Does it pay to build wealth/culture/research?

[Quillan]

I know that. But producing "Wealth" doesn't generate commerce, it generates gold. If the gold generated from producing wealth in one city is enough to cover the difference between your current science slider setting and the next step up, I'd expect you'd pick up many times more beakers per turn in research than the gold cost.

[joncnunn]

Indeed, moving from 2 routes per city to 4 routes to city via adopting Free Market + geting the Cooperations tech route allowed me to increase my science from 80% to 90%.

[Optimizer]

I think of modding "commerce processing" so that they yield more (75-100% instead of 50) and moving them to Printing Press - the printing press indeed allowed money, culture and research to be industrially manufactured.

[The keeper]

In my previous game, I used them quite a bit.

In the late game, my allies and I and wiped everyone else out except one. Napolean was at war with 3/4 of us, and quickly losing territory.

After this, there were 4 civs, and all of us were friendly or pleased with each other. I changed from building military to building science and wealth in many of my cities.

All the wonders had been built (most late game wonders by me) and all my main cities had all the buildings. If they weren't building spaceship parts, they were building wealth or science.

[Bobby Chicken]

you guys have to be joking. I build research all the time and after multiplyers it gives me +150 or so gold in just one city.

[Riotamus]

Originally posted by Quillan
I know that. But producing "Wealth" doesn't generate commerce, it generates gold. If the gold generated from producing wealth in one city is enough to cover the difference between your current science slider setting and the next step up, I'd expect you'd pick up many times more beakers per turn in research than the gold cost.

One can "easily" have fractional research rates by just alternating between 2 values (like 80-90-90-80-90-90-etc), kind of like the Gregorian calendar works. Or have some amount of money accumulated and then spend it during several negative income turns. If producing wealth/reasearch is not amplified by buildings, it's better to produce the one that you have less amplifiers for on average (which will be wealth in most cases). If the production is amplified (which I think is not the case), the one that gets better amplifiers than the nation's average should be built (i.e. build wealth in your only city with a bank, but build research in a city with all research buildings)

[Blake]

edit: I'm not usually guilty of not reading all the posts in a thread, but in this case I am, Riotamus had already said what I say

Originally posted by Quillan
I know that. But producing "Wealth" doesn't generate commerce, it generates gold. If the gold generated from producing wealth in one city is enough to cover the difference between your current science slider setting and the next step up, I'd expect you'd pick up many times more beakers per turn in research than the gold cost.

This is bad reasoning, allow me to explain.

You could simply alternate between 60% and 70% research (for example), using the surplus generated in one turn of lower allocation to sustain several turns of higher allocation. You'll find there's no real difference between building wealth and not tweaking the allocation, and building research and tweaking the allocation. The presence of multiplier buildings may have an effect though.

There may be a specific case where setting some cities to build wealth (or create merchants) will give just enough cash surplus to bump the allocation up and get the next tech in 1 turn rather than 2 turns, maybe for racing to Physics or something, but again I don't think there's much difference between building wealth and building research (ie the built research would ALSO be enough to bump the tech rate up to get the tech the next turn).

It might actually be interesting to research if it's better to build wealth and raise allocation, or build science with a lower allocation. Like how do the building multipliers effect things? What about Wallstreet and Oxfords?

[Quillan]

I can't say for certain, but my gut call is that the buildings will affect everything. We've already established that market/bank/grocer/Wall Street will affect the raw gold input brought in by super specialists and shrines in the city. So, I expect those same buildings will affect gold brought in by producing Wealth, the library/university/observatory/lab/Academy will affect beakers generated by producing Research, and things like the broadcast tower should affect Culture as well.

[regar reed]

Right now I am at a point were I am steering my civ only with wealth and research!

(playing France on Prince at 1800(Musketeers suck!))

Most of my cities have all important buildings. So the only thing left to build is units and great wonders. And sometimes a new building if I research something new.

At 10% research I get about 1200GP per round. With Kreml this alows me to buy most Great Wonders within 3-4 rounds.
At 100% science I loose maybe 20 GP. I need about 3-4 round to research new technologies. That enables me to outresearch the AI fairly quick.

So this pays for me.

I have to say though that my situation was favourable from the start. I had six (6) dyes and three (3) sugar within the reach of my capital (I may not be able to work them but they are within my borders so I still get their benefit). So I never really had the problem of unhappy citizens or pollution.
At the moment my system is beng tested as Katarina started a war and I have to build tanks and infantry massively to beat her cossacks. Holding the cities works just fine but Washington got the Eiffel Tower (Which is not that bad because I had six broadcasting towers and Hollywood three rounds later) and science starts to lag behind.


I really like this ecomony approach and it seems to work if the resources are plenty. Maybe this could be extended in future Civ titles.