Why taking out the research slider was a bad idea

[EmpireOfCats]

What the gold/research slider gave you was control. You could decide how high a priority you would make research, directly, with one move. If you put it too high, you ran out of money, if you put it too low, the others got far, far ahead of you. It had consequences. When research went down by itself, it told you that you were expanding too fast. It wasn't logical -- how exactly does that magic work? -- but for the gameplay, it was just right.

Now, we've gone from "gold to research" to "food to research" based on the number of people. Yes, that might be logical, but it isn't fun. It's too indirect. You have to make sure you city is large and then build libraries ... there is no way to directly influence the research rate, let alone do it quickly. Which is sort of ironic because you can influence production by just outright buying the units and you can influence the spread of culture by just outright buying the land.

Unfortunately, I don't see an easy fix for this. Civ V would seem to be stuck with "food to research". But this would be one of the top things to repair in Civ VI in five years or so.

(Again, I'm one of those second-class customers in Europe who has only been allowed to play the demo so far though I've already paid for the full version, though I've done it so many times I'm sure my CPU cache has a special area reserved for it by now.)

 

[Tennyson]

The thing I miss about the slider is turning it DOWN when I needed extra cash. In my last game, shuffling specialists around didn't really help much, and building wealth was a joke. (10% of hammers become wealth, in a game where you spend hundreds of gold routinely).

I think you are better off focusing on wealth, and if research isn't up to snuff, rush-build a research building in the right place to pump it up again. Plus research agreements, which are comparatively cheap compared to universities.