I made an observation about the slider and I am not sure if I missed something.
Everytime tax or science beakers end up being an odd number in a city that has one plus one multiplier buildings (for all practical purposes that would be the libraries/marketplaces era), the player loses half a beaker because the game rounds the result down. Since the uncorrupted amount of beakers in a town can "in general" be considered to be a random number as far as the odd/even quality is concerned (I guess you can come up with a couple of ICS or something weird rare exceptions but they are not important), it seems that 50% of the cities will end up with an even number of uncorrupted beakers (those with an odd numbers of beakers do not care about the slider, they will always lose 0.5 beaker) and a random distribution of the slider will cause half of them (25% of the total cities) to split the amount of beakers in a sum of two odd numbers, thus wasting a single beaker. To sum it up, we tend to lose one beaker per four cities per round. This can be avoided if either the tax or the science is set to 0%. For example, instead of playing with 30% science, one could go 0%, 60%, 0%, 60% until the last round when he may be forced to use a mixed slider. The value of this loss is of course debatable and I guess it is not a coincidence that I noticed it during micromanaging a monarchy game with 50% of my empire being a desert, but it is still something to take note. Is the above analysis correct?
Everytime tax or science beakers end up being an odd number in a city that has one plus one multiplier buildings (for all practical purposes that would be the libraries/marketplaces era), the player loses half a beaker because the game rounds the result down. Since the uncorrupted amount of beakers in a town can "in general" be considered to be a random number as far as the odd/even quality is concerned (I guess you can come up with a couple of ICS or something weird rare exceptions but they are not important), it seems that 50% of the cities will end up with an even number of uncorrupted beakers (those with an odd numbers of beakers do not care about the slider, they will always lose 0.5 beaker) and a random distribution of the slider will cause half of them (25% of the total cities) to split the amount of beakers in a sum of two odd numbers, thus wasting a single beaker. To sum it up, we tend to lose one beaker per four cities per round. This can be avoided if either the tax or the science is set to 0%. For example, instead of playing with 30% science, one could go 0%, 60%, 0%, 60% until the last round when he may be forced to use a mixed slider. The value of this loss is of course debatable and I guess it is not a coincidence that I noticed it during micromanaging a monarchy game with 50% of my empire being a desert, but it is still something to take note. Is the above analysis correct?
