Gold, Beakers, and Deficit Research

In my opinion, this article is great for exposing the link between research and wealth and varying each via the research slider with the goal of maximizing Research rate. In the following, I will touch on topics which really go beyond the scope of the current article. Please do not take it as a criticism of that fine article though it could be augmented with some of the ideas sketched out below.

The article doesn't fully address how building Wealth (aka Gold) or building Research can dramatical change the balance between Wealth (Gold Coins) slider and Research slider. Since one can build both Wealth and Research, the analysis of the average number of Wealth multipliers versus Research multipliers needs to account for Hammer multipliers being focused on either building Wealth or building Research. For example, a Hammer capital in Bureaucracy loaded with Workshops, vast Levee system, Ironworks, Forge, Factory, power Plant, even indirectly using The Kremlin's -33% production savings for Wealth (explained later), can build an enormous amount of either Wealth or Research. Wealth building can augmented by building National or World Wonders for fail Wealth (Gold) using resource production multipliers, possibly the Industruious trait and even The Kremlin for its -33% production = a +50% base Hammer boost like the one Mathematics provides to Forest Chopping.

The article does indeed make suggestions on when to build Wealth or build Research to maximize Research rate. However it doesn't explain how Hammer multipliers, including resource multipliers, the Industrious trait and The Kremlin can be leveraged to increase Wealth production, thus further increasing one's Research rate.

The article might also focus on games where maximizing Wealth is actually more important than maximizing Research. There is also the third case where maximizing Hammer rate is the primary goal too.

Sun Tzu Wu

Lemme discredit a bit some assertion I took from the article in 2 mins.

If you have no beaker or gold multiplying buildings (libraries, markets, etc), this ratio will be exactly 1, since commerce is converted into beakers and gold at the same rate. This suggests the beaker value of gold depends in some sense on the presence of multiplier buildings in your empire.

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Well, seems the 20% pre-requisite tech multiplier is not taken into account. Binary research is still valid early in the game without the multiplying buildings. For that specific multiplier and saving some beakers from rounding down.

Tachywaxon said:

Lemme discredit a bit some assertion I took from the article in 2 mins.



Well, seems the 20% pre-requisite tech multiplier is not taken into account. Binary research is still valid early in the game without the multiplying buildings. For that specific multiplier and saving some beakers from rounding down.

Click to expand...

In my typical start, no less than 10% beakers are saved by binary research and watching after rounding issues. That leads to earlier worker techs and libraries, which add some beakers/food/hammers too.

Tachywaxon said:

Lemme discredit a bit some assertion I took from the article in 2 mins.

...

Well, seems the 20% pre-requisite tech multiplier is not taken into account. Binary research is still valid early in the game without the multiplying buildings. For that specific multiplier and saving some beakers from rounding down.

Click to expand...

You are right, but the article doesn't go to that level of detail; the author probably would consider it out of its scope.

Obviously, every turn the Research slider is 00%, one gains a free beaker. This is in addition to the often lost unit of research and/or wealth (unit truncation) when using a research slider from 10-90%. I almost always use binary research; when I don't it is either due to forgetting to switch from 100% to 00% or to gain access to a techonology one turn sooner than strict binary Research would provide.

I recommend spending more than two minutes on this article.

However, the article's suggestion of when to build Research and when to build Wealth with the goal of maximizing Research rate is a bit simplistic. It assumes a Research slider that isn't that far from 50%. The trouble with that is building Wealth (needs only Currency) can change the idealized (average) to as much as 100% and beyond (surplus Wealth which can be switched to building Research [Alphabet] to further increase Research rate). Refer to my previous post for details. So strictly speaking the model degenerates when enough Hammer cities are established building fail wealth as well as immediate wealth to maintain 100% Research slider indefinitely (to infinity and beyond ).

Sun Tzu Wu

Sorry to necro my own thread, but I just started playing again and I noticed this user was still active....

Sun Tzu Wu said:

However, the article's suggestion of when to build Research and when to build Wealth with the goal of maximizing Research rate is a bit simplistic. It assumes a Research slider that isn't that far from 50%. The trouble with that is building Wealth (needs only Currency) can change the idealized (average) to as much as 100% and beyond (surplus Wealth which can be switched to building Research [Alphabet] to further increase Research rate). Refer to my previous post for details. So strictly speaking the model degenerates when enough Hammer cities are established building fail wealth as well as immediate wealth to maintain 100% Research slider indefinitely (to infinity and beyond ).

Sun Tzu Wu

Click to expand...

Thanks for the kind words, I just wanted to respond to these points on building wealth vs research. I don't assume anywhere that the research slider is near 50%, in fact what I called the beaker value of gold doesn't depend on the slider value. Even if you are running a surplus at 100% the gold you are building up can be 'converted' according to that value on future turns if you are no longer running a surplus (e.g. if you simply stop building wealth). Of course if your slider rate is high (and so the conversion to deficit research is slow) it is often strategically better to build research rather than wealth even if it is theoretically less efficient.

What might be more interesting and what I didn't talk about in the article years ago is if your commerce is negligible and you are mostly paying for your maintenance and researching through hammers. What I was talking about in the article is value of gold via deficit research through the slider. If we leave the slider fixed we can do deficit research by switching cities building wealth to building research. This defines another value of gold. The presence of forges and factories etc. does not matter, since it converts to wealth and beakers at the same rate. In fact at first glance this hammer based deficit research value isn't very interesting since it's always equal to one (ignoring discounts on particular techs which work the same way as for commerce based deficit research).

However things like the industrious trait, marble, etc do matter if some of your wealth is coming from fail gold. In effect you have a higher average multiplier for wealth than beakers so the value of gold for a hammer based economy should be something less than one (which is not usually the case when considering traditional deficit research).