Tech Tree Degredation.... Help?

[Bane Star]

Well For those of you that know I'm overseas researching, and I'm discovering alot of things here in china, Especially about how many Inventions had been invented by the chinese and yet not used, lost to time/ravages of war etc etc, and so were not discovered again until Years later... The Question Is.. How do I get that to work... Can I even get it to work

What I Want to do:
Have some way of 'techs' becoming lost during some point of the game, either the Tech is taken away from a player when certain events happen, or war razes a city.. some way of allowing the Fall of Rome, or the Lost sea scrolls, or the Dynasty wars burying inventions, Religeon Banning technology and therefore dropping backwards in techs....
Possible Solutions:
Maybe if Technology Could have an upkeep, where like Cash, If you cannot maintain it, the tech icons reduce until you get to a point where technologies are lost...
Maybe If I introduce an entire 'set' of Dark Ages where the next 10 techs in the tree were to cancel out the previous 12 techs, reducing the best unit/buildings, to a previous one, Any surviving units or buildings from that era would remain and would become a 'talking point' Problem here is that I'd require certain buildings to not be buildable when you have later technologies, just like certain troops are no-longer buildable after certain techs are dicovered.
Another Problem with this is the 'required' Dark Ages, players will slow if not stop thier technology growth to stop this from happening, while this makes a great 'storyline' play wise its a bad idea... dont you think?
Maybe If the 'scenario' options is really well put together, then I can link particular events to tech losses.....

These are My thoughts on this, but not actually having access to playing it right now I dont know what I can and cant do with the newest versions of Civ3 Bic.editor and the like, So anyones Ideas would be helpful

[sween32]

That's funny cause I was thinking the same thing the other day, for a different reason though. The Chinese invented pills and fireworks many years before anybody else even thought of it. I was thinking that the first civ that got an important tech like Gunpowder, it is almost like a wonder for a few turns. Nobody can even attempt researching it for, like, 5 turns.

Degradation would be cool for a mod, but not in the game that is shipped. And no, I don't think it can be done.

[GhengisFarbâ„¢]

In my Medieval Fantasy Mod I've set the ages for Ancient, Dark, Middle, and Renaissance.

For the Dark Ages all of the units "upgrade" to a much more pathetic version of themselves, then "upgrade" to better versions in the Middle Ages. That's the only way I could figure out to represent the degradation of civilization during that time. Won't really work for tech, but it should for units.

Course, as a player you want to build units before entering the Dark Ages because any units you build once your there will be crappy.

[Optimizer]

Paying upkeep for techs would make sense - can we have that in Civ 4?