Changing the Science per-City Science Penalty

This topic comes up a lot. I've played a lot of games of BNW now and my conclusion is the science penalty for each extra city is a detriment to the game. What the science penalty is supposed to do is put some breaks on wide empires from becoming run away science machines. IMO what it actually does is simply make expanding a strategically undesirable option much of the time, because while cities can eventually contribute to science they create a long term hassle you could simply avoid by going tall instead. While I think some kind of limiter needs to exist to keep wide science in check, the current mechanism is overly punishing.

So, here is my proposal to fix the current situation: Keep the science penalty per city, but only apply it to the Science produced by each individual city. To calculate this, rank the cities based on their Science output. The city in first place has no penalty. The city in second place has a 5% penalty, the city in third gets a 10% penalty, and so on. This would limit the ability of each extra city to produce more Science, but never penalize global Science just because you made a new city.

It was always preferable to only self found a few cities given the other penalties that apply to self build cities (but not to puppets)
What it did was add another penalty to keeping too many AI cities when conquering in most games.
In addition, it may also be designed to keep Venice from getting too strong.
It's also somewhat of a nerf to a human played Austria. (AI Austria unlikely to use its UA enough to come into play)

As long as you raze those cities that are junk anyway; puppets should be able to carry their own weight even though it may not be significantly adding anything. 5% of your science is an easy threshold to meet on normal size maps and the larger map sizes have a lower threshold.

The science penalaty is fine and don't hurt big empires to much, big is still better for science because of more population.

However I think they should increase the cost of the techs by quite a bit to slow down the tech pace alot, maybe ancient techs as much as 50% increase compared to now.

Denkt said:

The science penalaty is fine and don't hurt big empires to much, big is still better for science because of more population.

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You know what else is important for Science (and population growth)? Happiness. Which you won't have if you go wide too early. And unhappiness also means a production hit, which also kills the idea that early wide will be able to get in all those science buildings.

In the early game, which is where your snowballing begins, wide really isn't a good option. I agree with the OP that the wide penalties need some reevaluation, if not the science penalty specifically. Maybe some of penalties should be exponential instead of just a per city clamp.

I think it's fine. Getting a new city up to the point where it produces enough science to counteract the increasing cost isn't very hard. Even on smaller maps where the penalty cuts deeper there's a fair tradeoff: building beyond the point where it profits you directly at least stifles the competition.

What it does end is stupid ICS strategies, and I say to hell with those anyway.

I think the science penalty is mainly to counteract the speed at which you can get a new city up and running with ITRs. Once you have a healthy happiness surplus from religion, SoPols or mercantile CSs, you can start to really spam cities and usually all it takes is one cycle from a caravan to get it up to 7-9 pop pretty quick. Imagine doing that without the penalty and you can see how obscenely fast you could blow through the tech tree. Order would be disgustingly OP without a tech penalty just using resettlement and iron curtain combined with the gobs of happiness in the ideology.

I think a better solution would be the one I've seen other people mention and that would be to add a flat +1 or +2 to the library or the city connections in meritocracy. Going wide is still pretty viable with the Maya because of their Pyramids. The old MotG and pyramid combo still works pretty well but isn't quite as cheesey as it used to be. That's proof enough for me that it could be balanced with minor tweaks.