Wealth or Research

[pholkhero]

Okay ~ so i have a bit of a strategy question for everyone: Which option do you prefer to use for a city's production?

My thinking on it is this: I use wealth for the most part, reasoning that if i take in more 'wealth,' i can slide up the research rate and thereby get more beakers THAT way rather than by the using 'research'. However, if i'm making, say, a postive income and the wealth generated by 'wealth' isn't enough to warrant it, i go with research, but by and large, i'm using 'wealth' most of the time.

Anybody else have different ideas?

[Jester]

That's what I've always done.

My logic is pretty crude, basically amounting to the idea that it doesn't matter. Increase your "wealth" producing cities, and you can put your science rate up. Put your cities to "research", and you'll need a higher tax rate, but you get more beakers.

I just find "wealth" more convenient to work with.

Does anyone have any math that says otherwise?

-Jester

[Gyathaar]

Seems logical to me that as long as you cant run 100% sci with a positive income,
then the best strategy is to run wealth in cities that has higher modifiers to gold production (market, grocer, bank, wall street) than to sci,
and run sci in cities where the total sci modifier is higher than the gold one..

[Majromax]

Ah, but is wealth/research production influenced by the city bonuses?

[Gyathaar]

Ah, but is wealth/research production influenced by the city bonuses?

Yes

[regoarrarr]

It was funny that I was just reading this topic when I was playing Adventure 4, and realizing that at least in that game, this is a moot point! Since you can't discover Alphabet you can't build "research" and can only do wealth :-)

[Hacp]

Depends. You might want to do research if you need the extra happiness from the culture beakers .

[Blake]

I think there should be a definite answer for this one, depending on the gold:science exchange rate and the science/gold multipliers in the specific city. These things can be calculated but it's tedious (maybe someday a mod will come out which calculates all these demographics).

As a rule of thumb, build science in cities with high science multipliers (academy, oxfords etc), and build wealth in cities with high gold multipliers (ie Wall Street), intuitive so far. Anyway, in the absence of super-duper multipliers build wealth, as that will free up commerce in the cities with the highest science multipliers.
So basically:
academy cities: Science, everything else: wealth.

This is related to the economics concept of "comparative advantage", while I had believed that all economics is useless pseudo science it does actually have some use in Civ.

edit: This also works exactly the same for specialists, if you're trying to decide between merchant and scientists and don't care about the specific GPP, say with merchantalism.

[Bezhukov]

Building wealth, hiring merchants, and/or building a shrine in the Wall Street city is often enough to pay the expenses for a whole empire. Likewise research at Oxford. But the exchange rate of hammers for wealth/research is so poor otherwise that there are usually better options.