[SPOILERS]PB46: (In Search of) Fine Foreign Dining, by Hannibal of England

[Krill]

Turn 033

It's late and I decided I didn't want to go to bed after losing a 3% odds battle against a scout which would then fuck up all my micro, so I dumped the warrior onto the wheat this turn. I can manage all of the scout move eventualities this way, and I doubt TBW is so suicidal he declares war and leaves the scout in whacking range. I reckon he moves the scout NW next turn, but the wiser move is to stay away from the warrior because he doesn't know if I'll change my mind. If he fortifies in place I will seriously reconsider attacking because I need to be able to move teh warrior out to act as a fog buster, I can't afford to leave it at home on scout defense duty.




Warrior2 due eot37.





Is someone building Henge? 11hpt seems high.

Second cities:
T29: OH/Hitru (IMP), Borsche (EXP).
T30: GKC (Wut? FIN/ORG, what did he do to enable this, he has to have cut corners somewhere).
T31: BeardBeard (PRO/IMP, don't see how he can have a granary), Superdeath (AGG/CHM, same questions as with GKC).
T32: Pindicator (EXP), Gavagai (starting to seem more reasonable for double worker openings).
T33: TBW (EXP).

That's half the field, but only 3 of the EXP leaders and two of the IMP leaders. Interesting stratification.

[GermanJoey]

don't attack TBW over a scout; first of all, he's more of the mindset that if you're cool, he'll be cool. secondly, the meta at badgame is that nobody will ever cornstep, except against beardbeard, because everyone knows that everybody else will go absolutely apeshit revenge-mode if they get corn-stepped and thus nobody will ever do it.

[GermanJoey]

What's the reasoning behind the Bureaucracy/Nationhood upkeep switcheroo? I'm not aware of it being perceived as being overpowered, quite the opposite, in fact... I remember using Nationhood pretty effectively in PB37, but that required a pretty involved long-term and map-specific setup to make that work, and I still switched in and out of it a bunch of times, IIRC.

The long answer is quite involved. The reasoning is one of those that starts in a completely different area, in this case, cottage pillaging, tech cost scaling and Emancipation being brought forward. Below is the current rule regarding cottage/hamlet/village/town pillaging:

Villages: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission or pillaged. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers)

Towns: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers). Acts as cities. [Identical functionality as forts, for the purposes of rebasing air units, canals, city defense and city attack promotions etc].

So what this means, is that Hamlets and Cottages can still be pillaged into nothing, but Villages can only be removed by being improved over. Towns can get knocked down to Villages but no further (so instead of spending 70 turns to get a cottage back to a Town, it only takes 40 turns, not much of an improvement).

This means that captured cities may well lose city infrastructure (this is something I want to discuss after the game, because we probably want to streamline it a bit and remove randomness) but should not lose tile infrastrucutre that requires turns to regrow. Farms, mines, whatever, these are easily fixable, but to cottages being capturable mean that late game conquests have more commerce avaiable, so tech speed should increase. This is compounded by the tech cost scaling introduction, which lowers the late game tech costs, and suggests that more games should extend being the Rennaisance era, and more games should reach victory conditions such as Space.

Onto Emancipation: This got moved into the Legal civic column, and brought forward to Constitution. It's also free to revolt into, but costs anarchy to revolt out of. Again, players have greater opportunity to fix an economy and to rebuild a tech rate. But the +1 food/-1 commerce to Towns was implemented because without some form of a bonus to the civic itself that limited the opportunity cost of being stuck in the civic longer term. It doesn't matter per se what this long term benefit is, but it is obvious to me that without it Emancipation is still not usable without a definitive plan of how to get out of Emancipation. Emancipation doesn't necessarily speed up the game, but with Free Speech it does give the cottage spam and rush buy economy a longer term opportunity. But with a risk period where Emancipation does not give an economic boost where a civ running it could be invaded.

This puts the Legal Civic Column into an interesting position: All of the civics in this column have a strategic reason to be run. They are not like the Government, Labor or Economy civics, where there is a stepping stone civic (HR, Slavery, Merc) that you want into ASAP because it improves the economy, and out of because thee next bunch of civics are better still. The Legal Civics are like the Religious civics, where you want to pick a civic that fits the strategy you are following at that time.

