For a development-oriented gameplay

[rinehime]

I'd say Quantity is especially good for a Tall empire as it lets you have extra manpower, but more importantly increases your force limit, and development-to-Force limit is somewhat small, and while I can argue that Offensive is equally good as it gives you guaranteed pips and discipline alongside the force limit. Also while you may think that -10% is not much, when you go past 25-30 development in your average province, you'll notice that the extra 10% helps considerably to save your points.

That't not how the modifiers work. They're additive and apply to the base cost. So, before development efficiency kicks in, a -10% discount always saves 5 pts. (0.1*50 base). You don't save more points at higher development because the -dev cost and + dev costs (from development add together first and cancel out. When development efficiency kicks in, it's applied multiplicatively (which means it actually "reduces" your modifiers).

and the policy cost can be further reduced by going ahead in tech enough that you can spend next few years point gain purely on development and ignore the tech so you get most bang for your buck, so to speak.

????? How does this reduce the cost of the policy? You're just shifting when you pay it around. Presumably you don't mean to buy tech with an "ahead of time" penalty, right? If you really want to save mana, go *behind* on tech and get the discount from other countries. Aside from a few "milestone" techs, you don't need to be on time or ahead with adim or dip techs, only mil.

 

[TenshiN]

The most "Fun" development-game i played was as... Ming. Besides everything listed above, they have an additional -10% devcost from "Expand Palace Bureaucracy" EoC-edict. This, added with Economic, Economic+Quantity, state edict and loyal Burghers makes you develop some provinces at a minimal possible cost of 4 mp/development, keeping the cost under 10mp for quite a while. Ming's endless money and +5 advisors also help

 

[Shinkuro Yukinari]

The most "Fun" development-game i played was as... Ming. Besides everything listed above, they have an additional -10% devcost from "Expand Palace Bureaucracy" EoC-edict. This, added with Economic, Economic+Quantity, state edict and loyal Burghers makes you develop some provinces at a minimal possible cost of 4 mp/development, keeping the cost under 10mp for quite a while. Ming's endless money and +5 advisors also help

What Mingsplosion? Opium what? What Warlords?

 

[TenshiN]

What Mingsplosion? Opium what? What Warlords?

This stuff appearing in a perfectly stable and rich country do not make much sense
And nah, pls no more "Nerf Ming" threads

 

[Bibor]

That't not how the modifiers work. They're additive and apply to the base cost. So, before development efficiency kicks in, a -10% discount always saves 5 pts. (0.1*50 base). You don't save more points at higher development because the -dev cost and + dev costs (from development add together first and cancel out. When development efficiency kicks in, it's applied multiplicatively (which means it actually "reduces" your modifiers).

That's not how modifiers for development work either.
Development efficency reduces the base cost from 50 to 45, 40 and 35, respecively.
All "other modifiers" are applied to this base cost.
It's these "other modifiers" (from ideas, terrain, capital etc.) that attempt to cancel each other out.
Once you get past the point where increase in cost is not mitigated by reduction, you get the full % value of your discounts, but even before that the cost is much cheaper than it would be.

It's like saying that you're not getting the full value from unit maintenance discount, because unit cost just went down or because you reduced your inflation from 10% to 0

 

[Bibor]

????? How does this reduce the cost of the policy? You're just shifting when you pay it around. Presumably you don't mean to buy tech with an "ahead of time" penalty, right? If you really want to save mana, go *behind* on tech and get the discount from other countries. Aside from a few "milestone" techs, you don't need to be on time or ahead with adim or dip techs, only mil.

What he means is: it pays to save up for techs and ideas OR development. I do this myself. I save up 1500-2000 points for development (and build universities everywhere) and *then* I fire up the policy, boost the burghers, and activate the state edict and spend the next 5-6 years developing like crazy.
Policies last for 10 years (exactly how long it takes to next tech) and cost 1 point per month, so that's 120 points. Keeping it on for more than the minimum 120 months is a waste.

Ditto with missionary strength, unrest and 5% discipline policy. I use these only when mass conversions, conquests or big wars are about to begin.

 

[Casko]

What he means is: it pays to save up for techs and ideas OR development. I do this myself. I save up 1500-2000 points for development (and build universities everywhere) and *then* I fire up the policy, boost the burghers, and activate the state edict and spend the next 5-6 years developing like crazy.
Policies last for 10 years (exactly how long it takes to next tech) and cost 1 point per month, so that's 120 points. Keeping it on for more than the minimum 120 months is a waste.

Ditto with missionary strength, unrest and 5% discipline policy. I use these only when mass conversions, conquests or big wars are about to begin.

Thank you for explaining it better than I could

 

[rinehime]

That's not how modifiers for development work either.

We said the same thing (in slightly different ways).

To summarize as an equation:
DevCost = 50 * (1 - DevEff) * (1 + sum(Modifiers))
(the wiki has the sign on DevEff the other way, but the techs describe DevEff as +X%, so this is consistent with the tech description).

where Modifiers includes terrain, current development, ideas, etc. Whether you say DevEff "changes the base cost" or "applies multiplicatively", it's the same thing (although the "base cost" effect is how the tooltip explains it).

The post I was replying to seemed to imply that a 10% discount saved more MP as the penalty from current development went up i.e. that the 10% discount applied multiplicatively. This is incorrect: A -10% modifier always saves 5 MP per development click (assuming DevEff is 0%). It doesn't matter if your modifiers sum to +180% or -40%, the -10% modifier (from the edict, for example) is "worth" 5 MP per development click.

When I said "development efficiency 'reduces' your modifiers" I meant that, when DevEff kicks in, the MP value of the -10% edict (and other modifiers) goes down. For example, at tech 17, DevEff is 10%. This means the base cost is 45, which means the -10% edict is now worth only 4.5 MP per development. At 30% DevEff (35 base cost), that edict is now worth only 3.5 MP per development.

Of course, this applies to the +% modifiers as well, which means that as DevEff goes up, the total modifiers matter less. A DevEff of 30% with a +200% total modifier adds only 70 MP (for 105 MP per click), whereas, at 0 DevEff, that same +200% would add 100 MP (for 150 MP per click). A -50% modifier saves 25 MP at 0 DevEff, but only saves 17.5 MP at 30% DevEff. (This all applies to AdmEff and coring as well of course - the fact that coring base costs are 5x or 10x lower than developing and that AdmEff can be >= 50% is why wide is nearly always > tall).

I don't mean to imply that the additive modifiers are worthless at higher DevEff, of course it's still worthwhile to stack them as much as you can. It's just that their value decreases so the cost-benefit analysis might change.

 

[rinehime]

What he means is: it pays to save up for techs and ideas OR development. I do this myself. I save up 1500-2000 points for development (and build universities everywhere) and *then* I fire up the policy, boost the burghers, and activate the state edict and spend the next 5-6 years developing like crazy.

OK, I definitely agree that "bursting" development (or tech) is a good idea. It's just the poster seemed to by implying you had to go ahead of time on tech to do so. My point was that you can often fall behind on tech (except Mil...) and get both the benefits of bursting tech (at reduced rates) AND development.

Policies last for 10 years (exactly how long it takes to next tech) and cost 1 point per month, so that's 120 points.
Keeping it on for more than the minimum 120 months is a waste.

It's not necessarily a waste if you can develop 3 or more times per year on average. Say, for example, you've had it on for 10 years and can hit up the estates in a year or two for 450 MP total that you'll use for development(and don't plan on developing beyond that b/c you need to tech up/ideas/etc). In that case you leave the edict on for two more years and pay the 24 MP, instead of re-activating it in two years. [minor pedantic quibble - techs are 13-15 years apart]