Research Agreements: Less random, more cooperative

This idea originated in another thread, but it was so interesting I thought it deserved its own thread.

Basically, here's the crux of the problem: even aside from the balance issues (research agreements are too cheap in later eras), research agreements as they are at present have a kind of "detached" and random feel to them.

You sign an agreement with a civ - any civ, no matter how backward or advanced - and then you both get a random free tech after X turns. It doesn't really give much of a feeling of cooperation. Indeed, it's not cooperation at all. It's just two civs separately investing their separate money for completely separate and selfish gains. No wonder the currently self-obsessed and uncooperative AI loves them so much.

So here's an idea. Why not rework the research agreements in the following way:

- The "Research Agreement" is a category that opens up (like the "Luxury Resources" category)
- The options that are available are ONLY the techs that your civs can BOTH research at that time. For example, you and Catherine can both research Iron Working and Compass, so the options "Iron Working" and "Compass" appear under "Research Agreement". (This should limit the available choices to something like 2-3 in most cases, and civs that have a large dichotomy in their tech levels will be unable to sign these agreements - or at least only sign them one way.)
- The research agreement length will probably need to be scaled down (e.g. you don't want to wait 30 turns for a tech that you would have researched in 15-20 turns anyway). Perhaps 10 turns would work, or a factor that scales with the average time it would take both your civs to research that technology yourselves.

This would certainly make more sense and give more of a feeling of cooperation with other players, rather than just a sense of complete randomness and separateness.

An alternative option might be to make the "research agreement" simply align with your current research, except it adds both of your civs' research rates. For example, if my civ gets 60 beakers per turn and Catherine's civ gets 40 beakers per turn, then for a 600 beaker tech it would take us 10 and 15 turns respectively to research it separately. However, if we signed a "research agreement" then our research would be combined towards that tech (100 beakers/turn), so we'd both get the tech in 6 turns.

Of course, in order for this option to work properly, we'd first need some other game balance fixes (increasing tech costs for one thing, and allowing beaker overflow).

Anyway, just a couple of ideas I'm throwing out there. Please feel free to steal and implement them, Firaxis, if you're reading.

It would be really good, especially the alternative option feels much more like "our scientists are going to work together".

Interrupting the current reasearch when we're proposed a pact could be a problem if we're a few turns away from the tech. Maybe we could say: "let us the time to finish our current reasearch". Or maybe we wouldn't have to put all of our beakers into the agreement, so we could have two parallels research. In your exemple if Catherine has 40/turn and you have 60, maybe it's more fair to make 40-40 and your remaining 20 go to another tech you research normally.

Another problem could be the power of the option. Maybe there should be a "malus". I mean if two of your neightbours cooperate all the time, you really HAVE to find a reasearch partner too, it's not a choice, or you're going to get outteched like never cause cooperators globally get a sort of 100% bonus. So if you bring 100/turn and so does your partner, maybe the amount of 200 should receive a -25% or -30% malus. This would leave 150 or 140 /turn wich is still much more than the 100 you can get alone.

Namaspamus said:

It would be really good, especially the alternative option feels much more like "our scientists are going to work together".

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Thanks, I thought it was a good idea too.

Namaspamus said:

Interrupting the current reasearch when we're proposed a pact could be a problem if we're a few turns away from the tech. Maybe we could say: "let us the time to finish our current reasearch".

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Good point. That could work.

Namaspamus said:

Or maybe we wouldn't have to put all of our beakers into the agreement, so we could have two parallels research. In your exemple if Catherine has 40/turn and you have 60, maybe it's more fair to make 40-40 and your remaining 20 go to another tech you research normally.

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Yeah, could be fairer that way. Although I don't think there'd be a particularly large gap in beakers in this scenario, because if a large gap developed then one player would jump ahead in tech and be unable to sign new agreements with the other player until they caught up.

