A real reason why tech race looks like me vs World

[Dominae]

punkbass2000, the best example of Science and Luxury rate caps is in Alpha Centauri; in that game, your government type (actually, your Efficiency rating) dictated how much you could specialise. When your Effiiciency was low, you would lose Energy if you were trying too hard to do one specific thing. Thus, until very late in the game, you had to have some sort of split between Research, Commerce and Psych (I may be getting the terms wrong...it's been a long time). It was a great system.

When I first played Civ3, I was actually quite surprised that you could place the slider bar wherever you choose under any government type. Maybe a return to the caps system a la Civ2 (max 70% anything under Despotism, etc.) would help.

However, forcing the players to do their own research is not a solution that I like. It should be a good strategy to be a tech leader. Any system that makes this true will be ok in my book.


Dominae

[chiefpaco]

One nice thing about the crazy tech trading is that it brought back Monarchy as a long-term govt solution. It is good that players do not have to pour all their money into research to make it through. However, players can still do heavy research in a Republic or Democracy for an attempt at the much coveted "tech lead".

I agree that a 0% research strategy should have more disadvantages than advantages, but I think the same case should be made for a 100% research strategy. I admit it would be really hard to make a balanced system & it may never occur.

I still think Tech Devaluation really isn't a problem onto itself. It is the effects of it. Or, how it is easily abused. New systems stand a high chance of being equally abused too.

Forcing players to certain limits is a good way to stop the abuse. However, I think it could come as a limiting frustration to some, especially if they had an option before.

[lockstep]

Originally posted by Sirian
Upon further reflection, while I still have problems with the tech devaluation, I've come to the opinion that the BROKEN element here is the fact that you can always always always BUY tech for HALF the coins as you can research it for yourself with beakers.

This means doing your own tech research is ALWAYS unwise unless you find yourself in a situation where you need a tech and aren't going to have any chance to buy it any time soon

IMO, there are two options that are fairly equal:[list=a][*]Buy the tech for half the coins you would forgo by researching it,[*]Research the tech and sell it for half the coins.[/list=a]

Originally posted by chiefpaco
I think korn469's post earlier on the cost of buying tech sort of answers your Q. Gold cost seemed to be a fraction of beaker cost.

The only thing I'm not sure about in the post was the tech cost and the tech rate. I thought the 2 multiplied each other, in which case, the total beaker cost of the techs would be 1000? This would make the gold trades even more ridiculous. However, I'm not sure of that factor.

Judging from korn's test results and the rules stated in Nero Would's civstats-spreadsheet (http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=34054), the actual beaker costs of a tech are (tech cost*tech rate)/5.

EDIT: For all those who downloaded the spreadsheet: The relevant worksheet is 'Tech Tree', not 'Rules'.

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by korn469
punkbass2000

hmmm, i'm not exactly sure how it would work, but are you saying that a tile for example would provide 2 food 1 shield, 1 gold and 1 science?

Sorry I didn't get to your question sooner. I haven't completely worked out this detail yet. Perhaps one of each and have things cost twice as much, or one or the other. The rest of what I would say with this is discussed by me in Criticism 3.

i think the biggest problem with that is it takes away a player's strategic choices which is a bad thing, the more interesting choices a player has to make the better

True. I think I agree with whoever said we should return to the Civ2 rate caps. Quite frankly, I can't believe this didn't occur to me, considering how much I've played that game in the past five years or so.

but i could see it working if the game was built from scratch with this in mind and had a variety of tile improvements, but i don't think that civ3 could handle it

Maybe Civ4, then

[punkbass2000]

You know, maybe techs should cost as many coins as they do beakers, because although the reasoning someone did previously makes some sense, it doesn't account for a couple factors. First, the civ selling the tech essentially lost as much money as it had to spend on beakers (assuming no ToE or anything) Second, it doesn't account for the time spent by the seller and the time saved by the buyer. As it stands, with techs costing half the beakers, the buyer gets it for half price with no time spent, while the seller gets only half of his money back and it cost several turns for him to do so. Of course, then we run into the problem of selling the tech to multiple civs...