Building wealth vs building research?

[Arms Longfellow]

I'm a bit confused as to what's best. From what I've heard, building wealth is the way to go since you can run your science slider higher, and get improved multipliers from your science producing cities, but surely there must be some situations where you use building research?

 

[kossin]

Building research:
-you don't have Currency
-you are running 100% science with no gold loss, have nothing better to build
-you need just a few beakers to finish a tech 1 turn earlier (at the cost of some gold)
-you have a large sum of gold and are about to finish all the research you need

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

Also, it is better to build research if you don't have a huge commerce empire set up yet. Just test with what you have.

 

[vanatteveldt]

Normally, wealth/research goes through your science/gold multipliers.

Building wealth/research, on the other hand, goes through your production multipliers (forge etc).

If you build wealth, you can increase the science slider, and vice versa. So, build research if on average your gold multipliers outweigh your science multipliers (eg more markets than libraries). This is almost never the case, hence the advise to build wealth except the exceptions mentioned by kossin.

 

[Higher Game]

Building wealth is usually better due to getting libraries up before anything else. It still sounds like a bad return, but very early in the game a single juicy tech might be worth 3 in trading, so it's a risk worth going for sometimes.

Definitely build research or wealth if you have just a single potentially hostile neighbor, or better yet none. Units get priority if you might be up against multiple enemies.

 

[madscientist]

Normally, wealth/research goes through your science/gold multipliers.

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Not sure about this. Building wealth or gold goes through your production modifiers, thus the forge/factory/Bureacracy/Power/ironworks.

As mentioned you build research to get to currency faster.

Once you have a choice it depends on your infrastructure. Building wealth in a good production city generally allows you to up the science slider in other cities which generally have more science multipliers (libraries, academies, monestaries, universities, observatories) early on . This can swap very fast once you get guilds/banking and have alot of these buildings which better exploit your gold slider. However each vicilization is different as there are more gold multiplier bonus' UBs (Mint, Mall, Stock Exchange) than the lone research multiplier (the Korean UB).

Near the end of the game it rarely matters that much.

 

[coanda]

Simplest rule: Build wealth unless you're already at 100% science.

Slightly more complicated rule: Look at your current gold and beakers per turn. Bump your science slider up 10%, and note how many beakers per turn you gained and how much gold per turn you lost from before. If you gained more beakers than you lost gold, build wealth. If you lost more gold than you gained research, build research.

 

[UncleJJ]

Slightly more complicated rule: Look at your current gold and beakers per turn. Bump your science slider up 10%, and note how many beakers per turn you gained and how much gold per turn you lost from before. If you gained more beakers than you lost gold, build wealth. If you lost more gold than you gained research, build research.

This is the correct answer. Build wealth and raise the slider if research multipliers are better than gold ones.

Most often in the early and middle game you will have better research multipliers (more cities have libraries than markets, plus a few academies) so building wealth and raising the slider will produce more combined beakers and gold than building research.

Later in the game if you've built MGB in most cities and particularly if you've just captured a lot of cities with markets and banks (which have a 70% chance to survive capture) then it can be that the situation is reversed and overall your gold multiplers will be better than the research ones, then you should build research.

 

[kossin]

Later in the game if you've built Market Grocers Banks in most cities and particularly if you've just captured a lot of cities with markets and banks (which have a 70% chance to survive capture) then it can be that the situation is reversed and overall your gold multiplers will be better than the research ones, then you should build research.

This is too general unfortunately so it isn't completely true. This can be the case if your cities are geared toward hammers - not commerce.

In any case, every empire should have Oxford university so you should always aim to run the slider at 100% before building research.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Well, the most common way to go is to try to keep the slider at 100% - it's a perfectly reasonable way to go about things.

 

[Bibor]

Okay, here's the post lol.

Creating buildings that give (and thus promoting building wealth) have the following traits:
- need very early and very cheap technologies (Writing, Meditation)
- generate culture
- the total science multipliers after Scientific Method are 75% until superconductors
- culture buildings never survive city capture
- it's most certainly possible to have cities with +105% and an Oxford with +205% till Scientific Method.