Namaspamus said:

Another problem could be the power of the option. Maybe there should be a "malus". I mean if two of your neightbours cooperate all the time, you really HAVE to find a reasearch partner too, it's not a choice, or you're going to get outteched like never cause cooperators globally get a sort of 100% bonus. So if you bring 100/turn and so does your partner, maybe the amount of 200 should receive a -25% or -30% malus. This would leave 150 or 140 /turn wich is still much more than the 100 you can get alone.

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I did consider this before making the original post, but I think it'd actually be fine. Don't forget that you're already paying for the research agreement in terms of gold. Perhaps the amount of gold needs to be adjusted slightly for balance (especially in the later eras), but I think it'd work quite well.

Remember that the effective cost of a research agreement is that you can't spend money on other important bonuses (namely City States, also unit upgrades). So I think this detriment in itself would sufficiently balance the benefit of research agreements, if the gold cost was balanced appropriately throughout the game.

Perhaps there could be a small effect on relations though... if research agreements prove a bit underpowered, they could boost relations with the leader you make them with... or if they're a bit overpowered then they could cause negative relations with leaders that aren't participating in the research agreement. Just a thought anyway.

Maybe it could be as simple as the cost in time are based on the techs base cost. Now if A gets a tech from age X and B gets a tech from age X+1, A gets their tech Y turns. B gets theirs in Y+d.

The tricky part is to decide how to determine d. The process has to be simple to implement or the game could slow down on larger maps, with lots of nations and research agreements.

Whatever is done, it does need some tweaks.

This idea sounds like it would be an improvement. My thoughts are that they simply added this into the game as a balancer, without too much consideration for its own merits or faults. Which seems a shame, given that it has great potential as a feature.

Good Ideas. I would just like to see research agreements more limited-ie requires open borders, cooperation pacts signed. As it is right now on bigger games research agreements are flying around like leaves in the wind and whole era's are literally leapfrogged.

Thrax73 said:

Good Ideas. I would just like to see research agreements more limited-ie requires open borders, cooperation pacts signed. As it is right now on bigger games research agreements are flying around like leaves in the wind and whole era's are literally leapfrogged.

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Yeah, that's the problem. In the later era's research agreements are so cheap and so easy to make (it's one of the few things the AI's all love) that when you have a lot of civs it unbalances the game. Getting 15 free techs within a 5-10 turn period for 10% of the cost isn't balanced, it's downright broken.

Limiting them to only civs who have Pacts of Cooperation sounds like a good idea for a start that should be simple to implement.

I am not so sure about the pacts. It does not take much to ruffle feathers and be shut out of the research deals. I have had them call be bloodthirty (imagine that) and still some will make research deals.

I would be for the pacts, if they were easier to maintain. I do not want to be forced to be a peacenik. Just some sort of scaling should slow down the tech deals. I do not favor rasing the price as that will freeze out the little guys after the first two ages.

vmxa said:

It does not take much to ruffle feathers and be shut out of the research deals. I have had them call be bloodthirty (imagine that) and still some will make research deals.

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These two statements seem to contradict one another...

Personally I have rarely had any trouble getting an AI to sign a research agreement if they have the gold.

vmxa said:

I would be for the pacts, if they were easier to maintain. I do not want to be forced to be a peacenik.

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That part should hopefully be fixed when the AI is improved to be less fickle and more open to friendships. No reason why you can't go to war, you just have to pick the right allies.

vmxa said:

Just some sort of scaling should slow down the tech deals.

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Really? 30 turns is already a long time to wait, dude. And this still wouldn't really fix the problem, it'd just mean the free techs you eventually do get will be even more valuable.

vmxa said:

I do not favor rasing the price as that will freeze out the little guys after the first two ages.

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Well, the problem is that at present you can pay 300-350 gold for a research agreement in the mid-game and get a 3000-3500+ beaker tech at the end of the game. That's in no way balanced.

I don't think "freezing out the little guy" would be a problem at all with research agreements in the form I describe above. In fact it really "freezes out" the top guy, because if he's far ahead in tech then he has no-one he can sign research agreements with. Whereas the little guys can band together to research stuff because they're all at much the same tech level.

