I netted a cool 2100 gold from the mission, worth about a turn and a half of 100% research (about 6400 beakers).
Your empire beaker multiplier is 3x? ?
(April 27th, 2015, 13:48)GermanJoey Wrote: I'm in disbelief that he managed to build an 800 wonder worth a total of 1 happiness while at war with two civs, that absolutely cannot have been a good decision.
Maybe he had an engineer? Dunno, but I'd tend to agree with you
(April 27th, 2015, 13:48)GermanJoey Wrote: I produce 63ept, I didn't think that was so bad but I guess Gavagai and Gawdzak have a billion courthouses and plako and dtay probably have IAs all over the goddamn place.
Thats baaaad.
(April 27th, 2015, 13:48)GermanJoey Wrote: I wonder if my continent will develop a similar situation?
What continent?
South.central carthage rotating NAPs with north central carthage? Sounds tense. Maybe the East Carthagian vikings will backstab and play kingmaker?
(April 27th, 2015, 13:48)GermanJoey Wrote: I took 21 (!) screenshots this turn, and have an EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS REPORT planned for T250. GET HYPE. Before that, though, I'll give a short ordinary turn report.
(April 27th, 2015, 14:38)Ceiliazul Wrote: Your empire beaker multiplier is 3x? ?
Yeah, at least for gold -> beakers. 4277 beakers per turn at 100%, -1550gpt without wealth, which means 2100 gold translates into (2100/1550)*4277= 5794 beakers. (I was just eyballing it earlier) Obviously my commerce -> beakers rate is not so high, maybe 40% on average.
(April 27th, 2015, 14:38)Ceiliazul Wrote: Maybe he had an engineer? Dunno, but I'd tend to agree with you
If he had an engineer though, wouldn't he want to save it for the dam? I think he just... built the damn thing.
Yeah. Got graphs back on Gawdzak at least now though.
(April 27th, 2015, 14:38)Ceiliazul Wrote: What continent?
South.central carthage rotating NAPs with north central carthage? Sounds tense. Maybe the East Carthagian vikings will backstab and play kingmaker?
LOL. You know, for all the other abstractions in this game that's always got me as the most ridiculous one. How could an empire like mine ever possibly exist on a real world? It takes something like 40 years to travel across from one side to the other by railroad, how did a civil war not break out in the era before that??!
And, well, Gawdzak is technically on the main continent now with my capital now, planting his THIRD city in the empty English territory last turn.
(April 27th, 2015, 14:38)Ceiliazul Wrote:
Patience! One more day, sorry, I didn't quite finish the post. Ended up getting busy with other stuff and then I actually had to play my turns. It's gonna be a very good post, totally worth the wait, you'll see!
What's your 0% gold rate? I'm not sure you have the right gold:beaker ratio there. Say you make Xgpt and Ybpt at 0%. Then changing between 0% and 100% is trading X-1550g for 4277-Yb.
Agree with TBS, something is (way) off there. Merchant is still great, but not quite THAT great. Meanwhile, are you figuring base beakers (the nber in the top left corner of the screen) or effective beakers (actual progress after prereq and known tech bonii applied)? Cuz while your empire wide multiplier cannot be 300%, the effective beakers are going to cover some of the gap in many cases.
Interesting stuff though, G.sci bulbs get nerfed hard by the new known tech bonus. Badly so if several people know your bulb target.
Ah, I see what you're saying, but my 0% bpt rate is just 18bpt, truly a drop in the bucket. So, my eyeball approximation isn't so bad, but you're right that my general formulation is wrong. I was implicitly rounding. My 0% gpt is ~2400 without wealth builds. So, we can say that I gain (4277-18) + (4277-18)*(2100-1550)/1550)=5770 beakers. This isn't quite right either, because that 1550 number includes whatever number of merchant specialists I'm still running, so I'd really have to subtract those out too. But, either way, it is easy to see that the Great Merchant is far better than the Great Scientist. It really puts into picture why Gavagai and I fell so far behind Gawdzak - if 2100 gold translates into 5700 beakers, then 8000 gold translates into...? Probably close to the remaining cost of Flight and Radio put together, after you factor in prereq and KTB etc.
