DaviddesJ said:sometimes this "temporary" excess cash is useful in making trades that you otherwise couldn't afford (since you aren't allowed to trade your way into debt).
true enough
I'll try this!
DaviddesJ said:sometimes this "temporary" excess cash is useful in making trades that you otherwise couldn't afford (since you aren't allowed to trade your way into debt).
DaviddesJ said:Plus the opportunity value of deciding, during the 0% turns, that you changed your mind about what you want to research next.
I've been slowly working through the beaker to tech calculations and also getting feedback on my thoughts. To summaries:ruff_hi said:The way I would define lost beakers is base beakers * city science multipliers less floor(base beakers * city science multipliers). This is the fraction of beakers to research that gets rounded away.
ruff_hi said:To me, this means that running binary science @0% and @80% is better than running it at 0% and @100% because there are additional city level base commerce amounts were you lose no (partial) beakers (again - assumes that you are losing money @ 80%).
ruff_hi said:However, if you look at running at 80% - it wastes 0.00 beakers when your city level commerce is a multiple of 4 AND when it is 1 less.
Zombie69 said:This is only true when you have a single city, and no gold bonuses (market, bank, grocer, wall street).
Yes, well spotted. I looked at 16 commerce and 15 commerce and thought 16/4 and (16-1)/4. I should have looked at the other combinations.Zombie69 said:Wrong. From your table, it's clear that no fractional beakers are wasted at 5n and 5n+1, not at 4n and 4n-1. This makes a difference because it means no lost beakers 40% of the time (i.e. in 2 out of 5 cases), not 50% of the time (i.e. in 2 out of 4 cases).
ruff_hi said:I'll start thinking about the other side of the coin (so to speak) - gold. I read another post that floated the idea of science sliders, not at the civ level, but at the city level. The initial reaction was YES PLS. But on reflection the group decided that it would unbalance the game too much.
DaviddesJ said:If you're talking about how to fix the micromanagement, it's easy---just allow the +25% bonus from the library to create fractional beakers that get credited to research. Individual city sliders would go in the wrong direction---even more micromanagement.
In the case of a lost fraction, could it be the optimum solution to use a specialist instead of a worker on a tile, in a "per city" micromanagement? Of course it depends on the food, but still the number 3 looks like it's made for "adjusting" the lost fractions due to the division by 4.Zombie69 said:True. Adding fractions over all cities would drop the max amount of beakers saved by binary science to 1/turn as opposed to 1/city. And if you keep any fraction still left and add it to next turn's total, then you reduce the effectiveness even more, droping it to a maximum of 1 beaker over the entire game.
Of course, binary research would still be useful for the extra bonuses obtained from civs knowing the tech, the options provided by having extra money in the bank most of the time, and the extra flexibility afforded by being able to choose the tech researched a few turns later.
Zombie69 said:Of course, binary research would still be useful for the extra bonuses obtained from civs knowing the tech.
Zombie69 said:the extra flexibility afforded by being able to choose the tech researched a few turns later.
atreas said:In the case of a lost fraction, could it be the optimum solution to use a specialist instead of a worker on a tile, in a "per city" micromanagement? Of course it depends on the food, but still the number 3 looks like it's made for "adjusting" the lost fractions due to the division by 4.
jar2574 said:This won't help me because I disagree with this kind of strategy. I never research a tech if another civ knows it. I typically start BW + pottery + writing + ABC. I beeline for alphabet and then trade like crazy. It is MUCH more efficient to never research a tech at all and to trade for it than to research it at a discount.
jar2574 said:This is an interesting notion, and it may have its value, but I have never switched research in the middle of researching a tech in a serious (i.e. GOTM) game.
Can we explore it a bit further? (Of course, I agree with you that specialists are pathetic generally without Representation, so I should add that I mean to have representation as well.) My idea is something like the following:Zombie69 said:Doubtful, since in terms of production (i.e. ignoring GPP), specialists are rather pathetic. Still, sometimes i will do this. More often however, i will adjust the number of specialists to avoid lost fractions of GPP. For example, with a 50% bonus in GPP production, you want your base number of GPP per city to be an even number. Another thing i'll do in a science city is drop specialists and put them on small cottages to let them grow when at 0% science, or when at 100% science in the case of gold specialized cities.
atreas said:EDIT: I just noticed that the Merchant effect is 6 (my visual math seem very bad), so it doesn't work (of course, because it creates a "lost fraction" 3 on beakers). Only the scientist gets 7.
Zombie69 said:Even better then. It lets you wait for someone to discover the tech and trade for it instead. This is certainly better since you said it was more efficient.
Zombie69 said:Then research the next tech at blazing speed since you can run 100% science for quite some turns by then.
Zombie69 said:The point is that you're not in the middle of researching a tech now. Since you were running 0% science, you're maybe at 5/2000 researched. There's really no penalty to switching!
Zombie69 said:Say that someone else has discovered the tech. By your own admission, it would now be more efficient to trade for it and research something else instead.
Zombie69 said:Like i said, i try to keep them at multiples of 4. It's not always possible, but it often is. You'd be surprised how often it can work perfectly if you look carefully enough. By the way, i don't consider a non-river cottage to be an inferior tile to use compared to a river cottage, since you want to grow both cottages eventually anyway, so you might as well start on both right away.
Zombie69 said:For one thing, i usually value a growing cottage/hamlet/village as +2 commerce over what it currently produces, to represent the fact that assigning a working to it lets it grow. For example, a 2 food 3 commerce cottage (river and financial) to me is equivalent to a 2 food 5 commerce tile that won't grow.
jar2574 said:Obviously there is no penalty to switching if you haven't started researching something, regardless of whether you use binary or non-binary research. My point is that the opportunity to switch tech research while having commerce at 100% is irrelevant and is not an advantage to using binary if you never switched tech research when you are not using binary.
So that 'advantage' seems to be overrated, unless the player is someone who changes their research goals.
jar2574 said:My point is that this is also an overrated 'advantage' of binary, because except for meditation and priesthood, it is extremely rare for anyone to have discovered a tech that I am in the midst of researching. I typically research BW and then beeline to ABC. At that point I go for code of laws and civil service. If I can trade for meditation and priesthood then I do, and if no one will trade them then I must research them.
After that, I research "advanced" techs and let my trades with the AI back fill the techs I've missed. You can see why it would be rare for anyone to be research the tech I'm currently researching.