RA costs, say 200 gold right? And say it delivers engineering, 250 beakers.
In those 30 turns, you need around 8 beakers a turn. This is 10%, so if you're producing 80 beakers a turn at that point. It's even in terms of science.
Got no numbers at hand, but it feels weaker.
The RA costs gold. The DoF doesn't.
The RA is something you can get only if you give up something else, like a city state alliance.
And about the paying for being friends, that's very incorrect. Both players lose gold, sharing ideas costs something. It's not like they gain what you lose
I think you missed what my comment was in reference to; please read the entire quote.
"Do you mean that you would add a negative gold cost for a DoF in addition to the research bonus?
That is worth exploring, but also feels a bit odd.
Why can I not be friends with someone without having to pay them gold?"
My comment was about an alternative model where the DoF had a negative gold cost per turn, which is what Thal seemed to be implying from:
"but I've mentioned three times now that I can add other effects."
In version A (what was originally proposed, the DoF has no gold cost, and so it isn't a direct comparison to a RA that does have a gold cost.
In version B, the DoF gives you research but also has a gold cost, but this feels weird, because it means there is no way to become friends with another player without also incurring a per turn gold cost.
It's not about the act of choosing to go to war, but moreso about the choice of being a warmonger or not. If you prepare for war, you will produce more units, and forgo infrastructure. If not, you're doing something wrong. You cannot wage war without a large military and you cannot be optimal peacefull with a large military.
My point is that it is not fair to make comparisons with conflate benefits that solely come from acting like a warmonger (ie declaring war on and conquering enemy cities brings you more population and land) with benefits that are available to any player even if they don't attack their enemies.
The tradeoff between units or infrastructure is one that every strategy must consider, it is not the case that declaring war on your enemies and conquering their cities gives you more units. In fact, it give you fewer units, because you lose some units in the war (and you lose more units in an offensive war than a defensive war).
It is the case that you have more experienced units from combat; this is something inherently tied to a warfare strategy, you cannot get experience from combat without going to war.
It is not the case that you cannot have a large army without going to war. That difference comes from the military/infrastructure tradeoff you make.
Puppets may be less efficient, but science buildings still provide beakers.
Puppets will rarely build universities, let alone anything higher; they rarely build libraries, I find. A puppet with a library and a university provides 0.75 science per population point, as opposed to 2.25 science per pop for a regular city.
I do not find it to be the case that a warmonger strategy gives you a higher science income.
And puppets do build happy buildings, and use specialists.
Puppets are never net happiness contributors, and tend not to build happiness buildings unless you are in negative happiness. A conquest strategy has much more difficulty retaining positive happiness (you acquire more pop, you don't have as much time to dedicate to building happiness infrastructure), and so they're at much greater risk of going into negative happiness and tanking your city growth.
I do note that I have a feeling that your point of view comes from a deity player, efficiency and warmonger love - no offence -, because that's what it takes to beat deity.
Actually, I mostly play a builder strategy, combined with defensive wars and rare conquest, mostly from wars that are not initiated by me. I'm just aware that the builder strategy isn't the only way to play.
All parts equal, the conqueror will probably outpace and outgrow the builder, because of more cities equal to more hammers, equal to more infrastructure, in time.
The addition of puppets also increase resources, culture and gold which result in other bonuses. Which all, in time, accrue in more benefits for the conqueror than the builder.
The whole initial argument was that conquerors get more science faster, and so there needed to be this DoF mechanism to compensate for that.
I don't think this is the case. The Conqueror doesn't have the time to build up the huge megacities with all the stacked up science boosters that provide such a large research income, and puppets mean that they have terrible happiness:science efficiency.
With a builder strat, a very large proportion of my science income usually comes from ~3 cities.
is a higher rate of tech research than 1 free tech every 30 turns. This is something that would be really helpful, since I don't have any savegames right now that I could load to check empire-wide research.
:5
population boom split among the largest 5 cities.
for a NC
and 2 scientist slots
maint and 6 scientist slots
