in response 2 ur first question - yes. simple as that. build librarys asap and assign 1-2 scientists when grown 2 happiness cap. most of research will come from lightbulbing so representation is not as important as u might think
You are absolutely right, Representation's bonus is greatly exaggerated by some people.
Consider the amount of effort and the benefits from the first 5 GS that are made in the game.
The first GS costs 100 GPP, the second 200 and so on. The first 5 will cost a total of 1500 GPP. If all these 1500 GPPs are from ordinary scientists run from several libraries then it will cost 500 scientist turns and hence 1000 food to get all 5 GS.
Assuming each GS is worth 1500 beakers, whether used as an academy, settled or lightbulbed, we get the following benefits
Beakers from 500 scientist turns = 1500 x 1.25 = 1875 with library bonus
Beakers from 5 GS = 7500
Total = 9375 beakers
That is an effective rate of return of 9.3 beakers per food spent on a specialist. Of course that food can come from a grassland farm and hence you can argue that the farm gives 9.3 beakers per turn over this period, beating the research produced by cottages and hamlets etc by an enormous margin.
A Philosophical leader will get an even better rate of return since he needs to only spend 250 scientist turns and 500 food to get the 5 GS. He therefore gets less beakers from the scientists, only 937. So in total he'll have 937 + 7500 = 8437 from 500 food. That is an astounding rate of 16.9 beakers per food over this period.
Adding Representation for the whole period would give another 1875 beakers (in the non Philosophical case) which is about a 20% increase in total beakers and not the 100% increase that some people assume. This explains why taking the Pyramids gambit can actually slow early research down rather than speed it up. Getting more cities working scientists earlier gives a much faster return at this critical time.
