C3C: Lone scientist?

Hi all,

I'm coming back to C3C after a couple years break, something I never understood about C3C was the Lone Scientist. Not much is explicitly written about this so I eventually found this:

Set the Science slider to 0%, and have one scientist provide beakers?

For some reason techs will always take 40 turns to complete regardless of how many beakers they cost? (or was it 50? I don't have the game open right now)

So my question is: why does this happen? Is it intentional? If so, then in terms of game design, what did they attempt to accomplish with this counterintuitive, arbitrary, game-y mechanic?

ThisIsHughYoung said:

Hi all,

I'm coming back to C3C after a couple years break, something I never understood about C3C was the Lone Scientist. Not much is explicitly written about this so I eventually found this:

Set the Science slider to 0%, and have one scientist provide beakers?

For some reason techs will always take 40 turns to complete regardless of how many beakers they cost? (or was it 50? I don't have the game open right now)

So my question is: why does this happen? Is it intentional? If so, then in terms of game design, what did they attempt to accomplish with this counterintuitive, arbitrary, game-y mechanic?

Click to expand...

Lone scientist research takes 50 turns in C3C. You might find it counter intuitive, but on the higher difficulty levels of automatically comes to mind. For example, on Sid the techs are extremely expensive. When playing on a large or huge map, no matter how muck of trade you devote to science you'll almost always require more than 40 turns for a early techs. So what do we do? We appoint one citizen to do the research, turn science zero and amass huge profits. This gold can later be used to upgrade, build embassies and even buy techs when cheaper. Even on lower difficulty levels, this technique comes useful when, say, you're about to go to war with the largest civ in the game. You turn science zero and focus everything in military. But all the time the war consumes may give other civs a chance to catch up. Therefore you do lone scientist research so that 50 turns and a couple of defeated civs later you'll at least have a tech that feels kind of free (since the scientist was from a fully corrupt town) . Nonetheless this technique is more effective at higher difficulty and larger maps.

Even at higher difficulty settings it is often best avoided in favour of faster research. 50 turns for Writing as the first tech on Sid is the only case that would seem to be relevant. The tech costs 320 beaker, 400 beakers, 480 beakers, 640 beakers or 800 beakers, depending on map size. The saved money can then be invested to establish embassies around the wolrd. The lack of embassies is one the weakness one is faced with at Sid, it needs to be overcome quickly, so that AI will themselves instead of you.

Please note that researching a tech that is known to civs known by you reduces the needed amount of beakers. If there is a total 7 other civs and all of them know the tech and all have contact with you, than you save 50% of beakers.

Below Sid research is so cheap that 50 turns for a tech is unwise. Using the neutral difficulty setting regent as benchmark Sid has 250% the research costs:

Chieftain: 100.0%
Warlord: 100.0%
Regent: 100.0%
Monarch: 111.1%
Emperor: 125.0%
Demigod: 142.9%
Deity: 166.7%
Sid: 250.0%

... and: In the general settings of the editor you can set the minimum and the maximum research time in turns. The default setting for the maximum research time is 50 turns. This is the setting for the conquest main-biq of C3C, too.

These settings can be changed. If the minimum and the maximum setting for research time is the same, you can change the techtree to a calendar (what I did per example with SOE).