You might be wondering why my 0% bpt is so low. The reason is that I switched out of Rep in my last GA. I realized that PS was a better economic civic for me because a.) a lot of my specialists were in filler cities, and could be reasonably replaced with railroaded tundra/ice hill mines (5 yield instead of 6 yield when building wealth or research) and b.) I knew war with Gavagai, Gawdzak, or 2metra would generate some serious war weariness, and the indusrial-era techs would obsolete all of my market resources (whales/ivory/furs all gone), and finally c.) I would generate more income by selectively building wealth in low-output cities while high-output cities concentrated on military production, for the same overall military output as before where I was building military everywhere. (essentially converting the bonus hammers from PS into gold)
(April 28th, 2015, 12:20)Ceiliazul Wrote: Agree with TBS, something is (way) off there. Merchant is still great, but not quite THAT great. Meanwhile, are you figuring base beakers (the nber in the top left corner of the screen) or effective beakers (actual progress after prereq and known tech bonii applied)? Cuz while your empire wide multiplier cannot be 300%, the effective beakers are going to cover some of the gap in many cases.
Interesting stuff though, G.sci bulbs get nerfed hard by the new known tech bonus. Badly so if several people know your bulb target.
I'm just figuring in base, not including KTB or prereq bonuses. "Conveniently," Fight gets no prereq bonus so I'm only getting an extra 8% beakers from Gawdzak knowing the tech.
GermanJoey's illustrated guide to late-game filler cities!
... what, you thought this was going to be some epic military analysis? Perhaps a showcase of my best cities, or maybe pages upon pages of rambling polemics on the politics of this game? Perhaps a treatise on my plans for the future? No, this is all about the worst part of any empire, the filler! In this game I've really come to appreciate the filler city, possibly because 75% of my cities could be classified as them to various degrees. In short, it's all about squeezing something out of where others see nothing and then doing it with enough scale such that you get something substantial after all. I'll show you how to build crappy, low-output cities that generate a profit for you that you didn't even know it was possible to get!
As we've had a view of the entire world map for some time now, I've noticed many civs have done a poor job of claiming productive land that didn't equate to what they thought the BFC of a good city should look like. Portugal left its southern cape unclaimed for ages, Korea and Egypt left a whole civ's worth of of land unsettled, and finally Zulu and Sumeria left ridiculous amounts of ice idle for huge portions of the game. (Gawdzak, to his credit, has greatly rectified his situation in recent turns) To be sure, settling into ice instead of lush grasslands is a terrible feeling, especially if you look around the map and see your rivals digging into green while you scratch dust and dirt.
At any rate, this guide will focus on showing you what to look for when planning your fillers and give some examples of what fillers can achieve. It also focuses on RtR mod, which has better economic civics (Free Market, Mercantalism in 2.0.7.4+, and State Property) relevant to fillers. Thus, for the most part, our objective will be to maximize the income we gain from fillers and will thus build infrastructure towards that goal. However, fillers are even more important in BTS/ToW, where the whip and the draft is still un-nerfed. There, it'll be much more the case that you should focus on building fillers into whipping posts, which means that for the most part you'll need only granaries, farms, and a barracks, and maybe a lighthouse for seafood.
What is a "Late Game Filler" and what can it do for me?
Fillers, in general, are support cities usually intended to capture the output that can be generated from a single thing, often an isolated tile, usually a food resource (but not always). That's in contrast to "real" cities, which tend to be planned based on their entire BFC. Fillers are just happy to add whatever net profit they can so that the "real" cities can focus on more important tasks. Early fillers tend to have a goal like "keep good tiles working while the main city does other things" or "get ICTR." In the late game, your cities and infrastructure should be fairly mature and thus that kind of filler is no longer relevant. However, good land is also long gone at this stage of the game, and yet you're still in constant competetive tension with your rivals. What can you do to get a leg up on them, even a small one, when no new expansion or infrastructure options are available? Enter the late-game filler!
