Universal Suffrage v Representation

[fed1943]

Unless last changed, golden ages last for 8 turns,not 20.

So, 500 gold/turn, from hammers and commerce taken together.

So, cities+pop.=> 250 (and with all worked tiles outputing hammers

and commerce). Not easy.

Golden ages are usefull, but not so much.

Best regards,

[MikeH]

Does how long they last depend what speed you are playing on?

[couerdelion]

My golden ages are not worth 4000 gold. They are worth 8,000 They need to GPs so each one of those generates the 4000g figure.

To calculate the value, I simply looked at the different values for science and gold (from the finance manager screen) and production mfg. (from the information screen) just before a GA ended and immediately after. Possibly even understated since growth and building completions would affect the “after” figures.

The fall in manufacturing was something like 270 hammers!! It surprised me a little too.

The loss of gold and science was around 300-400 per turn.

The period of the GA was 10 turns on Epic speed – it is 8 turns on Standard speed and 20 turns on Marathon. I do not understand why the numbers are not in the 1/1.5/3 ratio as it is for other figures.

The key reason to run a GA is when you have a large empire and you are working a large number of production/commerce tiles. Riverside workshops, watermills and windmills are the real winners here along with the standard production/commerce specials.

If you do not have at least 20 cities then I would not use GPs in this way unless the game was near the end

[Diadem]

Well let's assume that 50% of your tiles produce both commerce and hammers, 25% produces hammers and 25% produces commerce. If we furthermore rate 1 hammer at 2 commerce and 1 commerce at 1.5 gold (library / university or market/grocer built) we get that every tile you work gives you 3.375 gold, or 33.75 gold for an entire golden age.

That means you need about 237 working population (so not counting specialists) for your golden age to be worth it.

Simply put: If you have that much population working effectively you have already won the game anyway and what your golden age does is completely irrelevant.

For example in my current game I have 205 total population. 40 of those however I just captured in the last few turns during a war. So my real population is something like 165. At least 12 of those are working as specialists, probably a few more. So 150 total population working my lands.

And I'm way, way, way ahead of the competition. So far in fact that I've already stopped playing really seriously and I'm instead fooling around with time-consuming things like rushbuying world wonders for no reason at all

In other words: No way that a golden age is worth that much in a realistic game where you haven't yet won.

[Blake]

My rule of thumb is that unless my empire is excessiely large (ie large/huge map probably with some conquest) then in the late game, the best usages are:
GM: Cash bomb.
GS: Lightbulb.
GE: Plop a wonder or settle in IW city to accelerate SS parts/projects.
GA: GAge fodder.
GP: GAge fodder.

Take a look at using GE + GA/GP for an GA to accelerate SS parts. Take the Ironworks city (the most critical one for SS parts) and assume that 15 tiles are hammer-bearing. In a 8 turn GA it thus generates an extra +120 raw hammers. In contrast when settled it takes 40 turns (5x longer) to generate those 120 hammers. However for a production-starved space race it may well be that the Ironworks city spends more than 40 turns building SS parts and that settling will actually be a viable choice.

Settling GE's in Ironworks city is obviously a good deal before the Space race starts, when I go with IW+NE and run like 5 Engineers I can often settle about 4 GE's for +12 raw hammers per turn - which would be an over +20% production increase (assuming an averagely good IW base of 40h/turn).

[couerdelion]

It sort of becomes a circular argument if you look at it like that. The whole point of valuing golden ages is to offer a comparison to other uses of the GP. As a general rule

Large Empire -> Golden Age

but using your argument

Large Empire -> Already won game so no point in playing on

For those who wish to play through to the end of the game slowly, then by all means lightbulb a tech or settle the GP. To do it more quickly, use a specialist heavy economy to blast out a few Golden Ages.

At it happens, I have already won the game but there is still the small matter of sending some large fleets to some of the neighbouring continents to explain all this to the others. You can build a big army during an industrial age Golden Age.

p.s. I did get a Prophet and decided to skip on the shrine gold of 60gpt and get the Golden Age (now worth 8300gold (using hammer = 1.5g). At 1h=2g, the value of the GA is nearly 10000g.

p.p.s. It's probably also worth mentioning that the victory objective will affect these decisions a little. Blake makes some good arguments for the Space Race and Cultural victories would also dictate different priorities for GArtists