Creativity gives you a chance that the tech that you are currently researching will be completed ahead of schedule.

When you are researching a low level tech that takes 6 turns to complete, and creativity kicks in on turn 4, you save two turns of research time. This is no big deal, but... when you are researching a high level tech that takes 26 turns to complete, and it kicks in on turn 2, you save 24 turns of research time, and this can be huge.

It's a roll of the dice whether or not it triggers. It sometimes doesn't happen for extended periods of time, but sometimes you get lucky, and bang bang bang, it happens one after the other, and you can get some very time consuming techs in very short order.

As for myself, this is the first point I choose in all of my games. IMO, it is the single most valuable point you can spend.

On a side note, 'Luck' is another that I almost always choose. When you are in combat, you have a chance to miss your target. Luck reduces this chance. I have beaten many superior foes simply because I can hit them more often than they can hit me.

Which game? DA or Twilight? I think they work differently between the two versions. If my understanding is correct, in DA all creativity does is give you a little bit of "free" research each turn. Whereas in TA, if it triggers you actually finish the tech right then.

Quick question - what does "proc" mean?

Given that this is the Dark Avatar sub-forum, I have to mention that the above explanation is the way Creativity works in TA, I believe. It certainly is NOT the way it works in DA, unless it has been very recently changed.

In DA, Creativity randomly provides a random number of additional tp in a gt. The amount provided roughly scales to the tp cost of the tech (but it never goes up to a significant fraction of the cost of late game techs). I figured out one time that, over time, the additional tp's in the background could equate to about a 12-15% boost in Research, but it is not as predictable. Oh, and you can't see the extra tp's by any normal in-game means. You can see them in Debug.err files taken a few times during a game with Creativity selected.

However, in either game version, Creativity is a worthwhile use of a point, but more so for a game you aticipate to be a long, empire building style, rather than a small, sharp early conquest game.

drrider

Whoops. I didn't notice that we were in the DA forum. drrider has given one of the better explanations of that ability. I always guessed that it was ~10% bonus; the extra 2/5 percentage points makes this an even better value than I had thought.

@drrider- Good catch. One of the things that annoys me to no end is the dissemination of incorrect information on these forums. The blatant mistakes are always caught and corrected right away, but there are a number of more subtle mistakes that sometimes make it through. Something like, 'it gives +10 to hitpoints when it should be 'it gives +10% to hitpoints', or something like the situation here: where a statement is factually correct for one version, but not for another. You stopped me from stepping in a big pile of that. Thanks.

@CalifDude- Sorry, went a little OT, hope you understand.

No guarantiees on that 12-15% estimate. Its just a general estimate from looking at several debug files and considering the techs being researched at the time. Too much uncertainty in the tp award to get closer than that without the actual controlling formula. And it probably tends toward the lower end of that range.

I'm empirically convinced it is worth more than any one characteristic point put into research alone, however, especially for a long game with slow/very slow research. Which also squares with the devs only allowing you to do it once.

drrider

It's hard to say in DA w/o looking at the debug.err as there are no visuals in game about creativity going off.