And what does this so-called late-game filler look like? Just check out this piece of garbage:
It's pretty much one of the worst cities you've ever seen, right? What empire would ever want a city like this? Take a look at the upper-left of the screen and notice that the city brings in 53 total income - wow! (adding gold+beakers together for simplicity) Subtract ~14gpt for city maintenance and civic expenses, and this city generates a net profit of 39. If we were still in Representation, we'd be even higher - 45 profit. If this doesn't sound like a lot, think about it this way - that's as much as a bank+library+observatory brings in TOGETHER for some of my better commerce cities (e.g. Claretin), except we spent only 100 hammers and 15 worker turns to create ThreeWordPhrase while Claretin needs 440 hammers to build those commerce multipliers.
Who Can Build Fillers?
Anybody can build fillers, but some leaders have better traits than others. I think only Cha has nothing to offer the filler. Organized is the king late-game filler trait, because cheap lighthouses, cheap courthouses, and even cheap factories are huge boons. Half-priced civics also help increase the overall profit of a filler as each additional pop point will end up costing less. Gawdzak has recently started spamming iceball fillers, I presume he took a look at some of mine after a recent map-trade, did the math to see if I was crazy or not, and realized how good they actually were. Protective is probably the second-best filler trait, as a cheap granary will get it up and running fast. Agg (lower maintenance), Imp (cheap settlers), Cre (fast expansion onto ocean seafood), Ind (cheap forges for hammer-fillers), and Fin (better coast) all also have some kind of great bonus for fillers. My Exp isn't ordinarily so good, but is amazing here with Carthage because of the Cothon. I believe that Rome and Khmer, two other civs with Exp-enhanced UB, would also have some pretty solid fillers. Finally, I theorize Phi could squeeze Great People out of their fillers while their core works GA-enhanced tiles, and Spi can use OR, whipping, and drafting to get their late-game fillers to produce more and earlier.
When should I start spamming fillers?
While you might settle some strategic fillers early, for example a crappy city intended to help a capital work cottages, to claim an island for early ICTR, or to solidify a border against a neighbor, you generally should always settle good spots before filler spots. You only have so many hammers to put into settlers and you want to get the most out of each one of them. In additon, your expenses will increase exponentially for each new city you build. That's because there's two components to city maintenance: Distance and Number of Cities (NOC). Distance is based on city pop and the distance to your palace, and is essentially the additional cost to your empire specific to that particular city. NOC maintenance, however, is spread across all cities. When you found a new city, the NOC cost goes up in all the rest of your cities too! City pop also factors into this, so the NOC maintenance will look lower in your new city compared to older ones, making it difficult to tell why your expenses go up so much when you found a new city when the city's individual maintenance on the city screen actually doesn't look so bad.
