Building Wealth, Research, Culture

[dylanmeditates]

i have a couple questions but first i want to clarify, to be most efficient, you build wealth if you have more research multipliers, and build research if you have more wealth multipliers. this is because RB+WB do not go through the multipliers of the individual cities doing the building; but they do get multiplied based on the sliders. so if you have tons of libraries and no markets, you want to build wealth to push the tech slider higher, and thus bring all the libraries into effect. and on the other hand, if you have many markets but no libraries, build research because you can lower the slider and have all the markets multiply your gold coming in. does that all sound right?

question 1: it seems that when it is most advantageous to be building research is when you have lots of gold multiplier buildings to increase the value of your lowered tech slider. so it seems that building research is never really meant for efficient researching at all, it's meant to keep beakers coming in while you're trying to amass gold? seems strange, not sure if i'm understanding that correctly.

question 2: let's say it's later in the game, around replaceable parts/astronomy, and you are gearing up to do some extensive beelining, maybe to get to mass media ASAP to build UN, or possibly going all the way to space. what will make my empire most efficient at teching for the long haul, building all the gold multipliers in every city or all the research multipliers, and then should i build research or wealth? what preference is given to highly cottaged/shrine cities vs farm/mines+workshop cities vs specialist cities? i can see pretty easily how wealth building is most effective in the early game but given all the possible buildings later in the game, it's too complicated for me to trust myself to understand

thanks for any ideas

 

[Ghpstage]

If you want to be teching you want to be driving your commerce through your multipliers. This means building wealth for the reasons you have already mentioned.
Building Research is limited to times where you either don't have access to Wealth (Pre-Currency), and times that your slider is at 100%.

 

[lymond]

this is because RB+WB do not go through the multipliers of the individual cities doing the building; but they do get multiplied based on the sliders.

This sentence may need clarification from you, if I'm reading it correctly. Not sure if it is misworded or you otherwise don't have the full understanding of concept, as this statement is incorrect based on the context (assuming RB+WB refer to research building and wealth building).

Just to clarify, Research and Wealth building have absolutely nothing to do with the sliders. Wealth building does allow one to keep a particular slider higher, but sliders have no impact on the act of converting hammers into wealth or research.

GHP comments are indeed correct and to the point. I'd add a little more. Generally, once you have the ability to build Wealth and Research, you get the most bang for the buck by building wealth to run your research slider higher. There are points in the game where it might be a matter of striking a balance. For instance, you are running 100% deficit research but have had a recent influx of gold from trades, conquest, whatever, such that you can keep the 100% research going for some time. You might augment that with some research building to speed up X tech even further.

Ofc, there may be other times, especially early during fast expansion or conquest, where you are simply building research to stay afloat or fund further conquest/expansion.

 

[plastiqe]

If you have a wonder available to build with any production bonuses like organized religion, industrial or the corresponding resource you build the wonder instead of wealth for the fail gold.

Eg. You have a city with 12 .

You could build wealth for 12 per turn.

or

You build the Hermitage in OR with marble. You're now putting 27 per turn with that same city which will all turn into a windfall of fail gold when another city completes the Hermitage.

Wealth is useful for saving overflow.

question 1: it seems that when it is most advantageous to be building research is when you have lots of gold multiplier buildings to increase the value of your lowered tech slider. so it seems that building research is never really meant for efficient researching at all, it's meant to keep beakers coming in while you're trying to amass gold? seems strange, not sure if i'm understanding that correctly.

More or less, yes. Sometimes if I'm racing to get a tech I'll go into all out science mode and build research.

question 2: let's say it's later in the game, around replaceable parts/astronomy, and you are gearing up to do some extensive beelining, maybe to get to mass media ASAP to build UN, or possibly going all the way to space. what will make my empire most efficient at teching for the long haul, building all the gold multipliers in every city or all the research multipliers, and then should i build research or wealth? what preference is given to highly cottaged/shrine cities vs farm/mines+workshop cities vs specialist cities? i can see pretty easily how wealth building is most effective in the early game but given all the possible buildings later in the game, it's too complicated for me to trust myself to understand

thanks for any ideas

What I do here (and all game) is called binary research, which means I'm either at 100% science or 0%. I will usually 100% research/bulb to education, then while I'm building universities & Oxford I set research back to 0. That way I have a huge sum of gold ready for when I finish those buildings and I can run my science slider through their multipliers at 100% again.

Only cities with a lot of commerce are building stuff like libraries and universities though, production cities are building the rest of the stuff my empire needs like units, spys, wonders for failgold and even sometimes wealth.