In my understanding there are several ways how to play: balanced (a mixture between food/production/money/science), food focus (and use population sacrifices for buildings), money focus (use buy outs), production focus (regularly building stuff), via population in cities (to increase the numbers by using buffed workers) and via districts (to increase the numbers by using buffed districts). I'm not sure if military (just conquer the territories or make vassals), influence (just expand massively) and religion (buff a certain playstyle) are valid ways in itself or just boosters after which you have to transition into other playstyles.

Anyway, I tried some playthroughs focussed on the various strategies and they all worked fine and felt like I can finish the full game this way. However, I often seemed to neglect science, i.e. my cities looked great but research crawled slowly. So I tried a science focused playthrough yesterday and rushed through the tech tree including the last era. But then I was stuck: my science rating per city way easily 10x higher then the other productions and suddenly everything got super slow: 20-40 turns to build normal buildings, several turns for population increases which itself bring only minimal increases and way too little money to buy anything at all. I was honestly stuck with no way to recover my economy. For roughly 10 rounds I was locked into a war with a single unit which I couldn't reinforce or upgrade to its supervisor successor unit because I lacked production or money. Then I surrendered.

Hence my question: do you have the same impression, that there a several valid strategies, including focus on a single parameter but they all need some science in parallel and that science only is not a valid strategy since the costs massively scale after a while where science has no way to catch up (contrary to money or population where you can use them to shortcut production)?

Would it make sense to add a similar mechanism where science can be used to shortcut buildings (e.g. reduce costs of outdated buildings when you research the successor tech. No idea how this should apply to districts or units though)?

By the way, is there a logic behind how costs massively increase over time? If I look at a large capital city with massive science production but zero population or other production capabilities, the building costs are massively higher than for a new city. I'm not sure if it scales by amount of connected territories (didn't seem so), production (didn't seem so and wouldn't make sense since anyway), population size (didn't seem so) or something else.

I feel like you can go science in one era but no need to go there in every era. I just made food play and than switched to science. Get all researches and go to gold after. There is one reserch where forbids you from pop buyouts than gold becomes more needed. 

zzzioh wrote:

In my understanding there are several ways how to play: balanced (a mixture between food/production/money/science), food focus (and use population sacrifices for buildings), money focus (use buy outs), production focus (regularly building stuff), via population in cities (to increase the numbers by using buffed workers) and via districts (to increase the numbers by using buffed districts). I'm not sure if military (just conquer the territories or make vassals), influence (just expand massively) and religion (buff a certain playstyle) are valid ways in itself or just boosters after which you have to transition into other playstyles.

Anyway, I tried some playthroughs focussed on the various strategies and they all worked fine and felt like I can finish the full game this way. However, I often seemed to neglect science, i.e. my cities looked great but research crawled slowly. So I tried a science focused playthrough yesterday and rushed through the tech tree including the last era. But then I was stuck: my science rating per city way easily 10x higher then the other productions and suddenly everything got super slow: 20-40 turns to build normal buildings, several turns for population increases which itself bring only minimal increases and way too little money to buy anything at all. I was honestly stuck with no way to recover my economy. For roughly 10 rounds I was locked into a war with a single unit which I couldn't reinforce or upgrade to its supervisor successor unit because I lacked production or money. Then I surrendered.

Hence my question: do you have the same impression, that there a several valid strategies, including focus on a single parameter but they all need some science in parallel and that science only is not a valid strategy since the costs massively scale after a while where science has no way to catch up (contrary to money or population where you can use them to shortcut production)?

Would it make sense to add a similar mechanism where science can be used to shortcut buildings (e.g. reduce costs of outdated buildings when you research the successor tech. No idea how this should apply to districts or units though)?

By the way, is there a logic behind how costs massively increase over time? If I look at a large capital city with massive science production but zero population or other production capabilities, the building costs are massively higher than for a new city. I'm not sure if it scales by amount of connected territories (didn't seem so), production (didn't seem so and wouldn't make sense since anyway), population size (didn't seem so) or something else.

I believe the costs scale with the number of districts you produce. 

Your thought experiment is an interesting one.  I expect what you're find is that if you focus just on any one yield, your economy will be sub-optimal.  Consider:

• if you focus solely on Industry, you'll be able to build lots of things, but if all you build is more Industry production, it goes nowhere
• Money is the same as Industry, if all you do is use it to get more Money
• Food gets you Population, and Population can get you anything else (except Influence), but to put that Pop to work generating other yields, you need worker slots, and those slots come from the districts and infrastructure associated with those yields; if all you focus on is Food, all of your Pop will end up being farmers, making more Food and nothing else
• Science gives you the ability to do more things, but you need Industry or Money to put them into effect
• if you focus exclusively on Influence you'd be able to add lots of territories and start lots of cities, but not do much with them besides continue to map-paint

From my experience you don't really need to focus much on science, if you just build the proper buildings and have some pops working as scientists that's enough.
You can mostly focus on other things. I mean if you focus on production with food/industry/money you can instantly build the required buildings and that alone will keep your science going.
Early on just a single scientist helps you rush through the early tech.
If you pick Joseon in the last Era, to get all tech, and have many harbors you will clear the tech tree very quickly.

Every districts adds +20% cost to all districts.. Resource extractors not included. Just saying. No idea how science scales.

I personally liked how science districts worked before, where you could build them in clusters of makers quarters. It made sense thematically and logically and I think it helped with gameplay too; it meant that every city could reasonably contribute to science gain and there was an end goal to creating sprawling complexes of industrial districts. An end game besides pumping out military units, that is. And most importantly, science districts look absolutely silly when they’re spammed right now. They have this big building in the middle that makes them look like they were only intended to be placed sparsely, which they evidently were given previous versions of the OpenDevs.