Culture Flaw & Culture = Techs

[doktorstick]

Howdy.

A friend of mine thinks there is a fundamental flaw with Cultural in Civ IV. His opinion is that high research is fundamentally required to achieve culture--more research = more techs = more in the lead = less research % = more culture %. Having fun with culture can only happen if you lead the research race.

This results in play that, for the most part, is the same. His thought is to allow a high-culture / low-research society to be competitive by using culture to operate somewhat like the Internet, but only one civ is required (because 1v1 games wouldn't be possible, otherwise). There is some governing formula (or formulaes) that determine if you leech a tech through culture--f(x,y), where x=culture%, y=culture generated (0% culture slider should mean 0% chance). Those are TBD.

Cultural victory conditions may need to be adjusted.

Does this sound feasible? Does it require the SDK, or can more "simple" modifications make this happen? Any feedback would be welcome.

Thanks.
/ds

[Ijuin]

How about we approach this in a similar manner to how Settlers are built? When building a Settler, you must produce a set number of Food + Hammers, but you can use as many Food or as many Hammers as you wish, as long as the sum is correct.

Likewise, we could have science takes Research + Culture. You could add more Research points or more Culture points, but the sum still has to be high enough. You could spend 2000 Research points or 2000 Culture points, or you could spend 1000 of each, or anywhere in between.

To balance this, the fraction of Culture points spent on Science would go into the Science box and would not accumulate toward the Culture total of the city producing them.