A bug or just unlucky?

[uffe]

I'm currently in the middle of a quite fun game...i.e., the AIs are putting in a good fight, but I'm just managing to be on top of things.

Anyway, as usual, I have specialized my capital to be the wonder city and the GP factory, the only one I have. And since I do like them Golden Ages, I'm trying to get a good mixture of GPs out of the said capital.

It all started very well. I got the Great Scientist by running two scientist specialists, while building the Oracle, and actually managing the CS slingshot (the first time I've done this since the 3.17 patch came out). Then I got a Great Prophet fueled by the Oracle, so that I got the Kong Miao.

After that it's gotten weird. I've build a bunch of wonders, contributing to different flavours of GPP, resulting in a fairly even percentages for GS, GPr, GE and GA. Yet, I have now gotten six Great Artists in a row. I'm not sure, what the odds were for the first one (since, it didn't really matter, which one I got for the first GP initiated Golden Age), but at least after that the odds for a Great Artist have been within 2-3% from 35%.

Calculating 0.35^6 gives about 0.2 % as the likelihood of 6 consecutive Great Artists (with the 35% odds for each). Possible of course, but I have to wonder, if this could be caused by some weird bug...

The game is on BTS, 3.17 patch with the Solver's unofficial patch, continents, normal speed, prince.

[Blaupanzer]

Change your specialists to vary the odds for an artist to lower than 1/3, and see what happens. If 35% is the highest of the 4 possibilities, then your results are telling you something about how the seed seems to be set. I note that I get the plurality GP about half the time even when no odds are above 40 %. (Note, not 100 %.)

I strongly suspect your situation is just luck. Someone's city had to end up as Firenza (Florence, Italy) with all those artists.

[snoopy369]

First off, it's probably just luck. 0.2% chances happen two times in a thousand.

Second off, with a single GP source which is both wonder and specialist driven, you cannot usually get more than 4 GAs plus wonder/event GAs. The odds are just a bit too low, even taking into account the tech GPs (music/physics/etc.)

In general, for the GA strat, you are better having two cities, one being SP and one being Wonder. The wonder one focuses on certain GPs (engineer, usually, and priest) while the specialist one generates the three caste system GPs (artist/merchant/scientist) one after another, and NEVER pollutes its pool (except, sometimes, with the National Epic, when that's not appropriate in the wonder city for whatever reason). Not only is it actually somewhat counterproductive to do both specialists and wonders (you get fewer wonders AND fewer specialists, because you need some short-food tiles for hammers, ie mines, which would be better off used as specialists in a pure specialist city, and on the other hand, you have specialists you'd rather put into hammer production). Of course once your hammer tiles are all gone you can use specialists, but that should usually be only a few unless you have an amazing capital better than I've ever seen...

With an optimal setup like that, and a PHI civ, you can usually get 5 and about half the time 6 specialist-driven GAs (if you're very careful). You do need to still get a good set of tech-driven GPs, and be aware of when they come, as well as usually holding off on GPs as appropriate from the specialist city (when you need to generate one of the wonder-driven GPs and are too far ahead of that city). I've spent 72 consecutive turns in GAs before, so it's not without possibility