Luckily, NOC maintenance eventually his a cap at 8gpt (or 6gpt for an Agg leader, like me in this game). Again, this is partly based on city population. However, there eventually comes a point where the NOC factor rises so much that even size-1 cities will have 8gpt NOC maintenance. Lucky you, you've hit the "Conqueror's Plateau", where adding new cities finally does only cost the amount you see on the city screen! Great news, now is probably the time to start spamming fillers! That is, it's time to start spamming them as long as they're profitable. For that, you need some civics first: either Free Market, Mercantilism+Rep (in RtR 2.0.7.4.), or State Property. Each of these civics gives some kind of semi-fixed per-city bonus, which tends to single-handedly put your filler cities over the break-even profit point. For example, lets say you settle a new city that has 3gpt distance maintenance and 8gpt NOC maintenance, for 11gpt - plus another hidden ~1 gpt for extra civics upkeep due to the extra population point. The city produces 9cpt from trade routes off the bat, not including civics, another 1cpt from the city tile, and finally a coast tile for a total of 12cpt income. At 0% slider, that means the city actually only breaks even, which doesn't seem worth 100 hammers for a settler. Now, the city could eventually grow to take 10 more coast tiles, for additional income of ~6gpt (subtracting out the extra distance and civic maintenance) at 0% slider. Now we're getting somewhere, but still, it doesn't seem that great as it'll take a long time before it's generating even that pitiful income. However, now lets factor civics in. Free Market increases its trade route income from 9 to 16, meaning that our income goes from 0gpt->7gpt at 0% slider. At the size where it's working 10 more coast tiles, the FM bonus means that we'll get some better routes in here too, so now our route income is probably around 25cpt. Thus, at size 11 the city's income increases from 6gpt to 32gpt, a truly huge difference! On the other hand, Mercantilism+Rep adds 12 beakers/gold per turn, so we can say that at size 0 we have a 0gpt->12gpt income, and at size 10 a 6gpt->18gpt income. Still very good, particularly if our filler cities were all small. Finally, SP doesn't shine so much economically compared to the other two, as it only eliminates the distance maintenance. Thus we go from 0gpt->3gpt at size 0 and 6gpt->13gpt at size 11. However, the extra food from workshops and watermills can really help get your filler productive faster, so you shouldn't write it off completely.
Types of Fillers
I've narrowed it down for y'all to four main types of filler city:
True Fillers
Island Fillers
Dumpster Fillers
Strategic Fillers
I'll go through them one by one.
True Fillers
True Fillers ™ are the archetype of other filler cities and where they get their name. These are cities that are intended to plug holes in your dotmap to work tiles other cities can't reach or can't work. They're often intended to support other "main" cities; taking and working gold mines when the main city wants to grow, taking cottages when the main city needs hammers to build infrastructure, taking food when the main city is happy-capped, and then giving all those up without a fuss when the main is ready again. The output of these cities will pale in comparison to their "mains" but should still be non-negligible.
Examples:
Megatokyo is my last and most recent settlement. It's actually got no food at all!! I grew it up to size 2 with a single grassland farm that's since become a workshop. The plan for this city is to first produce a granary and lighthouse via a pair of workshops, then farm them at Bio to let the city grow onto all its coast, and then finally convert those farms back to workshops for a different, larger city to its north to keep.
Santiago Dos was one of the Korean cities I took in our third war, and was briefly owned by the Portuguese. It's got a fantastic food source, a 6f pig pasture, but not much else to speak of. Much of its BFC overlaps two other, far, far superior cities (including Maracana), and so it only gets to keep what it can hold close to its chest. Still, with the help of some chops on some of the last remaining forests on the map this guy was eventually able to complete a coal plant and has produced quite a bit of military for me already.
This city isn't a late-game filler at all, but I wanted to show it anyways as its a good example of a filler utilizing tile-swapping to help its main cities. There's a few good tiles in Twokinds' BFC, but unfortunately it was only planted because those tiles, for the most part, did not fit well into the better BFCs of other cities nearby. Twokinds, for much of its early life, thus worked the two other mines in its BFC without growing beyond size 2 or 3 while its "main" cities of Odd Patriot and Klurfville needed to grow, giving up its oasis to 3CD. After those cities maxed-out on size, I let them keep their mines permanently. I'm considering giving up that oasis to Odd Patriot permanently at Biology, and letting Twokinds starve down to size 8. That's OK, I won't be missing much and I'd rather have OP be stronger.
Here's a 6-yield (3/0/3) tile unclaimed anywhere else. Why let it go to waste, especially since it can also pick up another 2 commerce from an unclaimed coast? At any rate, the relatively high output of this city is almost entirely thanks to the Cothon and the Free Market civic.
