"Marking" techs out

[Scooby_Doo]

I have just started another game of Civ 3, and I was thinking that a really good idea would be that if you could place a "flag" on certain techs so that you would be told by your science advisor when a civ with whom you had an embassy researched that tech, allow me to explain....

I was just playing and I was the only civ I knew of to have chivalry, there was a massive world war going on and I had a lead in that I exclusively could build knights, I found myself contacting each civ every few turns just to see if I could still offer them Chivalry, and thus deduce whether they had discovered it yet. I got to thinking that if, in the science advisors screen, I could select Chivalry and "mark" it out as a special tech so that I would know if anyone else had it this would save me lots of time flitting back and forth through diplomacy, and as there was a war on I wanted to get into the fighting quickly!

I don't think that this would be too difficult to do and would certainly save time, you could also use it with undiscovered techs so that you would know as soon as one civ gets that crucial edge.

What do you think? A minor change I know, but I think it would be useful.

[ProfEclipse]

An interesting idea. But, without a spy, would it really be fair to know ahead of time what a civ has learned? Granted, you can go into diplomacy and figure it out yourself, but the pop-up idea just seems wrong to me.

[scooter mk2]

I see where you're going. I hate not knowing what the enemy has before I discover espionage. But I don't think we should know the techs of another nation by looking at the Scoence Advisor. IT's probably just me, but knowing what you're up against early in the game tends to take away from the excitement of conquering those first few nations.

[aahz_capone]

I think this would be really cool. I know I do the same thing.

I do think however that since you can deduce how much sci/money/luxuries the AI has anyway by just going to talk with'em, I think that an embasy is enough to get this type of information. It's also realistic. In SMAC you could get all this info, about how much science he had, and it would be cool if with a spy you could see which science they are developing. SMAC was alot better in this area.

[Scooby_Doo]

the pop-up idea just seems wrong to me

I suppose it wouldn't be to everyones tastes admittedly, but I must say that I think it would save time and would be useful. After all, in Civ2 establishing an embassy allowed you to find out how many units the other civs had, what they had researched and what they were researching. I would really like to see that screen return and I don't think that it was unfair to see what was going on, especially as you can see anyway if you go into diplomacy.

Perhaps this could be an extra espionage mission? "Steal tech tree" so that you could see the other civs tech tree, just like in the Science Advisors screen, and see what they had, what they were going for and how long it would take?

[benjdm]

I have to agree wholeheartedly. Any information that can be gotten by means within the rules should be as easily available as possible. For example, at the end of every turn I could go through all my cities and look for who is about to go into disorder and give them an entertainer. This is ridiculously tedious, but legal. Instead I save at the end of every turn and reload to fix unhappiness before it affects production.

[aahz_capone]

I agree with benjdm: I also frequently check cities that are bout to fall into chaos, and entertain them. Not only is this tedious, it increases the chance of crashing when you look through all those cities. There should be a list of cities which are about to increase in size, so that you can prepare for this.