allotting commerce to science or gold

[chedderslam]

hello. New player here. I bought the game on steam so I do not have a manual.

I am just starting the game, and have 4 commerce coming in. It is alloted to 2 to science and 2 to gold. Can I change the ratio? For instance, have all 4 go to science? I can't figure out how to do this. Is this advisable?

Thanks!

 

[Bucephalus]

Welcome, cheddarslam.

If you press F1, you'll be taken to the Domestic Advisor screen; there you will be able to adjust the allocation of your commerce by use of the two sliders.

 

[Ataxerxes]

Welcome as well!

It's definitely advisable to adjust the science slider. At 50% too much is going to gold. Even on low difficulty levels this will hurt you significantly. A couple of basic tips:

When there's one turn to go to finish the research, go into the domestic advisor. If you're researching at 90% for example, you might be able to drop it to, say 40% and still finish the research the next turn. This can get you a fair amount of gold to let you research with the slider higher the next turn.

In general, keeping the science slider higher is better. There are uses for gold in buying techs, etc., but research drives your Civilization.

Above Chieftain, you might research your first tech at 10 or 20%. There's a maximum number of turns for research, so the first tech might be done in 40 or 50 turns whether you run the slider at 20% or 50%. The savings can then be used to run the slider at 100% for a while, speeding up your overall research. Besides, you can then trade for more techs from the AI and then sprint past them later.