And so, Vassalage is there for XP in all cities, Bureaucracy is there for the uber capital pushing research, Nationhood is there for quick unit build up and reactivity to others, and Emancipation is there to allow a rebuilt tech output. They are not supposed to be balanced such that any one of these is the "right choice", they need to be balanced such that they are all usable and none of them are invcredibly niche. This also needs to work for various game types (between a 5 player PBEM and a 30 player extravaganza). Some games the civics will be valued differently, but generally it is within the specific game that the civic valuations will be affected by the game state rather than game settings.

Therefore everything else is just finding the right general power level, taking into account the techs that enable the civics. Specifically, Vassalage is almost always available first, but even with a specific tech path, the only other civic available first is Bureaucracy. After that it is Nationhood, then Emancipation. So that weak period that Emancipation has is always going to be able to be exploited by a player running Nationhood unless specifici actiosn are taken before revolting into Emancipation (and dependant on map position, and relative tech, and available MFG and current strength etc etc).

Vassalage got double the unit cost savings. Maybe this was too much of a buff, but really it has to be valued against Emancipation running triple the cottage output. Nationhood had cost increased, because the only way to fit Bureaucracy into this, without giving it additional effects, was to make it scale into a huge map. And making it zero cost does that without changing the core purpose of that civic. Late game Bureaucracy is perhaps not that fantastic in terms of output, but when the saved civic costs go through inflation as well, it makes it a more interesting choice.

Nationhood is perhaps the most swingy of these civics, because the main purposes is to give units, and unless those units are used to take land, there isn't much purpose to it (well, defense from another but you see that is the point of how I am trying to balance the legal civics?)

I'm not saying that this is balanced correctly yet. Perhaps Bureaucracy needs to be no cost with another small buff (ie to city maintenance), and Nationhood needs to be Medium cost. Perhaps Emancipation is broken with the food bonus (although frankly I don't see how because stack the Towns so high and you run out of tiles to use for hammers and you have to run specs, so I think it's self balancing in terms of player recognition and Cash rush penalties. Kremlin times out at Computers, after all).

TBH, I think this is so out of whack I don't even know how to respond to it. How does Bureaucracy need another buff after being dropped to no-cost????? It was already often considered the "one right civic" for that column even when it was high-cost!!! When would anyone ever use any other civic but Bureaucracy the way it is now? Like, even Emancipation (which otherwise seems quite good) doesn't seem worthwhile over no-cost Bureaucracy unless you're Fin and you're planning on also being in Universal Suffrage and Free Speech.

I really don't understand why you slip in massive changes like this into mod updates for stuff that nobody else considered unbalanced in the first place.

[GermanJoey]

Joey, I have a question for you: Why is the general unit creation meta in civ 4 based around building units, and not upgrading pre-built units? Why do we focus on building new units and adding them onto a stack, causing an SoD approach, rather than the old mass upgrade strategies that were used in civ 3?

Because it's too expensive, obviously. First of all, gold-multipliers are anti-synergistic with beaker-multipliers, so people tend to build lots of beaker multipliers and few gold multipliers. This means that gold costs are essentially multiplied by your beaker multipliers. So, e.g., 100g might actually be like 150b. Next, the actual upgrade cost is pretty high. It's low enough that you still want to use it for emergencies, but high enough such that using it otherwise is just terrible: 20g + 3*hammer differential. For example, consider something like upgrading a Knight into a Cuirassier. That costs you 50g for gaining 10h, which might be the same as spending 75b to gain 10h, or a rate of 1:7.5. Consider that one can convert the other way, hammers into beakers, at the rate of 1:1 by building Research. That's super bad!!!

[GermanJoey]

What's the reasoning behind the Bureaucracy/Nationhood upkeep switcheroo? I'm not aware of it being perceived as being overpowered, quite the opposite, in fact... I remember using Nationhood pretty effectively in PB37, but that required a pretty involved long-term and map-specific setup to make that work, and I still switched in and out of it a bunch of times, IIRC.

The long answer is quite involved. The reasoning is one of those that starts in a completely different area, in this case, cottage pillaging, tech cost scaling and Emancipation being brought forward. Below is the current rule regarding cottage/hamlet/village/town pillaging:

Villages: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission or pillaged. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers)

Towns: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers). Acts as cities. [Identical functionality as forts, for the purposes of rebasing air units, canals, city defense and city attack promotions etc].

