3 – Overflow
On your last turn of researching a technology you notice that your current rate of research is higher than the remaining beakers left to research. You may be asking yourself, "Whats happening to those beakers?" The answer is that they are being directly converted to gold. If you have a research rate of +20 beakers and you are 40/50 on irrigation, the next turn you will complete the research AND receive 10 gold from overflow. Depending on how your cities are structured this can be helpful or harmful. If you have a lot of +%Science modifiers then the overflow is quite handy for acquiring some change, but if you have lots of +%Gold/Production then your workers would be more useful working other tiles so that there is no overflow. The latter requires significantly more micromanagement. As such, I tend to avoid the latter and stick with prior, also because I usually have libraries and such.
Manipulating your research rate correctly can allow you to obtain large sums of money from overflow. For example, if you have +500 beakers a turn and you arrange it so that you'll be 1000/1050 on combustion, then the following turn you'll have 450 bonus gold, which I would personally use to start gold rushing tanks.
Just saying.
