Oh ok I see what you mean now. I did notice this a little bit in some of my games, but by the time I bother to run merchants instead of scientists, I'm usually slowing my research tremendously in favour of wealth for US buying of troops for a final push. Before that time, I'm generally running only scientists and engineers (maybe priests if I'm not in caste) in all my cities.
So that brings up another point, I usually focus on research until such a time that I'm sufficiently comfortable with my techs that I shift focus onto wealth to begin abusing US. Early mid-game my commerce cities are not "specialized" to either research or wealth. In general, all my commerce cities start with granary (monument if early, but skip if I can get culture by religion, creative or in this current game, terrace as Inca), library, courthouse, (maybe forge) observatory, university, market, grocer, and bank (harbour and lighthouse would be built earlier if coastal). So by the end, all my commerce cities would have multipliers for research and wealth but with research getting priority (unless they are late game, non automated commerce cities, which then would build the wealth multipliers before the research ones). I understand that I'm not fully specializing my cities with this play but I feel wealth is not very useful early on, especially when you have nothing to spend it on (even more so with random event turned off). Tech rate is also very important early on especially with the initial REX push. Is this strategy generally speaking not viable for higher difficulty play?