So what this means, is that Hamlets and Cottages can still be pillaged into nothing, but Villages can only be removed by being improved over. Towns can get knocked down to Villages but no further (so instead of spending 70 turns to get a cottage back to a Town, it only takes 40 turns, not much of an improvement).

This means that captured cities may well lose city infrastructure (this is something I want to discuss after the game, because we probably want to streamline it a bit and remove randomness) but should not lose tile infrastrucutre that requires turns to regrow. Farms, mines, whatever, these are easily fixable, but to cottages being capturable mean that late game conquests have more commerce avaiable, so tech speed should increase. This is compounded by the tech cost scaling introduction, which lowers the late game tech costs, and suggests that more games should extend being the Rennaisance era, and more games should reach victory conditions such as Space.

Onto Emancipation: This got moved into the Legal civic column, and brought forward to Constitution. It's also free to revolt into, but costs anarchy to revolt out of. Again, players have greater opportunity to fix an economy and to rebuild a tech rate. But the +1 food/-1 commerce to Towns was implemented because without some form of a bonus to the civic itself that limited the opportunity cost of being stuck in the civic longer term. It doesn't matter per se what this long term benefit is, but it is obvious to me that without it Emancipation is still not usable without a definitive plan of how to get out of Emancipation. Emancipation doesn't necessarily speed up the game, but with Free Speech it does give the cottage spam and rush buy economy a longer term opportunity. But with a risk period where Emancipation does not give an economic boost where a civ running it could be invaded.

This puts the Legal Civic Column into an interesting position: All of the civics in this column have a strategic reason to be run. They are not like the Government, Labor or Economy civics, where there is a stepping stone civic (HR, Slavery, Merc) that you want into ASAP because it improves the economy, and out of because thee next bunch of civics are better still. The Legal Civics are like the Religious civics, where you want to pick a civic that fits the strategy you are following at that time.

And so, Vassalage is there for XP in all cities, Bureaucracy is there for the uber capital pushing research, Nationhood is there for quick unit build up and reactivity to others, and Emancipation is there to allow a rebuilt tech output. They are not supposed to be balanced such that any one of these is the "right choice", they need to be balanced such that they are all usable and none of them are invcredibly niche. This also needs to work for various game types (between a 5 player PBEM and a 30 player extravaganza). Some games the civics will be valued differently, but generally it is within the specific game that the civic valuations will be affected by the game state rather than game settings.

Therefore everything else is just finding the right general power level, taking into account the techs that enable the civics. Specifically, Vassalage is almost always available first, but even with a specific tech path, the only other civic available first is Bureaucracy. After that it is Nationhood, then Emancipation. So that weak period that Emancipation has is always going to be able to be exploited by a player running Nationhood unless specifici actiosn are taken before revolting into Emancipation (and dependant on map position, and relative tech, and available MFG and current strength etc etc).

Vassalage got double the unit cost savings. Maybe this was too much of a buff, but really it has to be valued against Emancipation running triple the cottage output. Nationhood had cost increased, because the only way to fit Bureaucracy into this, without giving it additional effects, was to make it scale into a huge map. And making it zero cost does that without changing the core purpose of that civic. Late game Bureaucracy is perhaps not that fantastic in terms of output, but when the saved civic costs go through inflation as well, it makes it a more interesting choice.

Nationhood is perhaps the most swingy of these civics, because the main purposes is to give units, and unless those units are used to take land, there isn't much purpose to it (well, defense from another but you see that is the point of how I am trying to balance the legal civics?)

I'm not saying that this is balanced correctly yet. Perhaps Bureaucracy needs to be no cost with another small buff (ie to city maintenance), and Nationhood needs to be Medium cost. Perhaps Emancipation is broken with the food bonus (although frankly I don't see how because stack the Towns so high and you run out of tiles to use for hammers and you have to run specs, so I think it's self balancing in terms of player recognition and Cash rush penalties. Kremlin times out at Computers, after all).

TBH, I think this is so out of whack I don't even know how to respond to it. How does Bureaucracy need another buff after being dropped to no-cost????? It was already often considered the "one right civic" for that column even when it was high-cost!!! When would anyone ever use any other civic but Bureaucracy the way it is now? Like, even Emancipation (which otherwise seems quite good) doesn't seem worthwhile over no-cost Bureaucracy unless you're Fin and you're planning on also being in Universal Suffrage and Free Speech.

I really don't understand why you slip in massive changes like this into mod updates for stuff that nobody else considered unbalanced in the first place.

