Explosives or Railroad

[Magic_gorter]

I want to know what the most civplayers prefer. Discovering railroad or discovering explosives (settlers to engineers)

Most of the times I do railroad first to move my units faster. But now I'm wondering if it's not better to get engineers (who work faster than settlers) and then discovering railroad. It costs a few turns to get a discovery, so which option gives in youre opinion the best result.

[Grigor]

I can't play CivII right now because my old computer died and my new Mac is only OS X. I hope to solve the problem in a few months.

However, as I recall, I always wanted engineers before railroad. **WAY** before Railroad. There are still a whole host of techs to discover before taking the beaker hit, so I prefer following that path as far as possible before RR.

And in any case, I always wanted to have somebody in place to build the railroads once they came online.

Darwin's is more powerful the later it is used.

[Straybow]

Yep, pretty much sums it up

Hey, Grigor! Sorry to hear you're stuck with a sucky Mac.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Originally posted by Grigor
I can't play CivII right now because my old computer died and my new Mac is only OS X. I hope to solve the problem in a few months.

However, as I recall, I always wanted engineers before railroad. **WAY** before Railroad. There are still a whole host of techs to discover before taking the beaker hit, so I prefer following that path as far as possible before RR.

And in any case, I always wanted to have somebody in place to build the railroads once they came online.

Darwin's is more powerful the later it is used.

I seem to recall two approaches to Darwins:

1) Delay it as long as you can - have 8 'vans stashed and ready, and as soon as the AI announces it's almost finished, rush it in a turn. Thus you get more beaker value for your free techs.

or

2) Research enough techs so that you can get Corporation via Darwin right after researching RR. That way you offset the trade hit from RR with the Freight bonus.

In any event, I always wanted Engineers ASAP, so I always beelined for Explosives. Explosives+Leonardo=