Playing a game as China, and it got me thinking about how you could make them more technologically advanced throughout the early game. I always find that I use a lot of scientist specialists with China, because rapid expansion drains my economy with maintenance costs and hundreds of food resources makes for a perfect specialist economy. In my current game I haven't seen above 30% science since the very begining, and practically all of my science it seems is reliant on whipping libraries everywhere and running two scientists in all my cities, plus the occassional great scientist for academies.
I think an awesome new UP for them would be giving scientists +1 or +2
. This would give them an important bonus in the early game, but would become less influential as the game continues and more and more of your science starts to come from commerce. It would also give China a unique strategy and playstyle in the game which can't really be replicated afaik by any other civ to quite the same degree.
The library would also be a prime target for a new chinese UB if you wanted to go there, because iirc you prioritise writing in the early game en route to founding Confucianism. Providing a third scientist slot would be a small change with a potentially strong effect, especially if you combined it with the UP idea. But again this would become less important to the game as time goes on, quite organically creating a Chinese golden era of advancement early on but then dying out as time goes on. Particularly because you can only really afford to run that many specialists when you're at peace, and so by the time of the Mongol invasion they will probably be taking only minimal effect from the UP/UB. In fact, you could even say that running 2-3 specialists across the country would be noticably reducing their production, creating a less well-defended China to the advantage of the Mongols.