Like, before I noticed this change I thought Emancipation was a really interesting change to tempt players into actually trying to build cottages again. But, like, in the Ren+ era the difference between a high-cost civic and a no-cost civic can be hundreds of gold per turn when you include inflation. Switching out of Bureau to grow cottages, when most players could just build workshops and run wealth for close to the same output for 1/100th the effort, doesn't seem like it would ever be a smart play. I can't even see wanting to run Vassalage in late-game, much less Nationhood, which was already a civic that most players forgot the existence of.

[Krill]

I think the consideration that gold modifiers are there to support beaker generation is the crux of the issue. If gold modifiers are viewed as production modifiers the valuation changes. Especially when we have different cost libraries, markets and Stock exchanges, and that tech for techs sake is not necessarily strategically sound, after all.

[GermanJoey]

I suppose we might want to lay down how we think various techs look better or worse for our situation compared to normal, with "our situation" meaning our traits and geography, and no consideration given about certain techs being prereqs of others.


Techs that look better than baseline to me:

• Writing - We've got discounted libraries! - This tech is mandatory to
  
• Sailing - Water map with islands to settle! Lighthouse for capital and city 2!
  
• Mathematics - we have slow traits, but have lots of trees. Lets chop those damn things down.
  
• Construction - half price Colosseums, Catapults, yada yada yada. On the other hand, we won't be getting a lotta mileage outta the "roads bridge rivers" bonus...
  
• Feudalism - SERFDOM will be crazy important for us, Cha longbows, also we'll want Vassalage until Constitution.
  
• Machinery - Cha Crossbows, Windmills, Watermills. A city around those flood plains could peak out at a crazy-high HPT.
  
• Aesthetics - an early HE would be nice, if we get an 8 Exp unit via barbs; looks like Marble is available to the south.
  
• Monarchy - We apparently have 21352356252535 wine tiles we can build wineries on, on all of which we get a Fin bonus. Might be able to trade some wines for other happy resources? Or sell them? Or just get drunk and cry about our lack of food?
  
• Literature - TGL on a water map, and we do get a discount on libraries.................... that said, there's probably nowhere we can save enough trees to make this a realistic goal tho.
  

Techs that look worse than baseline to me:

• CoL - Caste doesn't look appealing because we don't have any fucking food to feed workshops. We're also slow REXers and so early Courthouses look less appealing. It could be a way to get a religion for OR, though, which could be important if there's a particular wonder we want. (e.g. TGL)
  
• Iron Working - No jungle to chop, no food to work iron mines.
  
• CS - Bureaucracy. For our capital? *breaks into furious laughter*
  
• Engineering - No food for workshops, so the +1h doesn't matter a lick.
  
• Calendar - I see... a single desert incense and a grass dyes. Plus, we're Cha.
  
• Drama - generally the game's most forgettable technology. We actually have a pretty good Globe spot @ City 2, but I just noticed in the changelog that Nationhood is now High Cost (where it used to be No Cost) and also we'll want to be in Emancipation shortly after that comes available anyways.
  

Remember, this is just compared to a "baseline" situation; e.g. I put Engineering in the bottom category, but it's still an incredible important tech.

Some important points.

The current tech path is Hunting>AH>Writing. This is set in stone, Writing finishes around eot48. We need a library to pop borders at City 2. Sailing is a 140 adjusted beaker tech that should give us about 6 commerce per turn back by the time we can settle it. We need to work out how we build the settlers by T60, because I'm still struggling to see how we get our fourth city by then. But the point holds, Sailing shoud be useful.

Whether we want to use workshops or not is a moot point. We have almost no river tiles able to use a watermill (we have precisely 7 visible tiles), so it's really a comparison between windmills and workshops. The problem as I see it, is that Serfdom is a lot further away than Caste, and we need to decide what we are doing with great people, even if we want Vassalage, Serfdom and Longbows via 5 improved wines (which, it has to be said, would give us a further 25 commerce and +1 happy). This is really a timing issue in terms of when we want to trigger a GA, how long we need slavery for, when we will need court houses, and longbows

My gut feeling is we need to be in Serfdom, but, and this is a big "But", we can only get into that if we have a local MFG lead or a good standing army.

Construction is a purely defensive measure if we only look at catapults, but as you say, it is the key to building two promo units without civics. I reckon this is more of a want than a need TBH, because the real answer IMO is longbows and Xbows. We also have to have hammer cities with barracks to make any real use out of it (wild whipping with abandon to manage an unseen invasion is not something I want to consider right now).

