Scientific Method

Monasteries have the second best hammer-multiplier ratio in the game, only libraries are better. They pay for themselves very quickly. Plus, the very nature of the early-mid game points towards a civil service beeline, which means a bureaucracy capital can account for over half of your empire's income. It hurts, but sometimes you don't really care about research and really want things like biology and communism to boost your empire's production and save intercontinental conquest maintenance.
 
The loss quoted on the previous page is more than 1 turn of lost science for every 10 turns of research. Considering how many hundreds of turns are left in a marathon game by the Industrial era, that's pretty much cutting putting the Future Era's start at the point when you should've hit Future Tech, and leaving various Modern techs at times when you ought to be in the Future Era.
 
pi-r8 said:
Because that would totally ruin the game. The reason techs are more expensive for the first person to research the game is also to allow people that are behind in tech. Of course being ahead in tech gives many advantages, but it shouldn't be such a massive advantage that it's just an automatic win to get a small tech lead. And no, getting a small momentary tech lead is not "the whole frieken point in the game".

As it is now, someone with a larger but more backwards empire has a chance to come back, since they can still use monostaries and old wonders, and techs are cheaper for them. If you take that away, there would be no point in even playing the second half of the game- whoever reached liberalism or scientific method first would always win.
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Unless you are already running away in tech (which essentially means you've won, under most circumstances), prioritizing liberalism and scientific methods actually incurs a significant opportunity cost. That is instead of spending beakers on more practical techs like steel, rifling, and military tradition, you are spending beakers to obsolete your GL and monasteries. If I have a close competitor going for one of those techs and I will definitely not get SM until I have some counter for their new units. While communism and assembly line are attractive techs to go for, I generally don't beeline for them in a close game unless I have cavalries/rifles.
 
The path for Steel is very close to the path for Liberalism, up to near the end (you need Engineering + Gunpowder + Chemistry to get Steel, and Liberalism requires Philosophy, but otherwise they have the same pre-reqs). So going for Liberalism doesn't have that significant an opportunity cost if you want to get Steel anyway, which you presumably do.

Going for Scientific Method if you don't have a clear need to get the techs beyond it isn't anywhere near as optimal though.
 
Mathias said:
The solution: Don't waste your hammers on monasteries.

Actually, the most a city's science output can be reduced by SM is 41.2%. If you have 7 monasteries and no other science modifiers (highly unlikely), then your city's science output is 1.7 times its base output. The reduction then is from 1.7 to 1.0, the 70% increase representing 41.18% of the total.

If you are focusing on research, then you probably have Astronomy and Observatories. Your major cities then have +75% from science buildings and maybe +20% from monasteries. A reduction from 1.95 to 1.75 is just over 10.25%.
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Then again, we have to remember that it's really hard to get many cities with at least 4 religions each. The usual would be 1-3 (with 3 being an occasional ocurrence); so this at most means one would actually be losing 0-30% due to losing monasteries. Even so, there's still the possibility to get all the way to 70% from monasteries.
 
Yep, Firaxis understanding of Scientific Method is a bit... ********. Maybe technically it does what it is intended to do for gameplay purposes, but why call it scientific method then.

Imagine, what if you had a Tank instead of Swordsman. Same timing, same prerequisites, same stats, same everything, but it's called a Tank and has Tank graphics. Makes no sense, right, even if from gameplay perspective it's a perfectly normal unit right in it's place.

Note: I'm not saying that S.M. is a sensible tech from gameplay perspective. All I'm saying is that even if it was such, it shouldn't be called Scientific Method.
 
Scientific Revolution
This would be a much better name, as the Civilization concept of Revolution is to screw yourself over for a while so you can gain a benefit later.

The Revolution would be the disestablishment of religion's position in the field of science, thus reducing the amount of effort going in to research due to a near entire majority of secular researchers only, but ultimately this allows you to discover things that those religious scribes would never have dreamed of.
 
I thought about making one of these threads myself, last time I had a great library and monastic network biting the SciMeth dust. I'm always happy to join in though and discuss how much I hate this tech. This isn't the first SciMeth thread, and nor will it be the last. It's more like a support group than an appeal to firaxis for change.

A simple way to deal with SciMeth is to calculate the amount of gold needed to finance all-out, 100% deficit research on your target tech (commy/phys/bio). Raise all of that money WHILE researching SciMeth. This minimizes the amount of time you spend damaged by SciMeth without the rebounding benefits of the goody-tech.
 
Tristan_C said:
A simple way to deal with SciMeth is to calculate the amount of gold needed to finance all-out, 100% deficit research on your target tech (commy/phys/bio). Raise all of that money WHILE researching SciMeth. This minimizes the amount of time you spend damaged by SciMeth without the rebounding benefits of the goody-tech.
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In addition to this, I usually set my research so that scientific method barely doesn't finish — so that it's just got a slither of research left on it. Then I put my research on 100% to finish it so that I get maximum spillover onto the next tech. The excess beakers still get the monastery multiplier, whereas if there was no spillover then you'd just miss out.
 
If you have 7 religions, you should be going for a cultural victory, and I'm pretty sure you don't need SciMeth for that...
 
I can understand taking out the bonus for monastic research. You only have to look at the issues the church had with men of science in the 1500-1600 era. Galileo disputing the received wisdom saved and nurtured by the church in the Dark Ages? Call him a heretic and threaten him with eternal damnation. Science and the church broke apart, and (with the notable exception of Mendel) research leading to scientific breakthroughs became centered around Universities.
Thinking along those lines, as research decentralized the effect of a repository of ancient wisdom would become less significant. A great phase of experimentation with rigorous controls examined all aspects of the physical world. The great discoveries of the late 1700s through the 1800s were mostly from individuals, not from any centralized research facility. Electricity and Steam Power jump immediately to mind.
 
catfish99 said:
I can understand taking out the bonus for monastic research. You only have to look at the issues the church had with men of science in the 1500-1600 era. Galileo disputing the received wisdom saved and nurtured by the church in the Dark Ages? Call him a heretic and threaten him with eternal damnation. Science and the church broke apart, and (with the notable exception of Mendel) research leading to scientific breakthroughs became centered around Universities.
Thinking along those lines, as research decentralized the effect of a repository of ancient wisdom would become less significant. A great phase of experimentation with rigorous controls examined all aspects of the physical world. The great discoveries of the late 1700s through the 1800s were mostly from individuals, not from any centralized research facility. Electricity and Steam Power jump immediately to mind.
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So we could put it this way: Once science was on a firm ground, but denied by the church, the monks were really off with the sci's, leading to big rift - so science took itself elsewhere. Eventually these "individual discoveries" become fully fledged revolutions (the next techs :P) and no longer could it be denied. And THEN an immense period of discovery ensued, as they could no longer be rejected.
And the monks retire.
:D
 
So we could put it this way: Once science was on a firm ground, but denied by the church, the monks were really off with the sci's, leading to big rift - so science took itself elsewhere.
Click to expand...

In the civilization I run, monks and priests would never ever get into the way of Science. Meaning once the Scientific Method is discovered, it gets applied immediately. With no drawbacks caused by the decline of religious education or whatever.

There's just no justification for how SM is implemented in Civ. None.
 
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