I suspect this has been discussed elsewhere, so apologies if I'm raising an issue that's already been addressed.

My only full game -- where I played it out to its conclusion rather than throwing in the towel at some point -- was a custom game on a standard map size at the default game speed which defaulted to seven factions. I added two more factions, since I wanted the whole gang to be present.

However, by the time turn 400 out of 500 rolled around, the three dominant factions had researched every single tech. The ensuing 100 turns were pretty epic in a wargame/unit-management kind of way, but they were quite a slog and the poor AI had smoke coming out of its ears. It seems to me a standard map size with nine factions affords too much time and/or room.

I fired up the standard "Play game" option a few times, but I can't tell if the map size is different, and it seems to only include seven of the nine factions.

So do you guys have any advice about setting up the game so that a) all nine factions are present, and b) turn 500 rolls around before three factions have exhausted the tech tree?

-Tom

I will quite often play a game on Large Map size, Epic Speed, with a full roster of players.
Or Standard map, with ~7 players, Epic Speed.

I find that Epic works better for this mod than does Standard, because the large map distances and lack of road/railroads mean that it takes a lot of time to traverse between cities.
I like the slower pace where there is more time to enjoy each era, and where you can build a mighty empire by the late midgame, which is where the mod shines most.
Units and buildings still build relatively quickly, but you won't find that they become obsolete while slogging towards an enemy.

However, others find standard speed works well.

I *think* the "Play now" option starts a game with the last set of custom options you selected; it doesn't always start with standard settings.

My problem with this, Ahriman, is that the game shouldn't run out of research options before it's over. To me, that's a fundamental tuning problem. So I'm wondering how best to get all nine factions on a map so that research doesn't stop being a factor 4/5s of the way into the game. Without research mattering any more, you're funneling all your commerce into gold to buy units, which turns Civ IV into a big messy wargame that falls apart because the AI can't manage units as well as a human player.

Epic speed is one solution, but it makes me wonder if the maps are too large or resource collection is too accelerated for standard speed. I'll try smaller maps for the time being, but I just wondered if this was anyone else's experience as well.

-Tom

I agree with your general design point, and I confess that I haven't done enough testing of very late-game on standard speed to get a good feel for it.

Still, I also find that I can become the dominant player who is clearly going to win long before I run out of techs, I never really run out of techs to research. I'll always either win or get crushed long before then.
But I find that in vanilla Civ4 too; its a weakness of the civ series in general that is really hard to shake.

Have you experienced this on the latest patch? Increasing the unit maintenance cost from 1 to 2 was designed to slow down the late-game economy somewhat, particularly when

Some possible solutions might be:
a) Increase late-game tech beaker costs further
b) Increase the value of game-ending super techs, like Atomics and the Monitor, so that it is easier to use the super-weapons to achieve conquest -type victory
c) Reduce the thresholds for terraforming and spice victory
d) Reduce the number of game turns for various speed levels, so the "Time" victory comes earlier.

Have you really found that you can't achieve victory even when you're specifically pursuing one of the victory conditions? Or is it more a sense of: you're just playing for general power and building stuff without particularly pursuing a particular victory type?

Part of the problem is that the existing late-game is already somewhat "tacked on". It used to be that none of the "superior" promotion techs or the Monitor or the high-end economy techs existed, and so there was even less to do late-game.

Have you experienced this on the latest patch?

I'm only just starting a game with the latest patch, but before that, I've only gotten two games into the late-game stages, and I wasn't able to get any sort of victory condition by then, so it just ran the clock out. Both times I was surprised at how quickly me and the dominant factions ran out the tech tree. I don't recall that happening in vanilla Civ, because it always seemed uncannily built to have the time limit run out shortly before you could exhaust the tech tree.

Of course, that's all a matter of balancing, and you can jigger it with various settings. But it seems to me the tech tree should last considerably longer when players choose the default setting, and that's not happening in Dune Wars because there's so much money on the map, as it were.

Have you experienced this on the latest patch? Increasing the unit maintenance cost from 1 to 2 was designed to slow down the late-game economy somewhat...

Ah, that's nice. It's relatively easy to get an uber-economy going, especially by focusing on spice and trade, both of which can be really lucrative and don't require sprawling cities. I like the idea of having the military bite into that economy. I had noticed that maintenance costs for units didn't seem to figure much into the civics, so when I first started playing, I thought maintenance costs were entirely absent. And by the time my military started to cost me money, I couldn't have cared less since I was making so much money anyway and didn't need to funnel any of it to tech. I think an earlier heavier maintenance cost is definitely a step in the right direction.

-Tom

Any thoughts on the options a) through d) above?
Do victory conditions feel too hard to achieve even when you pursue them, or is it just tech speed, best fixed through global/blanket tech cost increases?

Definitely a)
Don't make the other victories easier, make tech advancing harder

Do people think its just late-game techs that come too quickly, or some of the earlier ones too? How early?

I'm sure tech costs could still use a lot of tuning in general.

Any thoughts on the options a) through d) above?
Do victory conditions feel too hard to achieve even when you pursue them, or is it just tech speed, best fixed through global/blanket tech cost increases?

It does seem like increasing the cost of tech across the board would be the way to go, but I'd hesitate to do that without more data. Is this other people's experience as well, that research runs out by turn 400 for several factions when you play the game on standard settings?

I've got a game going with the patch, but I'm not sure I'll finish it (I seem to have encountered a bug that makes espionage impossible for Ix). But the maintenance cost increase in that patch should help as well.

-Tom

(I seem to have encountered a bug that makes espionage impossible for Ix)
Huh. Frustrating. Can you describe?
One of the annoying things with the BTS espionage system is that the missions don't show up if you don't have enough Espionage points to use them - and the Ixian missions can be expensive, so won't appear at all if you only have a few EPs.
We're working on that as a UI issue. Could that be the problem?

In my latest game I also run through all the tech tree pretty fast
Altough I was with the fremen, and they are even more overpowered in human hands because of their early expansion
I don't really recall the other houses tech progress right now, it needs some more testing how much increase would be balanced

that research runs out by turn 400 for several factions when you play the game on standard settings?I haven't noticed BUT I always finish between turn 200 and ~350 or so (mainly due to playing on Immortal and the forced sense of urgency that level provides).

Raising all tech costs by a certain percentage seems like a sensible choice if we need to stretch the game out over more turns. The Epic gamespeed tech costs are 50% more than Normal gamespeed. Perhaps we should try increasing all tech costs by 50% and see how the game plays?

Another factor to consider might be tech trading and tech brokering (where a tech that has been traded for gets traded away again). I know a lot of people like to switch tech brokering of in Vanilla - I think the AI does a lot of it which could increase the speed of general progress through the tree. Perhaps we could disable Tech Brokering by default?

The Epic gamespeed tech costs are 50% more than Normal gamespeed. Perhaps we should try increasing all tech costs by 50% and see how the game plays?
I'd start with a much smaller change, like 15%. I can do this; I'll post a modified XML file.

Epic gamespeed also changes all the unit and hammer costs and culture thresholds and other things too.
If you increase all the tech speeds a lot without changing anything else, then people will run out of things to build. I really like that there is nearly always something you could build, so there's always a tradeoff between more military or more infrastructure.

I also think the early game plays ok, so I'd probably only apply these to midgame techs and beyond.

But the main reason I play epic is for movement speed to be faster relative to tech and production speed, so that war happens "faster" in the big scheme of things, so you can't build 3 more units in each city in the time it takes my army to get to you.

I often disable tech trading completely and I have no problem winning the game before I run out of techs.

Oh, yeah, thats another thing, I play every game with no tech brokering.