What exactly does "Tech Rate" on the World Size tab do?

[Azmogeddon]

As part of a mod I'm making I would like the research rate for all Civ's to be slowed significantly, to around a quarter or a fifth, but unfortunately it's not as simple as I first thought.

I can't simply increase the cost of all techs because most of the modern age techs hit the 1000 point cap, making the race for ICBM's, stealth bombers etc a bit of an anti-climax. Is there a way around that cap (and others in the editor, for that matter)?

I've tried increasing the tech rate modifier for all world sizes, but it seems to give weird results.. hard to tell exactly without playing the game several times all the way through (each taking 4-5 times the length of a normal game). From the two games I have played it seems to slow down tech a lot at the start but have less of an effect later on... I was reaching Medieval at about 1500 but then rushing to Industrial age by 1700, Modern in late 1800's, playing on Emperor with 4 and 6 other civs.

Is there some odd formula it uses, or is it simply the enemy civs sharing techs more as the game progresses and they make contact?

Gah this game annoys me... so many odd or just plain stupid design decisions.

[godinex]

Many times I formuled the same question... the "solution" was to increase the minimun research time... but was not satisfactory...

[Willem]

I'm not exactly sure of the formula of the Tech rate in World Sizes, but I know that the higher the number is, the slower the research time. There's definitely a problem with techs progressing much to quickly, even Soren has mentioned something about this. Here's a few things I have done that seem to have helped, at least until the Industrial Era.

- Increase the maximum tech turns to 60
- Increase the costs per tech in the "Civilization Advances" area. I've added 5 beakers per tech for each advance in the Ancient Era, and 10 in the Middle Ages. I originally had an extra 15 and 20 for each of the other eras, but things started falling behind in the Industrial Era, so I've cut those back.
- Increase the gold cost per unit in Republic and Democracy to 2 per unit. This means less money available for research. This seems to make a big difference throughout the game, not only for research, but also for army sizes. It makes it a bit more challenging trying to muster up a large armed force.

[GeneralTacticus]

I think what it does is divide the Tech Rate by 100 and then multiply the cost of all the techs by that number. So a huge world with a 240 tech rate would have techs costing 2.4 times what they are listed as in the Editor.

[Azmogeddon]

hmm, but nobody is sure?

I think what I'll do is increase the cost of each tech, and remove the Research Lab to make up for the modern age techs hitting the cap.

[Nero Would]

I believe the cost of researching a tech is calculated like this:

Take the cost of the tech as listed in the editor, multiply by the fraction of civs who already have the advance, multiply by the tech rate for your world size and divide by 5.

So increasing the "tech rate" should increase the cost of researching a tech proportionalty. An exception to that rule would be when a civ is spending enough gold on research to have hit the minimum number of turns per tech (defaults to 4), or so little that it has hit the maximum number of turns per tech (defaults to 40).