Remove Science Penalty For Certain Social Policies

The +5% research cost per city was a good mechanic to prevent city-spamming, but it's been severely screwing me over in terms of finish times. 5% may not sound like much, but think of it like this - 4 cities is 20% more science per tech, which is about 20% slower finish times, sometimes more with delayed science buildings. So before I'd finish at around turn 270 with a regular civ; now it's more like turn 310.

My suggestion is this: remove the penalty in different ways for completing the starter trees. For example: complete tradition to remove penalty if you have 4 cities or less, complete liberty to remove penalty for 5 cities or more, complete honor to remove penalty for cities you didn't found, and complete piety to remove penalty in all cities with a religion. This prevents early-game city spamming while promoting late-game exploration and colonization, and helps players achieve pre-BNW victory times easier.

neat idea. i like it.

the science penalty seriously isn't that big though. Unless you are ICS with the Mayans, or puppetting many citystates to feed Venice to 80 pop through cargo ships, it really doesn't determine that much. It also allows you to get your 4 cities up and running without having to go to an early war every game just to get some good land.

Well, you'd be surprised how much 20% more expensive can be. In my last game in BNW plastics took about 5500 beakers to research, or 11 turns as opposed to the regular 4500 beakers or 9 turns. 1 or 2 turns extra for even some of the tech tree is...a lot.

Looking at the penalty from a pure beaker cost is misleading.

At the start of the game, say you research a 60 beaker tech. Average beakers per turn in the capital of 4, 15 turns to complete.

Now take the same situation, but add a 1 pop city. The tech now costs 63 beakers, with beakers per turn at 5. The tech will be researched in 13 turns.

The penalty is only an issue if the 5% beaker increase is not covered by the extra city, extending turns to research. This therefore makes founding late cities, or capturing them without cultural dominance, unattractive in the late game (from a purely science viewpoint).

I like the idea though, the bonus would hit later in the game encouraging late expansion, etc





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I think having a tree like Liberty remove the science penalty defeats the whole purpose of having it in the game. The whole idea of the Science Penalty is to limit empire growth and prevent super-wide empires, if you then remove it with the policy tree that caters to wide empires, you might as well just remove it completely (unless you want it with the sole purpose to encourage taking Liberty instead of Tradition, which I think should be achieved in a different way).

My point is not that I'm against looking into the science penalty, because I agree it hits too hard - but I don't think removing it through policies is the correct fix. I have myself modded the values down a bit, and I find that solves the problems I have with it fairly well.

A good way to neutralize the science penalty for additional cities is to:

Play on a Larger Map,
perhaps a Huge map, even.

Science penalty is reduced, opportunity for more cities is increased.

Yeah, SP is only 2% on huge maps. Also, I think 5% is a fine opportunity cost for having more cities. You can do some quick math with average costs and figure out about how much you want each city to produce in science per era to overcome its own science penalty. Early-game most do just by being founded. Later you need a bit more. It's only by Modern+ that you really have to worry about having a negative science city if you've neglected to grow it or just founded a new one. This is the main reason I try to get everything settled by mid-industrial and rapidly growing. If you grow them well they quickly produce more science then they cost you in my experience, and allow you to finish FASTER not slower. I did not play before there was no penalty though so I never saw the difference to how the game was before. I'm sure it affects old finish times for sure.

Yeah I thought the eventual science output you would get from that city would eventually overcome the science penalty as long as you're not making a new city really late in the game but I'm not entirely positive on that

Chris3894 said:

Yeah I thought the eventual science output you would get from that city would eventually overcome the science penalty as long as you're not making a new city really late in the game but I'm not entirely positive on that

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Science is population. When you build your first settler and plop him on say turn 30, you have already overcome the science penalty. It has more to do with the prevention of ICS and Venice orgies.

Jaybe said:

A good way to neutralize the science penalty for additional cities is to:

Play on a Larger Map,
perhaps a Huge map, even.

Science penalty is reduced, opportunity for more cities is increased.

Click to expand...

Keep in mind that technology costs are 20 percentage points higher on Huge maps than Standard maps (more precisely, Standard map tech costs are 110% of baseline tech costs (for Duel-Tiny-Small maps), Large map tech costs are 120% and Huge map tech costs are 130%). So, the 2.5% per-city increase on Huge (vs. the 5% increase on Standard maps and 3.75% on large) partially offsets the base tech penalty for playing on a Huge map.

But given the embedded 20% tech cost penalty on Huge maps, you should not expect to beat Standard SV times on a Huge map just because the Huge per city tech cost penalty is half the Standard amount.

Chris3894 said:

Yeah I thought the eventual science output you would get from that city would eventually overcome the science penalty as long as you're not making a new city really late in the game but I'm not entirely positive on that

Click to expand...

Adwcta did the Maths in a post a few months ago that showed new cities founded up to around T150 pay off the science cost fairly quickly. The science cost is mainly in your head, 5500 beakers seems like so much more than 4500 but those extra cities are probably producing enough to keep turn times fairly similar

Undefeatable said:

Well, you'd be surprised how much 20% more expensive can be. In my last game in BNW plastics took about 5500 beakers to research, or 11 turns as opposed to the regular 4500 beakers or 9 turns. 1 or 2 turns extra for even some of the tech tree is...a lot.

Click to expand...

The nice thing about this is you don't have nearly as many runaway A.I. civ's. Before BNW, a warmongering Civ would have a monstrously large BPT, and was extremely hard to keep up with. Now when a warmongering civ is successful, he doesn't out science you nearly as much, if at all.

Anyways, don't worry so much about how this slows you down. It slows everyone else down too, which means everyone is even. People are still getting sub t240 games. I've even seen those getting sub t200 games. Just learn to play better, and have fun.

Edit: I know this all boils down to you feeling as if you can't win as fast as some of the really good players. If they changed the rules so you can get those faster wins, you'll still feel as if you can't keep up, because those superior players will also win much faster now, making sub t250 games not mean much.

Good discussion here, but while we're on the topic of this science penalty, I can't seem to overcome it. I'm not complaining or anything - it's just that BNW changes completely messed up my science strat. See specific problems here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=530527

Any advice? Post in either thread would be fine.

It really comes down to 2 things, as you are aware of the policy order already:
1) build order. You do need to know what is a priority and what is not and don't get bogged down with wonder building.
2) go tall, go very very tall. That means focusing heavily and growth and food.

I've recently learned that culture building is a waste of time. Now I get the writers and artists guilds, and get culture CS allies. I will go for the Worlds Fair and save back an artist and writers to get a big boost in policies. Oracle is often built as well.

Instead of building culture buildings, I build markets and banks. I work gold a lot more than I used too. Gold is as good as hammers, as it allows you to buy stuff, and with markets and banks, that gold starts getting better and better.

And from what I understand, those getting sub t240 SV's, do so with more than 4 cities, most the time. Oh, one last thing. These super fast victories are not happening on bad, or even average maps. They happen on advantageous maps.