Farms and (almost) no cottages

[AppleTheMan]

I'm having a real hard time implementing the strategy of using loads of farms + Caste system. I find that in spite of my large country, I'm always short of cash and behind everyone else in technology no matter what I do. What are your suggestions to this strategy?

I attached my saved game...

I just finished conquering Saladin on my island.
Anakara is my military city
Bursa is my science city.

I'm playing to win domination on Prince. I wanted to try this for real, so I decided to disable the spaceship.

As you can see, I'm still very behind in tech, and I'm quite certain that at this point the other continent has been discovered as someone has recently proved that the world is round.

Any advice would be good!

[AppleTheMan]

Oh, I forgot to mention, it's a marathon game.

[Theben]

You need to have libraries in every city + scientists and merchants. Having only one science city won't cut it.

[wodan11]

What are you doing with your GP?

[AppleTheMan]

GP = Golden age...

Next one is going to take three though, so I'm not sure.

[wodan11]

GP with a SE in the early game... questionable. I presume they were great scientists. Might be better to lightbulb, get Philosophy or Education etc. You might also get a great merchant... consider a trade mission.

[mrp]

I always use Gps to improve cities
I tried to paste on here any way
city size 3
science 28.25
tax 44.00
GPs 3 merchants and 2 prophets
2 regular merchants
with a forum and a library
representation government
It is on the rome Warlord scenario where you can train GP
All you can do with science is improve preaoritian and train GP
Like how about spreading religions and building the temples and make prophets and science guys

[snoopy369]

Golden ages are worth it in a few situations:

1. You're playing a cottage economy, and have a really good specialist city.
2. You're playing a specialist economy, but still have a decent amount of trade tiles (with at least +1 trade), and a more forest-based hammer economy (rather than lots of high hammer mines).

In the SE it's still somewhat decent because it is +100% to GPP, so particularly in the early times when you don't have very good choices for techs to get, it can be worth it. It's not usually worth it to go the 6 GA route in a specialist economy, but it really varies by the game.

Mausoleum is always important, of course, if you can get it before the second GA; and make sure to time your techs/GAs so that you are doing the appropriate civics changes in a GA.