[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Wendigo:
Hey Peter, don't blame me for using your numbers!
Obviously ignoring extra gem income is a simplification, but it's good enough to evaluate returns in regards to investment anyway.

Not really. Any water gem income cuts the time to 100 (TO100) by a good 10 turns or so.

Graeme:
Oportunity costs. Mages & gems used to do one cannot be used to do the other. So you gotta choose.

But you can do both. With construction 6 it only takes a water 1 mage to build a clam, and those mages aren't that hard to come by. What else would you do with a water 2 mage?

Could you elaborate on this? % magic sites? map? # opponents? who are you putting 100 clams on?
And most important of all: where Atlantis & Ermor in the game?

50% magic sites, independents 6, Orania, 17 players. The clams go on star children who are researching.

What kind of game are you playing that you can spend 750-1000 gems in items with no immediate return, without your military power resenting from it? Really, if you had such a surplus why didn't you just go for the game & start killing opponents?

I didn't have that kind of surplus. I had an income of about 5 water gems per turn and 10 astral per turn. From turn 20 when I started, I had my 100 clams by turn 55. Whenever I needed gems quickly I just skipped one turn of clam production and had an easy 20 to 50 pearls to work with for that turn. I'm not sinking 750-1000 gems into the clams. I'm sinking about 150 water gems (useless for anything else), and about 300 astral pearls from site income. The rest of the gems are produced by the clams themselves. There's really nothing else that's worthwhile for a nation like R'lyeh to do with its water gems.

Opportunity costs of course. Even more important because when you delay clam forging you delay your Return On Investment from those clams.

You don't actually delay the ROI much at all, since any site based income makes the TO100 come 10's of turns faster.

I am not saying that clam-forging cannot work, rather that it applies to very specific game settings. It's obvious that strategies based on economy building are stronger the longer the game, tho I find some of the 'fixes' being suggested a bit radical.

Building clams is an geometric growth with time. This is something that very few other strategies can produce.

Why don't you just play faster games? The same fun with less MM.

I wasn't aware that a game that's in turn ~60 was a long game.