Seems much more balancing to me...

It's like the United States and North Korea entering a research treaty

I think you really need to have a favorable relationship to enter a treaty like this. I know I would work harder on diplomacy if one of the benefits was getting research treaties to go from gray to accessible in the dialogue window. It should be friends only.

The ideas here are good.
But, in all cases, i'd like an option "Disable Research agreement" exists (in the same way we can disable "Tech trading" in Civ IV).

Thrax73 said:

It's like the United States and North Korea entering a research treaty

I think you really need to have a favorable relationship to enter a treaty like this. I know I would work harder on diplomacy if one of the benefits was getting research treaties to go from gray to accessible in the dialogue window. It should be friends only.

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We have had all sort of such treaties with Russia and they were working against us at the time as the USSR. Humans can work together while holding their noses many occurred in WWII.

ITER Fusion Reactor, EU, US, Russia, China, India, Korea and Japan all working together on a project. I do think it should require some level of improved diplomacy though. Or maybe once the UN has been built you can enter a research agreement with anyone.

That's a really good idea, and it inserts a little prisoner's dilemma into the game:

If you get into a research agreement like this, you want to personally commit as little as possible and let your partner do the heavy lifting. You'll be swapping out Scientists for production/culture/wealth. However, if both parties do this, neither one is gaining as much from the agreement.

If you teach the AI to also shirk on agreements, that could be quite fun.

How about this fine tuning:

-Costs go up not with just the Era, but also with how many research agreements you have made in the past and have currently running.
-You can make an agreement to research any tech researchable by both parties
-The agreement will give you visible progress each turn in that tech instead of all-at-once at the end
-This progress stacks with any personal research in that tech or other research deals for the same tech
-As soon as one party finishes the tech, the deal is cancelled
-The progress grows over time, so longer running deals are more efficient.

Basically, this lets you research a single tech quickly by making the same deal with many partners and also researching it yourself, but it will cost a huge amount of cash. Alternatively, you could slowly research other techs more efficiently.

You can also declare war without losing your research so far, but since an long-standing deal is more efficient that a new one, you will lose potential

I think the research agreement should actually look back more towards CIV4 and be less imaginative. I imagine that most technology agreements in the real world are about passing existing technologies from nation to nation rather than developing new ones. It's nice to think about the Cern collider and the international space station but a news story that caught my eye this week was London financiers going to Russia to help them improve their stock exchange. It's really dull but far more common.

What I'd suggest is that a research treaty lets you study an opponent's technology and gain it at the end of the treaty. The financial cost of the treaty could be based on the research costs of the techs on offer. This will prevent the randomness and stop tech leaders from getting valuable research from backwards nations. The difficulty would be making a deal based on the varying technologies of the two nations.

Another alternative would be for the research treaty to select one technology that can be researched by the more advanced partner. For both parties there could be a 20-40% research bonus towards that technology and techs required for that technology. The research agreement would not expire until both parties had acquired the technology. The fee to set up the agreement could be 10-20% of the research cost of the technology.

Namaspamus said:

Another problem could be the power of the option. Maybe there should be a "malus". I mean if two of your neightbours cooperate all the time, you really HAVE to find a reasearch partner too, it's not a choice, or you're going to get outteched like never cause cooperators globally get a sort of 100% bonus. So if you bring 100/turn and so does your partner, maybe the amount of 200 should receive a -25% or -30% malus. This would leave 150 or 140 /turn wich is still much more than the 100 you can get alone.

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Lord Parkin said:

I did consider this before making the original post, but I think it'd actually be fine. Don't forget that you're already paying for the research agreement in terms of gold. Perhaps the amount of gold needs to be adjusted slightly for balance (especially in the later eras), but I think it'd work quite well.

Remember that the effective cost of a research agreement is that you can't spend money on other important bonuses (namely City States, also unit upgrades). So I think this detriment in itself would sufficiently balance the benefit of research agreements, if the gold cost was balanced appropriately throughout the game.

