Late game-Beurocracy

[Artichoker]

From a pure economic standpoint, Vassalage works well in the late game with the Organized trait because it receives the full discount from Organized (unlike Nationhood), while still keeping the full number of extra free units.

Charismatic also has synergy, but I see that as more useful during Medieval, when you have a bigger window of opportunity to build units at lower cost, that can be upgraded to stronger units with gold. If you're fortunate enough, you may very well gain some cities with settled GGs that will eliminate the need for the +2 XP bonus from that point on. Without those high-powered cities, though, Charismatic allows you to put up a respectable level of troop quality with Vassalage.

If we're consider Bureaucracy, as in the OP, I would mainly consider using it if the following conditions are met:

1) I'm either going for space race or conquest w/nukes

2) I don't have enough towns for Free Speech to be better

3) I don't need to assemble many ground forces, in the case of conquest (otherwise I'd use Vassalage or Nationhood)

 

[Silu]

A small detail that hasn't been mentioned: Inflation affects these civics in different ways. Nationhood's (low civic upkeep) and Vassalage's (free units) economic bonuses are amplified by inflation, but Bureucracy's (more commerce) isn't. This makes the latter relatively a bit worse on higher levels and late in a game.

 

[mirthadir]

The situation where wonder-whoring is ideal is far and in between in my experience (at least on my current level: emperor). If I end up with an IND leader with access to stone/marble, I usually consider this, but it is a rare circumstance that all these variables are together in harmony (at least not until mid-late game).

Even if you have 10 settled Great People (GPr and GE split evenly which is very unlikely), you're only looking at 45 from specialists in REP. Plus the 225% from lib/univ/obs/oxford/academy, you're only looking at 146 per turn. It seems very sub-optimal IMO to put Oxford in with Ironworks even in this situation. My Oxford city usually brings in anywhere from 400 - 750 per turn without counting a golden age. It seems a far stretch that regular specialists and some sparse in this hammer heavy capital would be able to reach those levels of research.

All this is just my observations on optimizing the Oxford city. Then again, in this type of game, it would seem like a majority of research is coming from other sources.

Wonder whoring does have lower rates, but it also retards AI tech rates; only the proportional rate matters. The question is where is it better to put Oxford? If you aren't headed into FS, normal towns just aren't worth that much; if you are going to run slider the amount rolled through your multipliers is going to be even worse. Running mass scientists requires caste which hammers your production in a lot of cases (particularly if you are are planning to hit communism for early SP/Kremlin); getting masses of other specs just takes hoardes of production. Remember part of the beauty of this is that you get Oxford online when it is most useful - before lib when you are gunning for the breakthrough techs (e.g. rifling, communism, demo, steel). Say you have 50% science slider (cash, EP, and culture taking up the other 50%), 20 towns would be 100 of which 50 go into .

Long run sure, it is better to go elsewhere - eventually the slider rate will climb, but by the time the long run rolls around I normally want to leverage a short term gain.

Remember, at the end of the day you are capped at 140 for Oxford improvements (that is for FS towns). Anything more than that is coming from passive sources that stay with the settled spec Oxford (e.g. river is the same in both cases as are trade routes). If you use mills the difference is even less. Unless you are going to be run a high slider, which is not the normal game plan for a wonder spamming IW cap, then it takes a phenomenal location to beat the cap - faster build with all passive getting the B multipliers and specs :beakers: adds up to an extremely steep short term advantage (particularly if you can whip in unis).