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- It turns out that sometimes you do gain a significant advantage from micromanaging production overflow. Whenever you have a conditional production bonus, like +150% to wonder production, overflow shields from the previous build do not get the bonus. Effectively, you've lost almost 60% of your overflow, and that's a pretty big deal. There is a bit of tricky programming involved in fixing this -- you don't want to grant +100% for Stone to overflow production when the Stone was just hooked up this turn -- but it should be quite doable.
- On a similar note, chopping forests delivers the best value before you complete a Forge. Before completing a Forge, whenever you chop a forest you get the equivalent of 30 "honest" shields -- as others have noted, conditional production bonuses are applied. However, the programmer forgot to apply this to Forge/Factory production. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be fixed.
- Cottages advance during Anarchy -- make sure you work them all, since there's no reason to work any other tiles! (Yeah, this should be fixed.)
- Since interrupted worker actions can be continued later, you frequently want workers to spend single turns working on moderate priority improvements while en route to a higher priority improvement, because it doesn't cost you anything. For example, if your worker just finished improving a special, and there's an unimproved grassland special two squares away with river grassland in between, you should spend this turn moving a space to the river grassland and starting a farm/cottage, then next turn, first thing you do is interrupt that worker before he uses up his movement for this turn, and get him starting on the special just as early as he otherwise would have.
This helps neutralize the advantage of Fast Workers (though they are still the undisputed king of early game chopping). It also reduces road spam.
Either this sort of micromanagement should be embraced by the designers, in which case there should be some interface option to address the problem of workers silently using up their move for the current turn continuing an improvement when you actually want them to do something else (perhaps holding down a key like Alt when starting an improvement makes the worker spend only one turn on it), or something should be changed such that optimizations of the sort I described above are no longer possible/worthwhile.
- Bureaucracy's trade bonus is multiplicative (though its production bonus is merely additive). I try to delay revolutions until I can usefully switch 2-3 civics at once (and coordinate my production and research to minimize the gap between discovering two useful civics -- e.g. completing Pyramids and discovering Banking on the same turn). I thought Bureaucracy was insignificant enough in an 8-10 city empire that I was better off delaying its adoption 25 or more turns while I patiently assembled the Representation-Mercantilism combo; now I strongly suspect that in my current game, I couldn't have been more wrong, since I was Elizabeth and thus could rush an Academy with Library and 17 Scientist specialist turns. I'm gonna reload that today and see how Bureaucracy-Library-Academy plays out; I expect to be impressed. +162.5% to capital research, increasing to +200% when the University completes, yum...
- On a similar note, chopping forests delivers the best value before you complete a Forge. Before completing a Forge, whenever you chop a forest you get the equivalent of 30 "honest" shields -- as others have noted, conditional production bonuses are applied. However, the programmer forgot to apply this to Forge/Factory production. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be fixed.
- Cottages advance during Anarchy -- make sure you work them all, since there's no reason to work any other tiles! (Yeah, this should be fixed.)
- Since interrupted worker actions can be continued later, you frequently want workers to spend single turns working on moderate priority improvements while en route to a higher priority improvement, because it doesn't cost you anything. For example, if your worker just finished improving a special, and there's an unimproved grassland special two squares away with river grassland in between, you should spend this turn moving a space to the river grassland and starting a farm/cottage, then next turn, first thing you do is interrupt that worker before he uses up his movement for this turn, and get him starting on the special just as early as he otherwise would have.
This helps neutralize the advantage of Fast Workers (though they are still the undisputed king of early game chopping). It also reduces road spam.
Either this sort of micromanagement should be embraced by the designers, in which case there should be some interface option to address the problem of workers silently using up their move for the current turn continuing an improvement when you actually want them to do something else (perhaps holding down a key like Alt when starting an improvement makes the worker spend only one turn on it), or something should be changed such that optimizations of the sort I described above are no longer possible/worthwhile.
- Bureaucracy's trade bonus is multiplicative (though its production bonus is merely additive). I try to delay revolutions until I can usefully switch 2-3 civics at once (and coordinate my production and research to minimize the gap between discovering two useful civics -- e.g. completing Pyramids and discovering Banking on the same turn). I thought Bureaucracy was insignificant enough in an 8-10 city empire that I was better off delaying its adoption 25 or more turns while I patiently assembled the Representation-Mercantilism combo; now I strongly suspect that in my current game, I couldn't have been more wrong, since I was Elizabeth and thus could rush an Academy with Library and 17 Scientist specialist turns. I'm gonna reload that today and see how Bureaucracy-Library-Academy plays out; I expect to be impressed. +162.5% to capital research, increasing to +200% when the University completes, yum...
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