It’s not perfect and, hopefully, we’ll see some revisions to the Delhi Imperial game, but in the mean time…if you research Efficient Production (available in the Dark Age), it affects both research and unit production. With 20 Scholars garrisoned in Mosques and one in each military building (24 total), you can bring the Imperial Age techs down to just 1 second over standard time (and get double military units on top of that).
It doesn’t do anything for any non-military production building. Like I said, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than the 55 Scholars that you’d normally need.
It reduces the production time of units, techs and upgrades for any military building a Scholar is garrisoned. So, you either need four Scholars, one for each military building or you can move one between each of them. Like I said, it doesn’t do anything for any non-military building, but it definitely helps for military buildings, especially since you can get this tech in Dark Age.
Yeah. It’s not a perfect deal, because you still need 55 Scholars to bring any other research, that’s not in a military building, down to unity, but it helps a little.
but you dont need your imperial researces to take 90 sec to build; you can leave them at 3mins each and make 2 universities and it will be as if they are 90 sec each by queing them in parallel
Again for getting EXACT standard research time per age you need:
dark age: 10
feudal age: 11
Castle age: 15
imperial: 52+
but for any age you can settle for less than half the scholars needed by making multiple buildings to que techs in parallel. and like you mentioned ALWAYS you have the military research time by putting a scholar inside. So all things considered you can legit get by with decent upgrade timings with JUST 1, 6, 10, 20 from dark thru imp, by working your few scholars around.
I didn’t record the number for other buildings when I was testing this particular thing, but if I remember correctly, 20 Scholars bring the time for other Techs down to somewhere between 2 and 3 minute mark, depending on the original time.
EDIT: It’s also worth noting that after a certain point, it’s no longer efficient to produce Scholars, because of their diminishing returns, just like adding Villagers to buildings. After a certain point (around 20-30 Scholars, iirc), they start only reducing times by 1 second or less each. There’s also a maximum cap on time reduction. I don’t know what that is with the current build, but previously it was 33. After 33 Scholars, any addition Scholar would not reduce research times.