Perhaps there could be a small effect on relations though... if research agreements prove a bit underpowered, they could boost relations with the leader you make them with... or if they're a bit overpowered then they could cause negative relations with leaders that aren't participating in the research agreement. Just a thought anyway.

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I thought the gold cost was out in your system. So it's just another way to do it: no gold cost but a "malus" that avoids an overpowered system. Maybe then the malus applied on the total amount of beakers should be around -40%, if I count well it means the agreement still gives a +20% boost to your research.

Paeanblack said:

That's a really good idea, and it inserts a little prisoner's dilemma into the game:

If you get into a research agreement like this, you want to personally commit as little as possible and let your partner do the heavy lifting. You'll be swapping out Scientists for production/culture/wealth. However, if both parties do this, neither one is gaining as much from the agreement.

If you teach the AI to also shirk on agreements, that could be quite fun.

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Hmm, didn't think of that... seems like that'd be a bit against the point of signing an agreement. Perhaps this could be solved by making the contribution of both parties fixed at the same amount as the lowest-contributing player. For instance, if one player generates 10 beakers/turn and the other 50 beakers/turn, then both players only contribute 10 beakers/turn towards the tech (the other 40 for the second person are free to go towards whatever else).

Paeanblack said:

How about this fine tuning:

-Costs go up not with just the Era, but also with how many research agreements you have made in the past and have currently running.
-You can make an agreement to research any tech researchable by both parties
-The agreement will give you visible progress each turn in that tech instead of all-at-once at the end
-This progress stacks with any personal research in that tech or other research deals for the same tech
-As soon as one party finishes the tech, the deal is cancelled
-The progress grows over time, so longer running deals are more efficient.

Basically, this lets you research a single tech quickly by making the same deal with many partners and also researching it yourself, but it will cost a huge amount of cash. Alternatively, you could slowly research other techs more efficiently.

You can also declare war without losing your research so far, but since an long-standing deal is more efficient that a new one, you will lose potential

Click to expand...

Those all seem like good ideas.

DaveGold said:

I think the research agreement should actually look back more towards CIV4 and be less imaginative. I imagine that most technology agreements in the real world are about passing existing technologies from nation to nation rather than developing new ones. It's nice to think about the Cern collider and the international space station but a news story that caught my eye this week was London financiers going to Russia to help them improve their stock exchange. It's really dull but far more common.

What I'd suggest is that a research treaty lets you study an opponent's technology and gain it at the end of the treaty. The financial cost of the treaty could be based on the research costs of the techs on offer. This will prevent the randomness and stop tech leaders from getting valuable research from backwards nations. The difficulty would be making a deal based on the varying technologies of the two nations.

Another alternative would be for the research treaty to select one technology that can be researched by the more advanced partner. For both parties there could be a 20-40% research bonus towards that technology and techs required for that technology. The research agreement would not expire until both parties had acquired the technology. The fee to set up the agreement could be 10-20% of the research cost of the technology.

Click to expand...

To me, this sounds a bit too similar to an "espionage" style of research stealing. Since Civ games tend to insert some kind of espionage mechanism in one of the expansions, I think this'd turn out to be a bit redundant. Nice idea though.

Namaspamus said:

I thought the gold cost was out in your system. So it's just another way to do it: no gold cost but a "malus" that avoids an overpowered system. Maybe then the malus applied on the total amount of beakers should be around -40%, if I count well it means the agreement still gives a +20% boost to your research.

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Hmm, not so sure about this... then you'd be back to the Civ4 multiplayer problem of players trying to get into as large alliances as possible to get the maximum research boosts possible. (I still don't know why they never fixed that by imposing a 10-turn minimum wait between obtaining a tech and being able to trade it in Civ4.)

I think research agreements should mirror other mechanics in the game in that they turn gold into something else (in this case, gold -> beakers). Of course, having a slider would essentially solve this problem in that it'd allow us to make our own "research agreements" with ourselves. However, I don't know about the likelihood of that happening.