Starting question: Is this fair????

[couerdelion]

Blake,

The one thing that confuses me a little is how you can run 5 specialists and maintain enough food to produce enough of these to have two settled GS. If you are using one of them to lightbulb Philosophy, you’ll want another for the academy before settling two so need 4 in total.

At standard speed this need 1000 GPP.

With a PHI civ you can get +100% GPP for the first GP and +200% GPP for the second, third and fourth so the unadjusted requirement for GPP is 350 GPP – 50 for the first and 300 for the next three. With 5 specialists, producing 15 GPP, this would require 24 turns.

While this is not a great deal there is still the problem of how to feed those specialist. If you have a good food site in the capital (say pigs and corn), you can support all five specialists but will need a population of 7 – but will need 2 extra points of happiness at Monarch level to keep the specialists working.

But how can you maintain the same level of specialists if your capital is not as food rich?

[Blake]

Starvation. Store up nearly a full bar of food before exceeding the happy cap, then burn it all on max specialists, working only good foold tiles - it's like "pre-running" the specialists.

Once you have Philo you don't need to run as many. Tao comes with a missionary so you can use a second city to generate some of the great scientists - possibly even most of them if the capital has better things to do (and it probably does). Often I can pick up a double seafood site which can easily run 3-4 scientists at size 5-6. It can be good to stick with 2 cities only, so you're guaranteed to get the religions where you want them. Then again if you have both Conf and Tao you can just run whichever one ends up better placed, since Pacifism doesn't need to be well spread.

Obviously if the site is crap for food, then specialists just aren't going to work so well. Choose the strategy for the circumstances. Philo is still very useful though, in that it lets you get by with a lower level of GPP, which is good when starved (ie running less specialists, or getting by on wonder gpp alone).

[couerdelion]

That sort of makes sense if things are shared a little and there is a good synergy between switching from Slavery to Caste since you can whip in some cities before the switch and then use specialists to make sure they do not grow too quickly afterwards.

I’ve got this with my Mali game – comparison with Shaka – and managed a risky CS slingshot with a high food/low production capital. Philo was researched after popping CS and the next two cities were held back until Philosophy was completed.

Now with Caste, the capital has all the food but it wants to work the flood plain villages. City 2 it basically a mixed commerce/production site (with emphasis on the former) having being founded on the site of an iron deposit.

With five specialists it would be losing 6 food per turn so I can run only four and work the corn field too. City 4, however, is just settled and will have sheep, corn and three flood plains. It might just be able to take up the strain to allow the capital to start building things again. At 280 BC, it’s around time I started preparing for some sort of conflict.