How many eurekas/inspirations should i be getting?

[ropestring3]

Obviously it would be ideal if I got them all, and in a timely fashion such that I was not delayed in picking the tech/civic. Also some are just going to be impossible at a certain point (found a religion when all GP are gone). But how many is normal to not be getting? I tend to start missing several around the medieval time. If I focus on much on getting them, my settlers are delayed a lot.

[Lemurian1972]

My priority list tends to go as follows-
1) things I'm working on or toward
2) City State quests
3) Anything that helps me get Era Score
4) Everything else

Anything after #1 can be delayed for other priorities, and 2 and 3 switch positions depending on where I'm at in the Era.

[grognardgary]

The more cities you have the better. try picking monumentality for you first golden age note getting golden for classical is all but guaranteed in levels below prince. You can do that by killing barb camps alone though you won't have to, Use faith to buy settlers and builders at greatly reduced prices, As for how many Most of the time, by the middle ages, you've settled about everything you can and expansion is only going to come via loyalty flips or conquest.

For Eurekas and inspirations they all have different sources early game, a lot of them are directly tied to exploration, others to builder actions, And note both still work if you are already developing a tech or civic. Though that is subject to diminishing returns once you get passed half way.

All strategies have to be adapted depending on difficulty level,

[grognardgary]

That's really difficult to say because what triggers them is so varied. In ancient era some are tied to builder actions other to exploration and some to still other things. And all of that can be affected by everything from map size to civ density on your starting current continent. And note you can sometimes trip other wise unavailable eurekas and inspirations from goody huts which is another reason to explore aggressively early. Once you get to classical more an more Eurekas and inspirations are triggered by other inspirations and eurekas so getting which comes first can pay some hefty dividends.

[plaguepenguin]

The boosts are a very important optimization, but they are set up to often conflict with other optimizations.

Some of the boosts are gained by doing things you are going to do anyway, like killing 3 barbarians. Those you get essentially for free. There is no trade-off with every other optimization you are going for.

Some of them are unlocked by doing something a bit out of the way, or a bit before you would otherwise do the actions required. You are forced to make a trade-off. Is it worth taking the detour to save on research points?

The most extreme version of this trade-off are the boosts that are unlocked by actions you absolutely would not otherwise take. I never build two fortifications other than to get the eureka. The trade-off is actually simplest in these cases, precisely because there is no calculation of how inefficient it is to do the action earlier. Building two forts is something I will never do except to get the boost, so whether or not I do that depends entirely on the trade-off between it being relatively easy because I already have an encampment with an armory in a city that has no other huge priorities at the moment, and how badly I need cannons and cuirassiers just then, and have other techs I need to be spending my research points on just then.

Your research points are like a passive ability. After you take the trouble to build x number of campuses and their buildings, you get y number of research points per turn to use as you see fit. You can offload 40% of that cost onto a city that has to produce whatever the eureka calls for.. Whether you want to do that for any given tech depends entirely on the cost of whatever active effort you have to expend in your scavenger hunt to get the 40%, versus the cost of extra turns spending your research points. That will vary, a lot, tech by tech and game by game.

[SLG]

If you play as Hammurabi, all eurekas are important since you get 100% to forward technologies.

[grognardgary]

And if you play as gilgamesh you can farm barbs for all sorts of things including Eurekas and inspirations.