Traveller, on Mar 12 2009, 10:26 AM, said:
Cheers for the info. I'll add that the discrepancies might be due to the speciality of the gentleman. As they gain experience and 'assistants,' they tend to get bonuses for researching either the military/economic/philosophy techs. If you assign them to their speciality, they research it quicker; apparently it helps to have at least 3 schools, each researching one type of tech.
I've seen the tear-down-a-building advice, but are you sure that isn't going to have an impact later in the game? I only have a choice of church/weavers/ironworks to destroy and replace, and I think I'm going to need them all at some point. the church school does look a bit superfluous, but it significantly raises happiness in later levels, which might be really useful a few years down the line.
Hmm, the French guy is an industrial specialist, Newton something else - neither is the Bath-tub Admiral or Armchair General that gives a +1 bonus to military research (followed by Military Writer) iirc.
as for tear-it-down, build it up:
I usually demolish either a weaver or an ironworks, and keep the church to improve lower class happiness to a manageable level so that I can send armies around instead of having them police - commoners hate schools and a single school is a -4 happiness hit. For the same reason, I keep the pleasure palace around... +5 happiness rocks.
That leaves the industry buildings.
They do add pretty good money to the province and later on reduce upkeep & recruit costs, but they're relatively fast to (re)build (2 and 3 turns for the basic and first upgrade) and most provinces you'll conquer have 1 of the 2, so do several colonies. The industrial techs are further more only dedicated to either weavers or ironworks, so to make a healthy profit from both, you need to do a lot of research, which means time.
I personally prefer to level up my military tech to ring bayonet, carbines and square formation first to unlock more units and stand a chance against cavalry, so that postpones the need for leveling up the industrial buildings as well...
And the two early farm techs can usually be bought from Prussia, Russia or Austria - or trade it for plug bayonet, which is a tech you're going to replace immediately with ring bayonet anyway, so no harm done.
Imho, in the early game, the farming tree is also a much better bet than research for industrial buildings because it does not only modestly increase income but also pop growth, leading to additional towns a bit faster (although +0.5% pop growth is a huge bonus!) and thus, more buildings again... and with those, I can replace that weaver/ ironworks that I tore down for a school, just in time for the research I want to do on it after securing the first priority researches in the military and social department I wanted to have done.
Of course, your mileage may vary, and I did not do a whole lot of calculating on what gives more profit long term.
Everyone is entitled to his own wrong opinion. - Lizrad
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) and that gave me the base to start an assault on the Marathas, who completely owned the Mughals.. 
) and am currently taking down India (well, still named the Marathas, but their flag changes to that of India) in terms of Revolutions.