Another 1-tile wonder... Again, why let a 0/5/3 tile go to waste, eh? Look at this city's income - 33 bpt at break-even expenses. It would take 8 cities like this to equal my capital's bpt income at 100%, but guess what - I actually do have about 8 cities like this. You might say, Joey, that's all well and good, but your capital sucks ass. And, to be sure, my capital of GoatKCD is certainly no Zoo, yet it is still the best commerce city in my empire, so it's still pretty good that I can double that income via cities like this!
Islands
Islands are one of the earliest fillers you'll likely settle, in order to get ICTR to boost your early economy after hard REXing. It's also one of the easiest fillers to understand as they're a mix of all three other filler types. You settle an island, you get a bit of everything. They'll have very little land, thus very little production, so you want to settle islands while you still have slavery if you can, as whipping in infrastructure out of fish bones and clam shells is far easier than working a single workshop for eons. Islands also tend have strategic importance of expanding your borders into otherwise unclaimed-territory and thus protect your core from naval invasion by acting as a "crumple-zone" that slows-down your enemy and gives you more time to prepare a response. And, last but not least, they're more likely than other fillers to generate a tidy profit from trade routes and coast.
A word regarding Non-Financial Lighthouse Coast (NFLHC). NFLHC will be a major amount of the value you'll be claiming with the island-type filler, or indeed, fillers in general. Everybody knows that NFLHC as is not a great tile, but I'm here to tell you that... that actually that's still true. It really is not a great tile. Almost every improved tile is preferrable to NFLHC in almost every case. NFLHC is really only something you'd want to work if you have no other food-neutral tiles to work, and often not even then if the opportunity cost to grow onto the coast is too high to be worth it. (for example, you wouldn't care too much about coast in your HE city, as you just want to maximize hammers per turn). But does that mean that NFLHC worthless? No! You'll want to use your fillers to reclaim as many of these forgotten tiles as you can. Even considering the additional civic expenses from an extra pop point, NFLHC still nets a small profit. Food neutral + net profit = the more the better. Also remember that NFLHC gets a +50% boost from Golden Ages, a non-negligible amount of income over the course of such a tile's lifetime. Add that all up, and you'll find that they're worth the fairly small amount of effort it takes to get them worked. (That's very good news for an empire like mine, as I think half the tiles I control are NFLHC. )
I think a better way to think of NFLHC is to think of them as bundled into a set of the final tiles your city works. Now, imagine that together they form a sort of super-cottage. they're some kind of weird super-cottage. If you work this super cottage for some number of turns, it eventually grows in size and adds +1c. (2c - 1g for the civic upkeep) It's still food neutral and brings in an additional point of income, just like a grassland cottage, right? This super-cottage grows differently than other cottages, in that it has a non-constant growth time nor is it boosted by techs or civics like Printing Press or Free Speech, but to compensate that it has a higher ceiling on its final level. It's not so bad in that case, right?
Well, yes, it is. But again, the story here is that something is still better than nothing!
Examples:
Another example that's not really a late-game filler, as I settled this at the start of the Ren era IIRC. But, it's a good example of what a mature island filler can look like. octopus pie was a bridge city that let me expand two others towards Gawdzak, and was instrumental in eventually claiming the 4-city island north of Furungy's capital. It's since grown onto quite a lot of coast and eventually built quite a lot of infrastructure along the way, all produced from that pair of workshops. Growing vs Buildering was a constant tradeoff here.
Alice Grove is a newer filler; I kept it small for awhile, working just the bronze while another nearby city used the crab to finish growing to max-size. Once that city was growing, I let AG grow to claim more coastal tiles.
Sinfest is one of my better hammer-producing fillers, able to 4-turn battleships and destroyers, and also acts as an important airship base to spy on Gawdzak's core. I swapped that clam around with another island filler for much of its lifetime, although it's pretty much capped out now.
