slaze
Deity
Optimum early teching works like this: you want to spend as much time as possible at 0% science.
Many of you probably laughed that off as a joke, but hear me out... Now, most people tech at the highest rate they can. If, after maintenance costs, the highest they can go is 80%
, then 80% it is. But its perfectly equivilant to run 60% half the time and 100% the other half. So if this is the case, you'll want to be running some combination of 100% or 0%, and here's why.
Now it's true the following corner-cutting moves don't save that much in terms of research accumulated. It might save you something like 1 or 2 turns or even less for the whole of the ancient age. But it does save some, and that makes it slightly better. And better is in the direction of optimum. Anyway, read on.
The only constant, as far as your economy is concerned, is maintenance. You can choose to reseach, you can choose to put commerce into espionage, you can choose to stockpile gold. But outside of not founding cities (or running certain civics, etc., etc.) you can't choose whether you have to pay maintenance - it's a must.
So here's where the tricks come in. Say you want Monarchy (a good economic tech that is worth breaking your bank on). But right now you don't even have Meditation. You're not concerned about Poly or Mono, you're going to take the shortest path: Meditation, Priesthood, Monarchy. What you do is you put the science slider at 100% and you go into the scientific advisor screen and count up how many turns it would take to get all three techs (say you find out it's 20 turns). You then put the slider down to 0% to see how much maintenance you have to pay each turn (say it's 15
per turn).
What you'd do is run 0% until you get 300 (or a little bit less as you'll see) and then run 100% all the way to Monarchy. There's a couple reasons why this is better.
First, your economy is growing. Your cities are adding more population allowing more commerce tiles and your cottages are growing into hamlets and such. If you have more multipliers which, with the early library is usually the case, you'll have more commerce to put in the multiplier and while you're running the best rate, 100%.
The other reason is that while running 0%, you still get 1. While running 0%, you don't still get 1. In the above Monarchy example, this might save you 16. Yes that's not much, but in the very beginning this is about as much as you'd make in a turn. So you save only a turn, but it's closer to optimal.
Another thing to do is to use the hidden multipliers. If you're researching Writing and have all the prereqs (+20% each for +60%) and can afford to delay Writing for a turn, use the prereqs to boost research into the next tech. Say you want Alphabet which only has Writing as a prereq, then research as much of Writing as you can without completing it, and then on the next turn go 100% and pour as much of the multiplied research into the next tech. That research gets a +60% modifier, while then next turn Alphabet would go back down to a +20% modifier. After that you would go back to the 0%, save, 100% model. Use techs with many prereqs to spill research into techs without.
To conclude, for a growing economy, the 0%->100% model is best. For a shrinking economy (losing cities to invaders) a 100%->0% is best. For a stagnant economy, it doesn't matter. The 0% one beaker trick dies as soon as you run your first scientist, although as the techs (and your economy) get bigger, the 1 doesn't really matter, although you could switch to merchants if you really wanted to milk it.
And I could see a weakness in this as a vulnerability to spies, with their steal treasury mission.
Many of you probably laughed that off as a joke, but hear me out... Now, most people tech at the highest rate they can. If, after maintenance costs, the highest they can go is 80%
, then 80% it is. But its perfectly equivilant to run 60% half the time and 100% the other half. So if this is the case, you'll want to be running some combination of 100% or 0%, and here's why. Now it's true the following corner-cutting moves don't save that much in terms of research accumulated. It might save you something like 1 or 2 turns or even less for the whole of the ancient age. But it does save some, and that makes it slightly better. And better is in the direction of optimum. Anyway, read on.
The only constant, as far as your economy is concerned, is maintenance. You can choose to reseach, you can choose to put commerce into espionage, you can choose to stockpile gold. But outside of not founding cities (or running certain civics, etc., etc.) you can't choose whether you have to pay maintenance - it's a must.
So here's where the tricks come in. Say you want Monarchy (a good economic tech that is worth breaking your bank on). But right now you don't even have Meditation. You're not concerned about Poly or Mono, you're going to take the shortest path: Meditation, Priesthood, Monarchy. What you do is you put the science slider at 100%
and you go into the scientific advisor screen and count up how many turns it would take to get all three techs (say you find out it's 20 turns). You then put the slider down to 0% to see how much maintenance you have to pay each turn (say it's 15 per turn). What you'd do is run 0%
until you get 300 (or a little bit less as you'll see) and then run 100% all the way to Monarchy. There's a couple reasons why this is better. First, your economy is growing. Your cities are adding more population allowing more commerce tiles and your cottages are growing into hamlets and such. If you have more
multipliers which, with the early library is usually the case, you'll have more commerce to put in the multiplier and while you're running the best rate, 100%. The other reason is that while running 0%
, you still get 1. While running 0%, you don't still get 1. In the above Monarchy example, this might save you 16. Yes that's not much, but in the very beginning this is about as much as you'd make in a turn. So you save only a turn, but it's closer to optimal. Another thing to do is to use the hidden multipliers. If you're researching Writing and have all the prereqs (+20% each for +60%) and can afford to delay Writing for a turn, use the prereqs to boost research into the next tech. Say you want Alphabet which only has Writing as a prereq, then research as much of Writing as you can without completing it, and then on the next turn go 100%
and pour as much of the multiplied research into the next tech. That research gets a +60% modifier, while then next turn Alphabet would go back down to a +20% modifier. After that you would go back to the 0%, save, 100% model. Use techs with many prereqs to spill research into techs without. To conclude, for a growing economy, the 0%->100% model is best. For a shrinking economy (losing cities to invaders) a 100%->0% is best. For a stagnant economy, it doesn't matter. The 0% one beaker trick dies as soon as you run your first scientist, although as the techs (and your economy) get bigger, the 1
doesn't really matter, although you could switch to merchants if you really wanted to milk it. And I could see a weakness in this as a vulnerability to spies, with their steal treasury mission.
Also how does this work in combination with rushing, whipping, warfare.. which influences your commerce. Good luck trying to calculate everything. 
If you give the tech, you still have the tech yourself. If you give the gold .. you're fcked. 
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from a new river tile. 
