorish of 300 x science multiplier)... which probably means 100-200 years before your expected finish date. The option of choosing how you want to invest those hammers each turn has some value, so this is really a worst case estimate for settling (for instance, there aren't many 900 hammer wonders, especially if you have a full spectrum of resource doublers).

Of course, it may still be true that the late game GE is the best GP of the lot.

[Blake]

Yes but the settled GE's work for projects, that's the point of them. The GE wonder plop doesn't.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Yes but the settled GE's work for projects, that's the point of them. The GE wonder plop doesn't.

So do golden ages. The same production city above, with 8 turns within a golden age, finishes your 2000 hammer project in 14 turns - three turns faster than the baseline, and two turns faster than settling the engineer.

Alternatively, the golden age is going to be producing 160 or base hammers in the project center; depending on whether you are dividing that difference two or three ways, you are talking about 18 or 27 turns before settling pays off the local investment, and however long beyond that before the other benefits of the GA have been offset.

If the Golden Age commonly outperforms settling the GE, then there really isn't any particular advantage to GEs when the bottleneck to victory is project construction.

[Atlas]

Good discussion here.

If the Golden Age commonly outperforms settling the GE, then there really isn't any particular advantage to GEs when the bottleneck to victory is project construction.

Well there is the advantage is that GE are often the bottleneck to a golden age in the Modern Era, but of course that is sort of an aside.

[Blake]

So do golden ages. The same production city above, with 8 turns within a golden age, finishes your 2000 hammer project in 14 turns - three turns faster than the baseline, and two turns faster than settling the engineer.

Alternatively, the golden age is going to be producing 160 or base hammers in the project center; depending on whether you are dividing that difference two or three ways, you are talking about 18 or 27 turns before settling pays off the local investment, and however long beyond that before the other benefits of the GA have been offset.

If the Golden Age commonly outperforms settling the GE, then there really isn't any particular advantage to GEs when the bottleneck to victory is project construction.

If we assume that say 15 tiles are hammer-bearing at the IW city (which we'll pretend is the bottleneck for SS production rather than research or other city junk part production being the bottleneck), then the GA produces +15 raw hammer turn, as much as 5 great engineers. That's actually not that impressive, the GA only goes for 8 turns and requires 2-5 Great People, the engineers will provide their hammers over the entirety of the space race. Yes, the GA effects multiple cities and adds to research but the production is probably not particularly useful in more than 2 cities. (bear in mind for many map types 15 hammer bearing tiles is optimistic! I've had games with an IW city with only 5 hammer bearing tiles! Damn archi maps!)

I think I'd still rather settle GE's and burn the chaff GP for the cheap Golden Ages, maybe spending a very late GE for a final golden age to push the final part out. And I suspect that except for particularly large empires that a GM cash bomb will beat a GA if your bottleneck is research. But YMMV greatly depending on map size and play style, huge maps are obviously very biased towards GA's and tiny maps against GA's because the other GP effects don't scale with map size. I usually play standard maps where I feel the balance is slightly against GA's in most cases unless you've already won by domination for all intents and purposes.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

If we assume that say 15 tiles are hammer-bearing at the IW city (which we'll pretend is the bottleneck for SS production rather than research or other city junk part production being the bottleneck

I'm inclined to guess that most IW cities which are pulling in 60+ hammers have more than 15 hammer bearing tiles... but there may be a dead tile, or a couple of food tiles pulling in no hammers. I was a bit careless with my assumption of the GA boost, though I don't think I was off by 25%.

I don't intend that these assumptions get projected onto IW cities on an archi maps, and thought I had covered that contingency in my earlier caveat. Are you pounding out 60+ base hammers per turn on an achi map with 5 production tiles? Te salud, Don Corleone.

[uberfish]

Usually if I get a GE early in the game from Pyramids I'll settle it, but post-Liberalism, rushing wonders with it is very effective. Rushing ironworks or especially westpoint lets you get back to cranking out troops much faster. Taj Mahal is essentially a 1 gp golden age that you might miss out on if you don't have marble otherwise. Statue of Liberty is often contested too, and cutting 10+ turns off its build time means 10+ more turns of free specialists that you wouldn't have otherwise! That's worth a lot over 10+ cities. 2 engineers can steal the Space Elevator right out from under the nose of even a Deity AI with a head start.

Culture bombs can be very fun if situational. Ever seen 30 AI units trapped in no man's land by a culture bomb fired in the aftermath of a war?

Great merchants I normally will cash in for a trade mission, if not saving for a golden age, then enjoy running 100% science for a while or upgrade units.

Generals are the best new feature of warlords, Most of the time I settle them as military leaders. No longer do you have to switch out of your builder civics to get 5 xp units, and making a Heroic epic city that produces super-elite troops is fun.

For all that my favourite great person is still the early scientist that builds the academy. My preferred personal style in all civ-style games is winning through superior technology.

[LordOgre]

My favorite GP is the GE for the reason mentionned above... so i voted for GE

but i also think GA and GP are great for Golden Age pops...

i would also like to say that the GG should get a little more appreciation since you dont get them with GPP, you only have to fight, this puts them out of the discussion since they cant help for GA and their only function are military... what i like about them is mostly the fact that you can pop 20 xp on a single unit, and that unit doesnt cost anything to upgrade... i often create a small army of 6 GG, always top upgraded and always a good option in a war... gotta love artillery warlords... or mechanized infantry warlords...

anyway, just adding my 2 gpt...

[scooter]

I voted Great Engineer, but after reading Blake's initial analysis, I'm starting to wish I could change my vote... There was a game over at CFC that someone played where they ran their economy at 100% science nearly the entire game, paying for it with trade missions from Great Merchants

[sylvanllewelyn]

Single player: great engineer. So many awesome and fun wonders, so little hammers!

Multiplayer: (hear me out) great ARTIST. Rather than razing the enemy city like you always do, send in a great artist, end resistance, pop the borders 4 tiles away for scounting, a highly defensible position at 80% cultural defense, and even deny your enemy that strategic resource. Anything else is a disappointment.