Dumpsters
These cities are defined by the fact that the land around them is completely garbage, hence the name. They might have a single good food resource (or two bad ones), giving you something to work with, but unfortunately every other tile is junk - tundra, ice, desert, or maybe plains if you're lucky. In the industrial era, however, some decent improvements can be built on these awful tiles. Workshops on river-tundra are worth 4h1c, watermills and windmills 1f2h2c with Electricity (2f2h2c with SP!), and railroaded mines are worth 5h. Being able to share food can be really important to cities like this, as you often only need to grow them up to size 6-8 or so. You let them grow with some other city's food, then level off and give the food back, and voila, now you're working another 6-8 tiles you weren't before. Remember that if your city won't grow above size 6 or so, then it is unlikely that it is efficient to build a granary in a city like this unless you're piloting a Pro leader.
With Dumpsters, we have two subcategories here, Hammerballs and Iceballs:
Hammerballs
The primary goal for these cities is to simply produce as many hammers as possible. You'll want to use them to build late-era support units, like transports, explorers, caravels, machine-guns, etc, while your main production cities focus on building the backbone of your army like Tanks, Infantries, Destroyers, Battleships, etc. As these cities are typically nowhere near irrigateable land, (which is why they're dumpster fillers to begin with!), they will get no benefit from Biology. Thus, if you have a granary in one, make sure to remember to eventually drain the food bin as otherwise that's free production you're giving up.
Examples:
Whomp! Comics is an incredibly mediocre city, but a mediocre city produces more hammers than no city at all. It's already pumped a few infantry for me, and with the advent of the coal event I've decided to enhance it with a coal plant too. I have not yet drained the food box here as I was a bit busy with railroads, but two miners are in-process of converting that windmill to a mine. It's only temporary though, and they'll change it back to a windmill once the food box is almost empty.
Sonichu wastes more coast tiles than other other city of mine. But, it can't be helped. A single plains sheep is not a great source of food, and thus it would take forever to grow onto all this coast. On the other hand, there was immediate hammer potential in its remaining tiles, as many of its better ones were claimed by a superior city to the south. So, I ignored the coast, saved 60h on the lighthouse, and just let the city go to work immediately.
An older filler, Single Asian Female is between three strong cities, working the tiles that didn't quite fit into their BFCs. So, it's somewhere between a hammerball and a True Filler. I skipped a coal plant here but I think I might end up getting one next, once this Infantry is done. Even without the extra hammer multipliers, it still produces troops every 6 or 7 turns or so, pretty decent! It's already produced quite a few so far. I didn't get a lighthouse here to claim the coast because there's only 4 tiles worth and I needed to get military produced in this area ASAP, which is no longer as much of a concern with railroads and transport chains running.
Ghuzz is the Ren-era barb city that popped up below Korea. It's got some truly horrid land, but - a food makes anything possible. It'll eventually cap out at 15h and 13c from tiles and specialists, and another 26c from trade routes. Not bad, eh?
Ctrl+Alt+Del is the sister-city of Ghuzz, and they've swapped around that deer between them more often between them than a pair of stranded, hitching hillbillys. It'll eventually cap out at 14h and 20c from tiles and specialists, and another 26c from trade routes.
Iceballs
Iceballs are truly the worst kind of filler. They're typified by a food resource and lots of ice, hence the name. However, they prove that you can do a hell of a lot with just a single food resource.
Examples:
You've already seen 3WP. A crab, a couple coast, and couple windmills, and yet it produces 39 income per turn for me after expenses, including the unseen civic maintenance. Beautiful.
Interestingly, I've found that iceballs could potentially be used to squeeze out a great-person - trash tiles are worth less than a rep specialist, and since you don't need to grow then you might as well start working those specialists right away, right? Greasy Grossman got close to a Great Merchant, but eventually I hopped out of rep and it made more sense to work the 5-yield ice mines than 3-yield specialists. It'd be interesting to see this kind of filler with Rome (for the forum), the Parthenon, or a Philo leader. I think I changed my mind about the factory here, it will take too long to finish. The forge should be alright though.
