Fractional or Integer Advances?

[cpemma]

With a set of tax/science/luxury settings it says Advances every 4 turns. If I increase science 10% it still says 4 turns, 20% increase and I'm on an Advance every 3 turns.

So is there any advantage in the above case in increasing science 10%, ie. can I get Advances say (on average) every 3.5 turns? Or does Civ just round off?

[Scouse Gits]

As long as you are not playing OCC the science beakers carry over to the next advance - so in effect you are averaging an advance every 3.5 turns.

The way this happens is as follows. Go to F1 and view City Status. There are all your cities with the capital at the top, and your most recent town at the bottom - in the order you built them. At the end of a turn you go through the "Build Queue" Say you built a Temple in your newest city - this will show up first. At the same time the beakers generated by that place are added to the total for the next advance. If the two beakers from "Issus" are enough to trigger the advance then the message will read "Roman wise men discover the secret of Seafaring". From that point onwards, the science from the remainder of your empire goes towards the next target.

After your first increase of 10% you may only be one beaker short of the "advance every three turns". Try to work a few more trade squares in your cities (or create some scientists) and you may see it turns to 3.

One thing is worth noting. You can have two different readings for your scientific progress in any one time.

The Tax Rate window (Shift + T) gives you the situation as it really as at that moment you view it. Say you have three cities rioting which cuts your research a little - this window may read advances every 6 turns.

Go to F6 (Science Advisor) and it may say every 5 turns - this gives the general progress and does not appear to include your local difficulties!

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SG(2)

[EOL]

Once the beaker count is full you get the science but extra beakers from the city that filled it are lost, then beakers from subsequent cities are added. I believe the most recently founded city's beakers are added first an then the next most recent etc...
This means that if you only have one city all extra beakers are lost or if you have almost all of science coming from one SSC most of that would be lost if adding an extra 10%. If your beakers are spread out throughout a large empire you can average 3.5 turns/tech though since many fewer will be wasted.

This obviously presumes that you're not delivering caravans/freight. If you deliver some freight then you can part fill up the box or completely fill the box before your city beakers are considered and start getting techs much more regularly but you'll find you would need to check the number of beakers you're able to produce and how many you need for the next advance each turn before delivering freight and recalculate if you decide to deliver them if you want to make the most out of it. If the box is nearly full you may not want to deliver them since the science bonus will be mostly wasted (a city produced beaker is needed to trigger a discovery), and you might want to turn the science rate down to get more cash (if otherwise a lot of SSC beakers will get wasted). If the box is nearly empty you can deliver your various freight and may be able to raise the rate enough to get a discovery next turn.

I don't bother with the micromanagement stuff past checking to see if the beaker box is nearly full when I'm about to deliver. I don't generally want to spend time counting beakers to see if I would be able to fill the box that turn if I turned the science up enough - but then I also haven't landed before 500AD.

Edit: Hmm. a close second.

[Hasdrubal]

Originally posted by EOL
Edit: Hmm. a close second.

Nobody can beat the Gits: they work in shifts, 24 hours a day to make sure that a SG will be the first to post a reply. We, mortals, have to sleep and eat and stuff.

[cpemma]

SGs - Thanks, you sure you're not from Yorkshire?

EOL - I agree about intense micro-managing maybe being a bit OTT but the more I get into Civ the more I appreciate the software team's work

[Howitzer Al]

How can you tell how many more beakers you need for the advance you're researching? The science advisor shows a graphic display that's easy enough to tell for the early advances, but later on, the beakers just scrunch together into a blob. Is there a way to tell if you need 120 more beakers as opposed to 123, etc.?

[Caesar the Great]

You're gonna have to get really good at counting those tiny tiny beakers