Beaker micromanagement - I still don't get it

[DaveV]

I'm trying to play a spaceship game and want to optimize my science beakers. On my latest turn, I'm researching medicine. I go to the tax slider window and reduce science to 0%; it shows 600 turns to complete. I check the F5 screen; it shows 128 beakers (about half of which are from my capital). On the next turn, the tax screen still shows 600 turns to go when science is at 0%, although the F6 screen shows about 1/5 of the box full. Does this mean I have to keep a running total of beakers generated? That's the kind of busy work I'd expect the computer to do for me. Or is there a way to see how many beakers are needed to fill the box?

[Bird]

Unfortunately, you do have to keep a running total if you want to operate at maximum efficiency. I wish they would add a feature for "beakers needed to next discovery" in Civ III, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[DaveV]

OK, but it gets worse. Let's say I crank up my science so I accumulate 420 beakers over the next two turns. Now I'm sitting on 548 beakers out of 600. Next turn, one of my cities will discover the advance, and the rest of the beakers will go toward the next advance. Now, to determine which of my beakers on the "discovery" turn were applied to the "old" advance and which to the "new", I need to go through city by city and add up beakers until I reach or exceed the number left to go for the "old" advance (52, in my example). The rest go into the box for the new advance.

This strikes me as an awful lot of work, especially since I like to have lots of cities.

[geofelt]

Unless you have only one city, don't bother with this. If you get an advance on a turn, any extra beakers generated from other cities is carried over to the next. The program process each city in turn, and if that city adds enough beakers to get an advance, you get it, and the process starts again with the next city. With enough science, you can get more than one advance per turn.
Only on OCC is it useful to micromanage since extra beakers are not carried over to the next turn.

[Bird]

That is also correct. You often will not know exactly how many beakers are in the box when you start the next discovery unless you do that. With a lot of cities, though, IMO it's overkill to worry about the exact number needed b/c the only ones wasted if you have too many are the excess ones in the city that puts you over the top for the discovery. If you have a real science city and that's the one that puts you over the top, it could potentially cost a lot of lost beakers, but that's a worst case scenario. Everything else goes toward the next discovery, as you know.

I'd still like to see a feature added in CIV III to help out with this, though.

[Bird]

Didn't see geofelt's response. I was replying to DaveV.

[Dino the Dinosore]

As if it isn't already hard enough keeping track (especially important in OCC games) I have found that the number of beakers required for an advance sometimes changes _while_ you're researching it, even without gaining another advance from an AI or a hut. It happened to me 3 or 4 times in my last OCC game, and now I have twice seen it in detail. While still early in the game, when you can actually make out and count the individual beakers in the science advisor screen, I counted 6 beakers needed (for Monarchy, of course) and I was getting 6 per turn. Next turn I didn't get it, check the science screen again and the beakers are closer together and showing I still need about 9 more. No additional advances in the meanwhile, all I did was hit enter at the end of turn. It happened several times, especially late in the game when getting advances every 2 turns is crucial for OCC, and makes this a killer bug. One time I think the number required went down instead of up, but I'm not sure. Maybe it's a Mac version bug? Anyone else seen this?

[Zagbo]

This has happened to me anumber of times too. I'll set up science / tax & scientists / taxmen at the optimal level only to have the number of beakers needed change from one turn to another.

A couple of OCC games ago I got a new advance late in the game (can't remember exactly which one) and with nothing else happening the number of turns to the next advance went down!

Very frustrating. If there is logic behind it, it would be nice to know exactly what it is.

[Paul]

I have occasionally had the same problem in my OCC games. It's very frustrating to lose a turn because of this, especially when you are getting close to the record.

[CapTVK]

On Deity level there's a small 'bonus/penalty' in play for scientific advances. If your ahead of the AI civ's in science you'll get a science penalty (+1 for the next scientific advance). If your behind you'll get a bonus (-1 to next advance). I have no exact idea how this penalty is calculated but I believe it's based on the most modern techs one has vs the AI players.

It's just one of those little 'features' that kicks in at Deity, you'll have to live with it I'm afraid...

[Dino the Dinosore]

Sorry this is a bit long and technical.

So I'm stewing about how hard it is to plan your science rate when the game keeps moving the goalpost in the middle of researching something, and had an idea - I"m a programmer, lets use the low-level assembler debugger to snoop around. So I note the "number of turns" needed when science is set to zero (which as has been noted is the only way to find out how many beakers are needed), and then search thru CIV2's memory partition for that value (in hex of course). Then I do it again for the next advance when the number is different. Then I compare the addresses at which I found those values to find the one that would correspond to the program variable where CIV2 stores the number of beakers needed for the next advance. Guess what - there isn't one! I also looked thru the auto-saved game files similarly, also not finding it. So I have to conclude that CIV2 always recalculates the number of beakers needed for the next advance on the fly every time it needs that number. And what is the algorithm it uses for that? Only the programmer that wrote the code can tell us. At least some Apolytonians have deduced some clues about it.

[Comrade Dan]

This must be a thread for mathematicians, because I'm not getting any of this.
Take any science you get as a blessing, and if you get a tech early, that's a bonus in your paycheck.

LONG LIVE THE SOVIETS (and the annoying but irrestible Civ threads)