What's this, no ice? No! Desert instead, and floodplains instead of a crab. It works out to about the same. As I mentioned some months ago, I mis-settled this city, it should have been 1N to claim the lake. However, it's still proven pretty productive and has already claimed every tile it wants. I'll convert that farm into another workshop and then let it fill up on specialists until it runs out of food.
Strategic Fillers
These are cities you're not settling for profit, but just to claim specific tiles. There's not much to say about these as its hard to fit them into a specific type. They could be culture-crushed or out in the middle of nowhere, but either way the point of the city isn't to be productive but rather just to exist. Be very careful with this kind of city! Make sure your strategic objective actually makes sense and is worth it to you - don't expect the income of the city to balance a gain/loss equation if planting a city like this incites a war!
Also, be very careful not to create an easy-to-take port that lets your rivals flood Commandos into your core!
Example:
Not much to say here; I settled this city simply to capture vision in this central area of my empire. I can use it as a port or an airship base and that's all it's good for. With the help of two golden ages, it even got a cothon up!
This by all means is not an exhaustive list of all my fillers, but I hope this gives you a taste on what you can do with them!
Quote:Then changing between 0% and 100% is trading X-1550g for 4277-Yb.
Er, whoops, that should be X+1550g. You make enough gold at 0% to cover the 1550 expense and generate X gold.
So it looks like 3950g at 0% slider or 4250b at 100% slider. Which sounds a lot more realistic to me.
Anyway, looking forward to this update.
Hmm, I see, we're looking at it differently. What I want to know is how many extra beakers I'll get that I didn't have before, while what you want to know is how much does a GM vs a GS jump me forward in the tech race. I think your way is fairer, now that I think about it. So, let's put it like, "how many turns of research did the great person gain for me in the end?." Thus, you'd have to end up subtract out your civ's base income for the GM.
So, how do we compare for flight, if the GS could actually bulb into flight? The GS calculation is still easy, as its (bulbed beakers)/(100% beakers * KTB * prereq bonus). Here, it's approximately 3500/(4277*1.08*1) = 0.7577 turns forward. The GM, on the other hand, is something like ((beakers gained from bonus gold) - (gold and beakers gained otherwise)) / (beakers at 100%). We can find this out by assuming we have 0 gold in the bank when we use the great merchant, then run at 100% for one turn, and then at exact break-even for the next turn. Which means we get, since we get more than 1 turn worth of expenses:
(4277-18)*(1 + leftover%) - 2400 - 2*18 = bonus beakers
(4277-18)*(1 + (2100-1550)/1550)) - 2400 - 2*18 = 3334 bonus beakers, divided by 4277 = 0.7795 turns forward. Still better than the GS, but not nearly as much.
It also looks like, from looking at these formulas, that the GM does relatively even better on a tech with better KTB and prereqs, and does relatively worse the higher your gold income is as compared to your expenses. So, a GM is relatively better for me as compared to for an Org leader, like Gawdzak.
Got graphs back on Gawdzak at least now though.
So, my eyeball approximation isn't so bad, but you're right that my general formulation is wrong. I was implicitly rounding. My 0% gpt is ~2400 without wealth builds. So, we can say that I gain (4277-18) + (4277-18)*(2100-1550)/1550)=5770 beakers. This isn't quite right either, because that 1550 number includes whatever number of merchant specialists I'm still running, so I'd really have to subtract those out too. But, either way, it is easy to see that the Great Merchant is far better than the Great Scientist. It really puts into picture why Gavagai and I fell so far behind Gawdzak - if 2100 gold translates into 5700 beakers, then 8000 gold translates into...? Probably close to the remaining cost of Flight and Radio put together, after you factor in prereq and KTB etc.
You make enough gold at 0% to cover the 1550 expense and generate X gold. 
)
