A question about GS and GW bulbing

It seems that GS bulbing will give you the sum of base beakers of previous 8 turns(the beakers CS give you don't count, nor do the beakers come from opering of rationalism), how about GW bulbing? Will the culture given by CS be counted in?

Also, how about the golden age? Will it be more efficient to bulb a GW after a golden age?

It's just your base output #, pre-modifiers, which is the sum of everything your cities give you.
Golden ages do not count.
Nothing from CS counts.
Honor opener doesn't count.

Anything that affects your cities DOES count, which is why the world fair counts. It doubles YOUR culture output (meaning culture from your cities; not the culture output of anything else; golden age is treated as an alien entity; so are trade routes; so are city states; so are bonuses from policies that are not tied to your city's base output).

adwcta said:

It's just your base output #, pre-modifiers, which is the sum of everything your cities give you.
Golden ages do not count.
Nothing from CS counts.
Honor opener doesn't count.

Anything that affects your cities DOES count, which is why the world fair counts. It doubles YOUR culture output (meaning culture from your cities; not the culture output of anything else; golden age is treated as an alien entity; so are trade routes; so are city states; so are bonuses from policies that are not tied to your city's base output).

Click to expand...

Thank you very much, I always wait for a golden age to bulb my GW, it seems unnecessary at all.

adwcta said:

It's just your base output #, pre-modifiers, which is the sum of everything your cities give you.
Golden ages do not count.
Nothing from CS counts.
Honor opener doesn't count.

Anything that affects your cities DOES count, which is why the world fair counts. It doubles YOUR culture output (meaning culture from your cities; not the culture output of anything else; golden age is treated as an alien entity; so are trade routes; so are city states; so are bonuses from policies that are not tied to your city's base output).

Click to expand...

This is not correct for Great Writers. It is correct for Great Scientists (neither the Rationalism opener nor Scholasticism, nor beakers from RAs of prior GS bulbs, is taken into account in determining the payoff from bulbing a GS).

For Great Writers, the political treatise pay-off is simply the sum of all of your culture for the last 8 turns, from all sources. Below is a chart that shows this for a current game (the totals differ by 4 because the UI rounds decimal amounts up and down for display purposes, but uses actual decimal amounts in determining the payoff from bulbing):


GW bulb yield on turn 193: 4732

Indeed it seems to count all culture past 8 turns as it changed drasticly near the end of a golden age + worlds fair 100%.

Tourism from Musicians works differently however as it only seems to multiply when born and remain static.

TeriXeri said:

Indeed it seems to count all culture past 8 turns as it changed drasticly near the end of a golden age + worlds fair 100%.

Tourism from Musicians works differently however as it only seems to multiply when born and remain static.

Click to expand...

Yes, I think players are not allowed to save a GM for future use just because players will win easily if just bulb them all during Olympic Game.

In general, GS I plant until Plastics, then I bulb. GW I I make writing until I hit Archeology, then I bulb, since my explorers will start findin artifacts, and the culture from Political Treatise will skyrocket

Browd said:

This is not correct for Great Writers. It is correct for Great Scientists (neither the Rationalism opener nor Scholasticism, nor beakers from RAs of prior GS bulbs, is taken into account in determining the payoff from bulbing a GS).

For Great Writers, the political treatise pay-off is simply the sum of all of your culture for the last 8 turns, from all sources. Below is a chart that shows this for a current game (the totals differ by 4 because the UI rounds decimal amounts up and down for display purposes, but uses actual decimal amounts in determining the payoff from bulbing):

Turn|Culture from cities|Culture from excess happiness|Culture from CSs|Culture from Golden Age|Total culture
186|197|32|156|77|462
187|203|32|156|78|469
188|306|33|156|99|594
189|307|32|156|99|594
190|305|32|156|98|591
191|372|33|156|112|673
192|372|33|156|112|673
193|378|33|156|113|680
Total|2440|260|1248|788|4736

GW bulb yield on turn 193: 4732

Click to expand...

Hmmmm... I had tested this last week (only 1 turn) and the GA didn't count. I'll load up that save again and see if there were some other factors at work.

Thanks for the info guys. That really helps out with my decision making. Out of curiousity, is the GS science output a fixed amount regardless of the tech being researched (assuming I'm not trying to exploit the overflow)? That is, if I pop a GS for 5000 beakers, and I only have 2000 left on the next tech, do the other 3000 roll into whatever I select next? And does having techs queued up make any difference vs. selecting the next one manually?

Silverman6083 said:

In general, GS I plant until Plastics, then I bulb. GW I I make writing until I hit Archeology, then I bulb, since my explorers will start findin artifacts, and the culture from Political Treatise will skyrocket

Click to expand...

I've been thinking about the value of building academies vs. saving GS until research labs or later and bulbing. I decided to make a spreadsheet that captured (hopefully) reasonable times for a person who hits a turn 300 SV to build the +beaker% buildings and get the policies/ideologies/techs that boost either academy tile yields or beaker%. I made a graph of the total beakers from building an academy at a certain turn vs. bulbing a GS the same turn. I pulled most of the beakers per turn values from some of my recent games, and just interpolated between data points. Everything being equal, it looks like you get more beakers from bulbing a GS post-research labs (I assumed around turn 220) than you could ever get from an academy, no matter how early it was planted.

That's probably not too surprising to some, but I always thought I probably came out better on the academy until ~ mid-game. Of course, the "all things being equal" part of that equation is unrealistic. Planting an academy early will get you to the important benchmarks (universities, research labs, etc) earlier, which should have a snowball effect. Along those lines, I wonder about the trade off for bulbing a GS mid-game vs. saving them until the end. Obviously saving them generates more beakers, but teching up to Plastics 8 turns faster might more than compensate for the extra turns of doing manual research at the end of the game.

Beakers from GS bulbs will overflow.

So saving the great scientists or placing them in the land as academies will probably make more research when it is earlier. Saving great scientists for later will give you more research/bulb.