Science design (call it a mod idea, maybe)

I have been doing some game design theorycrafting about science yesterday. In Civ4, we had two basic approaches: A cottage economy and a specialist economy. This was due to there being two basic sources of research: Commerce production in your city and direct science production by (representation-boosted) specialists. Both had advantages and disadvantages and, while the specialist economy needed a bit more work to get it going, it was a viable option.

In Civ5, there is no equivalent to a cottage-driven research (I dislike using the term economy here because the two are now separated). Instead, research is now directly based on population. So the two approaches to research could now be population-driven and specialist-driven. However, since we only have one kind of science buildings, you don't really have to decide: You will usually run both, using science specialists to boost your research once you have enough food to put into them.

My idea would be to separate the two by creating three different kinds of research buildings. The first kind would offer library-like boosts for base research by population (public education, if you like). The second kind would offer scientist slots (elite education). The third kind would offer percentage bonuses, which are useful for both strategies.

Why would this be interesting? I think that the specialist-driven economy would work better with a small-city approach. True, you are foregoing all those population bonuses but the scientist specialists provide research for you. In addition, you get to use Great Scientists for bulbing so you can afford a little less efficiency. The pop-driven approach would obviously work well for large cities. The advantage of that is that you can use your citizens for other things and have them contribute to your science passively. You would probably get a larger total economy because the citizens can work other tiles.

If you add social policies for both, science-boosting for the specialists on one hand and tile-improvement boosting for the big-city approach, you could end up with a very interesting situation where it actually makes sense to have big cities. Of course, it would also make sense to go hybrid and have some smaller cities with specialists and some larger cities with passive bonuses but this would be less efficient for social policy reasons.

Opinions? Ideas? I'm still unsure if I will be creating a mod but if I do, I would probably try to do something like this along the way to add a bit of diversity to research strategies (and improve large cities, of course)

Not a bad commentary, but I'd like to mention a couple things:

alpaca said:

In Civ5, there is no equivalent to a cottage-driven research (I dislike using the term economy here because the two are now separated). Instead, research is now directly based on population.

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Actually, there is. There's a Social Policy that gives Trading Posts +2 research; with this, you're right back to the "cottage-driven research" in the most literal sense.

Additionally, you can modify this in your own mods to adjust tile yields directly without needing Social Policies. For instance, in my own Alpha Centauri mod, the Digital Era is full of techs that permanently boost some yield of various improvements; a Farm gaining +1 production, a Trading Post gaining +1 production, that sort of thing. But I've done things like make Mines give +2 research. So you could easily do the same for other improvements, creating an environment where working tiles instead of making specialists is still a viable way to boost research. While still being effectively population-based (as number of citizens limits the number of tiles worked), it directly opposes the specialist method.

My idea would be to separate the two by creating three different kinds of research buildings. The first kind would offer library-like boosts for base research by population (public education, if you like). The second kind would offer scientist slots (elite education). The third kind would offer percentage bonuses, which are useful for both strategies.

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The biggest problem with this is that in the late game there's very little downside to building more buildings; barring a deliberate ICS strategy, every city WILL have each building that would even remotely help, because why not? The maintenance costs will be far less than you're making in income. So it becomes very hard to create a strategy under which the library-style buildings could really balance out the specialists; it'd be more like specialists vs. the terrain things above (since those DO oppose), with the flat bonuses adding to both.

Also, you left out one category, the truly flat bonuses. You can make a building that gives a flat +5 to research (adjusted by the usual +50% multipliers) instead of Library-style population scaling. Of course, this really encourages the ICS types, so I'd avoid it.

First, thanks for commenting. The social policy only adds +1 per trade post, which is simply much less than going for scientist specialists (and the policy is three down in the tree while the specialist one is only two down and a prerequisite for it), and usually not worth more than 100 research.

The reason for tying them to social policies is that this makes it undesirable to go both ways because you could choose other useful policies if you decide for one of both ways. The way I see it, if you just add improvement bonuses you will indeed be likely to do both in your science cities. If you have social policies, and both the specialist and the improvement policies had some fairly weak prerequisites, you would have to sacrifice a lot to do both, with fairly little gain.

An option for making it desirable to specialise the cities on one research approach could be to invert the building-tree set-up. What I mean with this is to make the base buildings of both trees more expensive and less effective than the ones higher up. This would make you want to decide on one of the two, unlock it, and then go down that path rather than build the base buildings for both approaches. This could be done either by increasing the hammer cost or the maintenance or both.

Maintenance is the more likely candidate: Say, we have four buildings and the total tree should cost 20 maintenance. Vanilla would divvy this up like 2, 4, 6, 8 or something. Instead, I would go for 10, 4, 3, 3. Both would end up at 20 but in the second case, going for the high-tier buildings is very much more desirable than going for the low-tier buildings of both approaches. This could also be used to make sure you only go for either path if it's really desirable for you, for example because you have chosen appropriate social policies.

Do you know if it's possible to create buildings that improve the tile yields for trade posts or farms, for example? This would further increase the tension between the two approaches. I'm not yet sure how to really incentivize you enough to decide on one of the two trees short of waiting for dll access and hard-coding them to be alternatives (which I'm not fond of, mind) but then again the idea is just a day old and maybe somebody has more good ideas.

alpaca said:

Do you know if it's possible to create buildings that improve the tile yields for trade posts or farms, for example?

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Not through XML, as far as I know. You can use a building to increase the yields of a resource (see the Mint), you can increase the yields of terrain features (forests, jungles, oases), and you can explicitly increase the yields of river, lake, or ocean tiles. But from what I've seen, there's no way to increase yields of an improvement through buildings (but you CAN improve them through SPs and technology unlocks, so clearly it can't be that complex to add in LUA), just like you can't increase the yields of specific terrain types. (So you can't give every grassland +1 food, from what I can see, which is too bad.) Again, this'd probably be doable through LUA editing, just not the XML.

Now, what I did in my mod was add an SP that gave +1 research to farms and mines, to accompany that trading post boost. Added to the yield boosts given at certain techs, it really does prevent the specialist economy for a while (until they get their own boosts). So you can get the same effect, if not in the exact way you wanted.