Cityscape#5
I had put some notes together for this post over the past couple of weeks, but things are changing with the new edition coming out. I was all set to argue for a minimum city size before it was viable to start producing Education for Tech. But now the use cases for the Tech cards may be increasing dramatically, making a stronger case for developing a minimum amount of Education earlier. I'm going to go ahead and make my argument anyway, and we'll see when the 3rd edition update comes out how much this calculation will change.
The trick to this calculation is that you need a minimum amount of Education to be eligible for the 1% chance every 36 hours to get a Tech. That minimum is 40 Education. It's not a lot, but for a small city it's a relatively large committment of resources as I'll explain.
The problem is the cost to produce that 40 Education and the return on that cost. For the same cost, you could dedicate that investment into Income production instead. With the the SIM you could earn, you could market buy 2 low tier techs in the same amount of time (about 1 month) that you would have an approximately 10% chance to get just 1 from the Education.
Here are some rough numbers. You would have to buy an assortment of Schools, Universities, or Laboratories and a minimum of 1 Research Center (required to receive Tech cards) to get to that 40 minimum. For example, 2 Schools, 2 Universities and a Research Center would do it. It would require 70 workers and produce 11 Income daily. Putting those workers into Income production instead would roughly get you 60+ more Income per day. That's 1800 more SIM per month. With current SIM prices of 800-1000 for the lower tier Tech cards, you could get 2 with that extra Income, rather than the 10% random chance to get 1.
At these numbers, you're better off optimizing for Income for a few months to get those Techs. Once you have the low tier Techs, things change a bit. It gets more expensive to buy the mid tier and high tier cards. At that point, the chance you could randomly get one of the top tier Tech cards starts to look good. That's when investment into that Education infrastructure becomes more viable.
Herein lies the rub. 3rd edition will bring a whole new dynamic to this equation. The previous MO for Tech-producing cities was to just sell off duplicate Tech cards or transfer them to alt accounts. But this new update will include a way to use Tech cards to combine with buildings and other cards to produce something unique. This means that all those extra Tech cards have some other use than to go to the open market. That means prices go up for Techs. And that means that there will be more value to that Education.
So my original argument makes sense, but it looks like it will be obsolete once 3rd edition comes out and new market forces change the cityscape a bit. That's part of what makes this game fun. It will always be changing.
See you down at the school I picked up cheap!