Idea: Great People buildings don't require citizens

[Pragmatic]

One of the complaints against the Academy is that, after sacrificing a Great Scientist to get it, you've also got to use a citizen who might be better employed working a farm, a trading post, or a mine.

So how about making the GP-buildings auto-employed? If you want the underlying terrain output, you've got to work the tile. But otherwise, the science, production, culture, or wealth just automatically flows into your city's stats.

Won't replace the generally-inefficient use of GP in creating buildings, but it should mitigate it some.

 

[MercuryP]

I think this is a good idea, although the same general effect can be established by just upping the effectiveness of the buildings. So like when choosing the value of say, a customs house, compare it to a trading post. 4 gold from customs house minus 2 gold from trading post means my great merchant is producing me 2 base gold per turn (or less, if you consider rationalism). Not very useful. So I increase this to something like 7 instead of 4, and my great merchant is now producing 5 gold per turn.

It's not really as interesting as what you proposed, but it has the same basic effect and is a lot easier to implement.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Yeah, I would suggest having a dramatically high effect to make it worthwhile (and probably also let you access whatever resource is underneath). Right now, it seems Great Engineers and Scientists are wonderful, while Great Artists and Merchants are not.