If you pop boom only to work 2-1-1 tiles, I think the synergy could be better. Which is why I'm usually not that in a hurry with booming. Efficient mineral-related infrastructure is a cornerstone and I trade a condenser for half a borehole any time. Instead of working 2-1-1, it's way better to put a crawler on forest.
allow you not to juggle workers and crawlers in search for 2 nuts.
If a forest to crawl exists, you don't work 2-1-1 if popboomed, but a forest.
And you don't have to juggle if you build a condenser.
The math goes as follows:
Base food: 3
Condenser food: 4
Each forest tile food: 1
So, with 1 condenser you only need one other tile that produces > 1 food and several of our bases have them in form of monoliths.
With a single crawler, food becomes non-issue as it can be set to crawl the condenser and thus free extra citizen to produce 1-2-1.
In short, early pop boom requires you to have better terra infrastructure (condensers, farms, kelp farms)
Most of our bases either have enough forest to work for 7 pop, or will shortly.
In fact, our formers are nearly out of work, clearing fungus, building mines on rocky tiles.
And we only need 1 condenser per base to get to pop 7.
facilities (creches, everything drone related)
We only really
need Creches and they are not that expensive at 50 minerals (rectanks & reccomms are 40 each and we have them).
Once boom starts, building a holo theatre will be quick due to increased minerals.
I hate holo-theaters and wait with them until late mid-game. They cost 3 maintenance
This is the same as disussion as we had earlier - reccomms or not.
You have to factor in what you get for the expense.
If you count the extra energy you get from the citizens they allow, they cost 1 at most.
Also, they cost half the cost of tree farms while producing the same psych benefit and a drone reduction of -2 on top of that.
If we're not relying on the forests for food as in case with condensers, it's better, cheaper and earlier.
We're also not going to run much econ allocation, so tree farm econ bonus changes little in equation.
then tree farms
This is only possible after you get EE + some turns until you build/rush them.
So, you're only delaying something you would do anyway, which means, unless you offset it somehow (like, with ICS, which we're not doing), losing time.
And when we get to the WP/EE, I strongly recommend to engage all our formers in building boreholes within 2-3 turns. Condensers can wait, not because they're bad but because they're not boreholes.
If you get WP significantly sooner than EE, as is possible in our case, condensers are the better type of improvement, because they allow to popboom sooner, with less investment in infrastructure and bypass the nutrient limit, which means you are also arriving at tree farms faster due to increased production (and likely tech).
That is, with exception of mineral/energy bonus tiles, which can and should still be boreholed, but of which we have none.
Boreholes are useless until EE except for the mentioned bonus tiles.
You can ICS as it is stronger than vertical growth, but not in our case, as we're out of land.
WP fixes that too by allowing raise land option early.
The same goes for sea formers and kelp farms - sure they're neat, but when you build sea formers, you don't build land formers and crawlers, and this is the part when you behave sub-optimum.
Kelp spreads, so you only need very few sea formers to get the ball rolling.
And you need none if you build WP as condensers are better (kelp does not bypass nutrient limit).
Building crawlers and thanks to them building nodes faster will be more efficient in my opinion.
A childrens creche costs 50 minerals and allows us to get 3 extra workers in 3 turns with some psych investment.
Each worker would produce 2 minerals and 1 energy as a bare minimum.
Each crawler costs 30 minerals and will produce 2 minerals until we get EE.
So 3 crawlers cost almost double while producing only the mineral equivalent and are much longer to build.
And we don't have IA yet.
In any case it's not popboom vs crawlers because they are not mutually exclusive.
To popboom past 7 we need IA.
And as per your strategy, even crawlers first strategy would eventually popboom.
The alternative is to crawl + ICS, neither of which is possible at the moment and ICS can be enabled by WP even if we don't popboom in the end.
In any other game I'd say go full ICS and just wait until you get IA, then crawlers + PTS + more ICS ad infinitum.
However, this requires land which we don't have.
To be able to ICS soon, we need WP, which also enables us to popboom, should we choose so.
We only have one real growth option at the moment - conquest, and conquest is slow, limited and unreliable.
Popboom can be enabled either by WP soon or by IA+EE some time later.
ICS can be enabled by WP soon.
So, WP enables us to do either popboom or ICS or both and do it soon.
And it will help us significantly even if we decide to do neither.
EDIT: I also don't argue about delaying IA. I actually drew up a plan in previous page, how to increase chance of getting it sooner. It may include running 90-100% econ but there's a good reason for it. Also, I see no problem running 100% econ for a couple of turns after we get IA. It could even be used to rush first crawlers.
EDIT2:
Knowing when to pop boom is of the essence in this game.
Exactly.
And the rule is not "only after treefarms".
It's just the most common situation that ends up happening.
I think the general rule is "as soon as feasible and has better ROI than other options", which does not tie popboom to anything specific apart from having the prerequisites to enable it and which for us is if/after we get WP.
