[Mod] TechConquest

[Bhruic]

TechConquest is designed to give a tech boost from conquering enemy cities. When an enemy city is conquered, a list of techs the enemy has that your empire doesn't is created. From that list a random tech is selected.

The number of points you get is based on the size of the city that is captured. You always get a minimum of 25% of the cost of the tech, plus a random amount. The random amount is from 0 to (city size x 5)%. So for a size 4 city, you would get 25-45% of the tech cost. For cities greater than size 15, you get an ever increasing chance of getting the full tech. For example, for a size 20 city, you would get 25-125% of the tech cost, where anything over 100% would get rounded back to 100%.

Installation:

TechConquest should NOT be installed in your main Civ IV location, as it will overwrite necessary files. Instead, it should be installed at: "My Documents\My Games\Civilization 4".

History:

v0.3
- base tech cost wasn't reflecting modifications from game speed/map size/difficulty level
- altered percentages to give higher tech points for smaller cities
- fixed a bug preventing the popup from displaying
- only techs for which the player has the prerequisites are included in tech list

v0.2
- changed from a flat percentage system to one based on the city size

v0.1
- first release

Bh

[Bhruic]

Released v0.2

Bh

[MattPilot]

Excellent mod!

Can't believe i missed it.

Definitely prefer something like this over twiggins mod that gives an entire tech per capture.


** I don't suppose you've created other (great) mods i've missed in the last few weeks?

[Bhruic]

Dunno. I think the mods I've done so far are:
TechConquest
Tradeable
CultureDecay
RealFort
Gaia

So if you've seen all of those, you haven't missed any. Or if you've seen all of them but Gaia, you haven't missed any. (Gaia just adds a new climate option that causes tundra/ice/desert to not be generated)

Bh

[Stone-D]

Erk, filename still says 0.1?

[Bhruic]

Er, where? Says 0.2 here, and that's what downloaded when I clicked on the link.

Bh

[Tiberius]

So do I understand it correctly that when you conquer a city, you get a certain percentage of a tech that you don't have but your enemy does?

If so, this is brilliant!

Not so overpowering as getting a whole tech, yet rewarding and even realistic (you find some research papers left behind in the scientists' rush to escape).

Great!

[Tiberius]

Question: will this happen when you take a city with culture flipping? Because imo it should.

[Stone-D]

Heh, stupid local proxy. :P

[Cptn Fancypants]

You could also vary the beaker windfall by how proprietary the tech is. Capturing a city in a civ that knows writing could get you a very long way to adopting writing yourself: there would be inscriptions, ledgers, correspondence, etc. Even one left-behind compass or rifled gun barrel could provide the spark of ingenuity to allow your people to copy the tech. Yet the remains of a stealth fighter might give you only the faintest idea of how to begin working on anti-radar materials.

To carry this out, however, you would have to create a table of values for every existing tech in the game, and any newly modded techs would require an addition to this table. A fun addition, but maybe not worth the unwieldy infrastructure.

[Diadem]

It should simply only select from techs that you do not have, but could research.

Just like in tech-trading you can't get techs that you can't research.

[Bhruic]

Originally posted by Tiberius
Question: will this happen when you take a city with culture flipping? Because imo it should.

Currently it happens whenever the onCityAcquired function is called with the bConquest flag set. To be honest, I'm not sure if that happens with culture flipping or not. I'll have to try and set up a test game and see.

Originally posted by Diadem
It should simply only select from techs that you do not have, but could research.

That's the next thing I plan on adding.

Bh

[Tiberius]

From a realistic point of view, you should even get a higher percent of science when a city flips to you, because the scientists are not fleeing, but willingly cooperating. Besides, there are not so many flippings happening as conquests, so it may not be overpowering.

Eventually, it depends on whether you can mod it

This get-science-from-culture-flipping stuff gave me an idea. How about this: every foreign city that has a percent of your culture OR your religion (or both) would "leak" a small amount of data every turn (or randomly from time to time) from the rival's research. The amount of leaked data would depend on the size of the city, your cultural influence over it and the presence of your religion in the city. I am talking about very small amounts of research data, obviously.

Maybe it makes more sense to do this on civ level. The quantity of leaked data would depend on the same factors though: percent of your religion within that civ, percent of your nationality within that civ.

This tweak would fuel 2 game important elements/fun factors:
1. cultural wars which are curently only fought to get a resource or from time to time a city
2. would finally give an incentive to removing a different religion from own cities. I know there is a mod to remove a foreign religion from our own cities, but I haven't installed it because the question is: why? Currently there are no downsides to having more religions in a city. On the contrary, you can build more temples and monasteries.

I have though some concers about it myself:

- it may not be as fun as it seems. It isn't a direct reward such as getting science for conquering a city
- it may be hard to balance. Either it returns too much research and becomes overpowered or returns only an insignificant amount
- the AI will not use the remove religion options thus opening a gate for an exploit

Anyway, just a rough idea, maybe someone will catch it on-fly and give it more sense and playability.

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Cptn Fancypants
You could also vary the beaker windfall by how proprietary the tech is. Capturing a city in a civ that knows writing could get you a very long way to adopting writing yourself: there would be inscriptions, ledgers, correspondence, etc. Even one left-behind compass or rifled gun barrel could provide the spark of ingenuity to allow your people to copy the tech. Yet the remains of a stealth fighter might give you only the faintest idea of how to begin working on anti-radar materials.

To carry this out, however, you would have to create a table of values for every existing tech in the game, and any newly modded techs would require an addition to this table. A fun addition, but maybe not worth the unwieldy infrastructure.

Or simply vary the beakers by how common the tech is in the current game. If everyone has gunpowder except for you, for example, then civilizations are not going to keep the secrets of gunpowder under lock and key.

-Drachasor

[Zuul]

Nice ideas Tiberius. And nice mod Bhuric. Maybe there should be a chance to get half of that amount % on two techs (if you don't have them but can research them).

Maybe Goody huts should give such % too. Especially in late games or mods lika Greek World where it takes much longer to research.