It's not unheard of to have as much as +45% multipliers in early cities with 2 religions with the benefit of also generating 6
Thus, the logical choice in the early eras is to push the science slider up and to build wealth.

In comparison, the MGB has the following traits:
- requier two moderately expensive and one relatively cheap technology
- the total multipliers are 100% already after banking
- can survive city capture
- are buildings that require a lot of to build
- does not open their superbuilding (Wall Street) with Banking
- more often than not, the Grocer and Marketplace require trade with nations in different climate zones and/or continents to gain the full benefit of investment.

Astronomy opens up many new trades, cities are already able to produce more expensive buildings (workshops with caste and guilds), thus realistically enabling a solid expansion of MGBs.

In my opinion (myriad exceptions put aside):
- build science from Alphabet to Currency
- build wealth from Currency to Scientific Method
- build tech buildings from Meditation to Education
- build wealth buildings from Guilds to Astronomy

 

[UncleJJ]

This is too general unfortunately so it isn't completely true. This can be the case if your cities are geared toward hammers - not commerce.

I never said it was common. I did say it "can happen" and it has happened to me when running a CE with corporations. So it is completely true.

The odd academy and Oxford do not match the MGB everywhere, it's basically 75% versus 100% nearly everywhere (and Wall Street cancels Oxford if in a good commerce city). Plus I captured about 10 cities all with some gold multipliers and some had the full MGB and my corporations (Sushi amd Mining Inc) meant I had other things to do than replace research buildings. The average gold multiplier was distinctly higher than the average research one.

In any case, every empire should have Oxford university so you should always aim to run the slider at 100% before building research.

This was definitely not the case in my game described above. The slider was low and it was better to build Research rather than Wealth.

 

[jaycuhbbb]

The real question is, is it better to build wealth/research in the early-mid game instead of building markers/grocers especially? Often it seems to me that these buildings would take quite a while to generate any returns, especially in science cities with little productivity. Thus you would have to whip, delaying working cottages/specialists for no appreciable gain with your slider so high. Although, you do get happy/health. Markets/Grocers vs Wealth, hmmmm

 

[Kid R]

Build units.

Conquer cities = wealth. Peace settlement = tech. Best of both worlds

Re. keeping the slider at 100%, I say build wealth even then, so you can save up and keep the slider at 100% longer after you start running into deficit, because that time will surely come. If you're really confident you can keep the slider high for the foreseeable future then just build or whichever you have a need for at the time, don't follow any rule anybody gives you. OR BUILD UNITS.

Treating and as somehow opposites, and building research "to keep the slider down" is absurd! If you're running the % low because you want the cash, you don't have to build research to keep it low - if you need cash now, build cash now. If you're humming along with the slider at breakeven, build cash for all the reasons people have said. At surplus, see previous paragraph - probably build cash.

 

[jaycuhbbb]

Build units.

Conquer cities = wealth. Peace settlement = tech. Best of both worlds

I'm not so sure about this. Do you play on epic speed? I would rarely switch from wealth/research to units unless I was sure I had reached a tech that would allow me to succeed in a war, which does not happen enough to make this a good general rule.

 

[goodolarchie]

Fail gold can often be better than building wealth too, at the expense that it's a gamble/investment rather than seeing an instant return. Depends on Ind and available resources though.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

70 or 80% slider, market, etc will help in high commerce cities. Not a lot, but then, there just aren't all that many science multipliers. Plus, those cities you want pretty big, so you need happy/health in them, anyway.

There are lots of ways to get cash that doesn't include commerce, though, and really, you should invest in all of them.

Wealth, fail cash, hammer overflow conversion, trading resources for gpt, trading tech for gold, just begging for gold, shrines, privateers, corporations, spiral minaret, trade missions, settled great priests/merchants, merchant specialists - lots of ways to get gold to deficit research