I would disagree with Cleveland about purchasing a bullet, since it seems more efficient to just rent one. The rest of his statement seems accurate though.
The 120 points that you spent on growth can go a long way towards the purchase of a shiny new SC pretender. This will let you take an extra province per turn, greatly increasing your first year's growth (e.g. taking 2 provinces on turn 2 instead of 1, taking 4 provinces on turn 8 instead of 3, taking 5 provinces on turn 12 instead of 4). Besides being invaluable in early wars, a well managed SC is going to grow your empire at a lot more than 0.6% per turn, and that early growth can then be leveraged into all sorts of new opportunities. I think it was KissBlade who said that in most games the winner is decided by turn 20. While I don't think that is entirely right, I do think that by turn 20 you certainly know who is not going to win. You need early expansion if you are going to be competitive in the mid-late game, as even a high growth, high gem income nation with 20 provinces won't be able to compete with a high death, low gem income nation with 60 provinces.
I would also point out that in the early game, when I am evaluating who to attack, growth scales are a great indicator of who is stocking away points for late game efficiency at the expense of their early game survivability.
Re: The Growth Scale
Hybrid Mode