Engineering is still important due to Castles. We'll need them in coastal cities we think can get boated. They still give trade routes, and frankly, anything that gives us commerce or gold can be considered pretty useful.

Ultimately, our expansion will be slow. The capital is stuck on a 7 turn whip cyle for settlers, we don't have any workers, and city 2 has to double whip a library before it gets a good food surplus (and still has to figure out how to build a lighthouse). So I'd focus on the medium term as commerce is going to exceed our hammer or food output for a while. Any tech that gives us something that does not cost food or hammers, or gives us hammers and food, has a higher value to us. I note that this is Maths (better chops), Currency (trade routes), CoL (free border pops), Monarchy (wineries), and Feudalism (Serfdom cuts down worker requirements and free border pops).

Getting a better read on how long we need slavery is a good point. I know we're sending a scout north soon, but do you think that we can squeeze an additional workboat to look around up there too? (TBW did come from the north, right? I actually can't remember now...)

Monarchy as our primary classical-era economic tech... I think may be sad but true, lol...

If we go Math directly after writing, what's our ETA?

[Krill]

What's the reasoning behind the Bureaucracy/Nationhood upkeep switcheroo? I'm not aware of it being perceived as being overpowered, quite the opposite, in fact... I remember using Nationhood pretty effectively in PB37, but that required a pretty involved long-term and map-specific setup to make that work, and I still switched in and out of it a bunch of times, IIRC.

The long answer is quite involved. The reasoning is one of those that starts in a completely different area, in this case, cottage pillaging, tech cost scaling and Emancipation being brought forward. Below is the current rule regarding cottage/hamlet/village/town pillaging:

Villages: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission or pillaged. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers)

Towns: Cannot be destroyed by air bomb mission. Also provides access and tile yields to Copper, Iron, Oil, Coal, Aluminium and Uranium. (Can still be improved over by workers). Acts as cities. [Identical functionality as forts, for the purposes of rebasing air units, canals, city defense and city attack promotions etc].

So what this means, is that Hamlets and Cottages can still be pillaged into nothing, but Villages can only be removed by being improved over. Towns can get knocked down to Villages but no further (so instead of spending 70 turns to get a cottage back to a Town, it only takes 40 turns, not much of an improvement).

This means that captured cities may well lose city infrastructure (this is something I want to discuss after the game, because we probably want to streamline it a bit and remove randomness) but should not lose tile infrastrucutre that requires turns to regrow. Farms, mines, whatever, these are easily fixable, but to cottages being capturable mean that late game conquests have more commerce avaiable, so tech speed should increase. This is compounded by the tech cost scaling introduction, which lowers the late game tech costs, and suggests that more games should extend being the Rennaisance era, and more games should reach victory conditions such as Space.

Onto Emancipation: This got moved into the Legal civic column, and brought forward to Constitution. It's also free to revolt into, but costs anarchy to revolt out of. Again, players have greater opportunity to fix an economy and to rebuild a tech rate. But the +1 food/-1 commerce to Towns was implemented because without some form of a bonus to the civic itself that limited the opportunity cost of being stuck in the civic longer term. It doesn't matter per se what this long term benefit is, but it is obvious to me that without it Emancipation is still not usable without a definitive plan of how to get out of Emancipation. Emancipation doesn't necessarily speed up the game, but with Free Speech it does give the cottage spam and rush buy economy a longer term opportunity. But with a risk period where Emancipation does not give an economic boost where a civ running it could be invaded.

This puts the Legal Civic Column into an interesting position: All of the civics in this column have a strategic reason to be run. They are not like the Government, Labor or Economy civics, where there is a stepping stone civic (HR, Slavery, Merc) that you want into ASAP because it improves the economy, and out of because thee next bunch of civics are better still. The Legal Civics are like the Religious civics, where you want to pick a civic that fits the strategy you are following at that time.

And so, Vassalage is there for XP in all cities, Bureaucracy is there for the uber capital pushing research, Nationhood is there for quick unit build up and reactivity to others, and Emancipation is there to allow a rebuilt tech output. They are not supposed to be balanced such that any one of these is the "right choice", they need to be balanced such that they are all usable and none of them are invcredibly niche. This also needs to work for various game types (between a 5 player PBEM and a 30 player extravaganza). Some games the civics will be valued differently, but generally it is within the specific game that the civic valuations will be affected by the game state rather than game settings.

