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RJM:
You raise some of the right issues regarding increasing your SSC with Farmland. My experience is that in the part of the game where Refrigeration becomes an option there is always a tech round where I have to take an off-path tech anyways, so I choose Rfg and go to work on the SSC terrain. The Engineers are usually available, as I have finished the primary round of roading and irrigation by then, and am usually keeping two or three pairs around to clean up any pollution and work on longer-term transformations of SSC terrain. Re-irrigating Grass and Plains is not a very time-consuming exercise, and can be easily interrupted for pollution cleanup. The bigger issue you correctly point out is the extra time spent with increased luxuries for WLTPD growth, but that can also be timed to coincide with a spurt of growth of your second generation cities and offshore colonies which should be coming on-line around the time the Farmland is ready. I usually figure on 5-6 turns of high-lux growth; adding 4-5 more to go from size 25 to 35 is not a big diversion. I don't think the SuperMarket is too big an issue around then either: I usually have a fair amount of gold sitting around in the mid-game then as more and more caravans and freights are getting delivered to bring in enough beakers for one or two techs per turn, so an SM is just a one or two turn diversion from the regular SSC building program.
So I would summarize that goosing the SSC into the 30s with Farmland and SM is not a major hassle, but I would suggest that the player's primary focus should be on building up the secondary group of colony cities and ramping up the long-distance trade. The benefit of growing the SSC is the multiplication of the science Wonders already built there; very few other cities will have much more than a Library anyway, and a good SSC in the mid-30s should provide something like 1500 beakers per turn.
You raise some of the right issues regarding increasing your SSC with Farmland. My experience is that in the part of the game where Refrigeration becomes an option there is always a tech round where I have to take an off-path tech anyways, so I choose Rfg and go to work on the SSC terrain. The Engineers are usually available, as I have finished the primary round of roading and irrigation by then, and am usually keeping two or three pairs around to clean up any pollution and work on longer-term transformations of SSC terrain. Re-irrigating Grass and Plains is not a very time-consuming exercise, and can be easily interrupted for pollution cleanup. The bigger issue you correctly point out is the extra time spent with increased luxuries for WLTPD growth, but that can also be timed to coincide with a spurt of growth of your second generation cities and offshore colonies which should be coming on-line around the time the Farmland is ready. I usually figure on 5-6 turns of high-lux growth; adding 4-5 more to go from size 25 to 35 is not a big diversion. I don't think the SuperMarket is too big an issue around then either: I usually have a fair amount of gold sitting around in the mid-game then as more and more caravans and freights are getting delivered to bring in enough beakers for one or two techs per turn, so an SM is just a one or two turn diversion from the regular SSC building program.
So I would summarize that goosing the SSC into the 30s with Farmland and SM is not a major hassle, but I would suggest that the player's primary focus should be on building up the secondary group of colony cities and ramping up the long-distance trade. The benefit of growing the SSC is the multiplication of the science Wonders already built there; very few other cities will have much more than a Library anyway, and a good SSC in the mid-30s should provide something like 1500 beakers per turn.
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