Science turns books into permanent bonuses. Books come mostly from your scientists, and paper, practice and exploring add more. You spend them on sciences, or give them to your state's Colloquium.
Scientists
- Scientists work in one of three categories: economy, military or arcane. A new house starts with 6, split evenly.
- Every tick each scientist writes books by rank: 60 as a recruit, rising to 120. Rank comes from how many books their category has written per scientist: 60 books a tick from 0; 80 books a tick from 1,440; 100 books a tick from 5,280; 120 books a tick from 12,480.
- New scientists arrive at 0.05 a tick (more with universities) and join the category you choose.
- You can move scientists to another category, but experience stays behind, so the new category's rank drops.
Paper speeds research
You don't need paper to do science, but it helps. Set how much paper your scientists may use each tick. Each unit used adds 5 books, up to 100% more than they'd write without it. Only what adds books is used.
Example. A new house writes 360 books a tick. With a budget of 10 paper it writes 50 more. Past the cap, extra paper isn't spent.
Learning by doing
- A successful attack earns up to 200 military books, more the closer the fight (defense ÷ offense), like renown.
- A successful spy earns 50 arcane books.
- Each building you start earns 5 economy books.
- Every 1,000 gold of market fee you pay earns 100 economy books. Only an order that fills at once pays the fee, buy or sell, so only that earns books. An order that waits in the book pays none and earns none.
Lost texts
Each time you explore there's a 15% chance your explorers find lost texts: 20 economy books for every acre explored.
Investing books
Books are spent on sciences in their own category, and take effect at once. Each science nears a limit (see Sciences) and never reaches it. It reaches half its limit at 350,000 books, and each further step costs more books.
The formula: bonus = limit × r ÷ (r + rhalf). Here r is the 2.125th root of the books in the science, as in Utopia, and rhalf is the same root of 350,000. Libraries and other science efficiency raise r, as if the science held more books, so they never take it past its limit either.
The root is worked out in whole numbers only, so every machine gets the same result.