Therefore everything else is just finding the right general power level, taking into account the techs that enable the civics. Specifically, Vassalage is almost always available first, but even with a specific tech path, the only other civic available first is Bureaucracy. After that it is Nationhood, then Emancipation. So that weak period that Emancipation has is always going to be able to be exploited by a player running Nationhood unless specifici actiosn are taken before revolting into Emancipation (and dependant on map position, and relative tech, and available MFG and current strength etc etc).

Vassalage got double the unit cost savings. Maybe this was too much of a buff, but really it has to be valued against Emancipation running triple the cottage output. Nationhood had cost increased, because the only way to fit Bureaucracy into this, without giving it additional effects, was to make it scale into a huge map. And making it zero cost does that without changing the core purpose of that civic. Late game Bureaucracy is perhaps not that fantastic in terms of output, but when the saved civic costs go through inflation as well, it makes it a more interesting choice.

Nationhood is perhaps the most swingy of these civics, because the main purposes is to give units, and unless those units are used to take land, there isn't much purpose to it (well, defense from another but you see that is the point of how I am trying to balance the legal civics?)

I'm not saying that this is balanced correctly yet. Perhaps Bureaucracy needs to be no cost with another small buff (ie to city maintenance), and Nationhood needs to be Medium cost. Perhaps Emancipation is broken with the food bonus (although frankly I don't see how because stack the Towns so high and you run out of tiles to use for hammers and you have to run specs, so I think it's self balancing in terms of player recognition and Cash rush penalties. Kremlin times out at Computers, after all).

TBH, I think this is so out of whack I don't even know how to respond to it. How does Bureaucracy need another buff after being dropped to no-cost????? It was already often considered the "one right civic" for that column even when it was high-cost!!! When would anyone ever use any other civic but Bureaucracy the way it is now? Like, even Emancipation (which otherwise seems quite good) doesn't seem worthwhile over no-cost Bureaucracy unless you're Fin and you're planning on also being in Universal Suffrage and Free Speech.

I really don't understand why you slip in massive changes like this into mod updates for stuff that nobody else considered unbalanced in the first place.

Like, before I noticed this change I thought Emancipation was a really interesting change to tempt players into actually trying to build cottages again. But, like, in the Ren+ era the difference between a high-cost civic and a no-cost civic can be hundreds of gold per turn when you include inflation. Switching out of Bureau to grow cottages, when most players could just build workshops and run wealth for close to the same output for 1/100th the effort, doesn't seem like it would ever be a smart play. I can't even see wanting to run Vassalage in late-game, much less Nationhood, which was already a civic that most players forgot the existence of.

To be brutally honest, I think your view is anachronistic. Especially regarding Nationhood. The point of these civics is that they support different approaches to the game. I'm not sure that running bureaucracy when some is building 10 modern units per turn is a sound decision.

[Krill]

Re: Maths after Writing, I think mid T60s. I'm not certain how this fits in with the copper city, but when I did a play through I felt that it was awkward and going Sailing into Maths seemed better, and worker>settler after city3 seemed best even without Maths, as we could use all 3 workers to improve copper city then move them the the capital to mine hills. City2 does need any workers and city3 can whip workers.

[GermanJoey]

I think the consideration that gold modifiers are there to support beaker generation is the crux of the issue. If gold modifiers are viewed as production modifiers the valuation changes. Especially when we have different cost libraries, markets and Stock exchanges, and that tech for techs sake is not necessarily strategically sound, after all.

Well, that itself is a side effect of the fact that there's nothing to do with gold but a.) funnel into sliders (mostly meaning tech, but sometimes players will briefly run the EP slider), b.) upgrade units, or c.) rush buildings. The latter is almost never used at all because it comes at a civic that a.) comes very, very late in the game, b.) is available at an otherwise worthless tech, c.) the civic competes with Rep, d.) it boosts an improvement that most players don't build lots of, e.) is mostly too expensive unless you have the Kremlin.

I have doubts as to whether it's even worth "salvaging" upgrades and rush-buying; FFH2 tried doing this and it's just a fucking mess... I guess you could try doing it with a trait for RtR mod? "Always available rush-buying and half-price unit upgrades" might be more interesting than something like Fin's commerce boost.