Tech cost by Era

[HannibalBarka]

I dont know if that is a bug or normal. I discovered Music first and get a great artist. With the GA, i can bulb Drama and get a new GA, so it's basically getting DRama for free (which in itself sounds weird). Now before bulbing I saw that Divine Right would take 8 turn for me to discover it. Once I bulbed Drama and moved to Renaissance, that cost was doubled !!!! Is that intentional?

[LunarMongoose]

Originally Posted by HannibalBarka

Once I bulbed Drama and moved to Renaissance, that cost was doubled !!!! Is that intentional?

Yes, it's a major change in version 4.0, that I mentioned as often as I could here on the forum, though admittedly I didn't get around to adding it to the Stuff to Know thread, heh... In each era the costs for unresearched techs in all previous eras, get doubled.

The idea is to make skipped stuff not trivially cheap, which normally happened even moderately later in the game. It makes the secondary tech requirements on certain techs and units - some of which go way way back - not completely meaningless, which I love.

I didn't think of the effect it would have on the Music / Drama Great Artist double whammy sequence, but that's pretty kewl that it nerfs it a little, heh. One thing I never came to a final decision on, since the beginning, though was the strength of the great people insta-tech ability, which is a large, fixed amount that isn't enough for a whole tech later in the game. This is how vanilla has it, so I just left it that way. But it's a big waste on early techs and very underwhelming on later techs, so it never felt right. On the other hand, that might be the best way to balance the ability.

Anyway, yes, it's intentional. I know the patch notes for version 4.0 were humongous, but I worked pretty hard condensing them as much as I could for the final notes (which are in the Download thread's bottom-most posts, and in the Documentation folder in the zip), so I do hope people read them. There was just so much I did in 4.0 compared to any previous update, that otherwise you'll probably get caught by surprise a lot. Sorry.