With no AIs to play with after T241, no cities to found after T245 and no Mininc Inc to spread after T270 ... the game descended into Fortify, End Turn, Fortify, End Turn, etc. By the way, just how quickly can you play 50 turns?
Turn 332/500 (1912 AD) [11-Jul-2012 21:23:30]
Turn 382/500 (1962 AD) [11-Jul-2012 21:41:36]
That is 50 turns in just over 18 minutes ... or 1086 seconds ... 22 seconds per turn.
The required human interaction was ...
- Ctrl-A (complete stored moves – ie move all units to the wey points)
- Click on the units at the wey points
- Ctrl-G (select all units)
- Click on a tile short distance away
- 2 to 3 Fortify commands
- Hit End of Turn
All cities were on auto builds, Future Tech was selected, wey points had been assigned, cities had been micro'd to have enough health, food, etc. It was total cruise control.
Anyway, I played through to about T290 or so and then decided to see if I could estimate / project the expenses through to the end of T500. To do this, I broke the expenses down into their component parts ...
The red line is the actual unit costs I experienced. The light blue line is my projected (or estimated) future unit costs. It is a linear projection based on 1g per unit and my 97 cities generating 90 units per turn. The super observant reader might have noticed that I had wiped out the Justinian forces with 27 muskets. Honestly, when is the last time you saw 27 muskets ... and no riflemen? I had deliberately stayed away from the Rifling tech so that I could build 50h Longbows. I was concerned that even with Mining Inc fueled hammers, my smaller cities would take too many turns to complete Longbows. As such, I refrained from teching Rifling thus keeping Longbows in play.
This is an interesting graph - you can see the red line jumping up and down based on the 'We Love Ruff' status of my cities. The maintenance costs has an upwards trend but it will jump around a little.
The red line shows a discontinuance at about T238 - I swapped from Organized Religion (high Upkeep) to Pacifism (No Upkeep) and thus saved gold coin on the Civic Upkeep. The 1g per military unit more than made up for it.
The projection is based on a decaying addition to the cost - I tweaked the decay rate until I got a curve that looked like it fit the history.
This curve was pretty easy to fit - I just let excel attach a polynomial trend line and then read the curve off the chart. The only problem doing it that way is that the parameters shown in the formula aren't that accurate ... 5.0E-6 could be a fairly wide range of values. I could have used the excel regression functions but I couldn't be bothered looking them up (again).
Putting my above forecasts / projections together I was able to estimate when my coins would run out. However, I wanted to get a feel for my margin of error. I recalculated the projection assuming my forecast expense growth rate was 20% higher and 20% lower. These changes moved the critical bust turn by +7 and -7 turns.
The big question you have to ask yourself now is ... is my forecast bust turn T450, T490, or T495? Or T600? Would I be able to spend these coins before T500?