I'm about to be out of things until friday night, so final thoughts for now
So, and I haven't run the math on this yet, I suspect the overall yield evens out pretty quickly. Once you hit the goal population, you can just dump food entirely (barring upkeep, which should mostly handle itself b/c base income) and go into whatever resource you want. That should take 3 turns tops. You've got more yield producing sectors than you would have normally at that point, along with the pop to man them - they should catch up rather quickly.
I briefly ran numbers in my head on the 8 pop one - it doesn't turn out too good. But a lot of that comes down to how little time it shaves off - and how much you can cut down the transition time. I suspect that as the time saved to develop a given yield rises, value increases. 12 pop should perform better.
I'll be back in a few days. Don't have too much fun without me
Edit: Realized I was baking this in implicitly but not stating it: I play MP occasionally and am aware of the fast paced meta right now, and that time for payoff is running short when you hit ~turn 16. I also know from the relay rush experience that food/colonist pickups will probably speed things up by 3-5 turns.
I hadn't realized this conversation went back further than one page. I'm afraid I don't have the time to read all of it right now, so I'll get back to that later - though if you were willing to repeat yourself it would make my life easier.Yes, this is correct. I think I mentioned it somewhere before but it's probably buried in a wall of text.
Thing is, although you get pop and sectors earlier, this also wastes many early pops and the first sector on non-yields. Your second sector is earlier than if you didn't invest in food, but your second useful/non-food sector is actually later, and similarly for pop/non-food pop. And, along the way you are making food instead of energy/research, you've lost 18 turns of useful yields to have a slightly faster gain later.
That's the reason that my food strategies lose out in total yields to '1 worker', all the way until turn 73. And even after that, it's possible that by having the higher performance in the turns prior, the city has generated more benefit towards victory, through speeding the empire's snowball instead of delaying it.
So, and I haven't run the math on this yet, I suspect the overall yield evens out pretty quickly. Once you hit the goal population, you can just dump food entirely (barring upkeep, which should mostly handle itself b/c base income) and go into whatever resource you want. That should take 3 turns tops. You've got more yield producing sectors than you would have normally at that point, along with the pop to man them - they should catch up rather quickly.
I briefly ran numbers in my head on the 8 pop one - it doesn't turn out too good. But a lot of that comes down to how little time it shaves off - and how much you can cut down the transition time. I suspect that as the time saved to develop a given yield rises, value increases. 12 pop should perform better.
I'll be back in a few days. Don't have too much fun without me
Edit: Realized I was baking this in implicitly but not stating it: I play MP occasionally and am aware of the fast paced meta right now, and that time for payoff is running short when you hit ~turn 16. I also know from the relay rush experience that food/colonist pickups will probably speed things up by 3-5 turns.
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