kryszcztov said:
Also, though I like some features that are driven from your theory (discount for optional prerequisites is one of those), I dislike some other features (the +1 beaker that you get in any case, totally NOT needed and wrong IMHO).
Requies said:
Yeah, I like the optional prerequisites, but I DON'T like the way overflow is calculated for the reason Roland points out. And I really don't understand why they put in the +1 beaker when THEY DON'T USE IT IF YOU HAVEN'T FOUNDED A CITY.
I think that I have a decent answer for why the +1 beaker is not provided when you do not have a city.
Consider what would happen if you did receive such a beaker. For most players, if they settle right away, they will not even notice the difference made by the extra beaker. Admit it, before the reasearch for this article was done, I'll bet very few of you knew about this extra beaker.
However, assume that you choose that instead of settling, you would like to find a different starting spot that takes you at least one turn to get there. Civ 4 GOTM 10 is one such example, where in the pre-game discussion forum, several players have discussed spending their first turn to move to a grassland hill.
If those players received +1 beaker for that first turn, what would happen? Well, a tech-selection dialogue would pop-up. Yet the costs of each technology would be the full amount. So for a tech which costs 120 beakers to research, the time to research would appear to be 120 turns!
On the following turn, after they found their city, the time to research might jump to, say, 10 turns! What a crazy usability nightmare!
Nearly everyone playing the game would think that it's buggy. People would laugh at the game, try and return it, or just discard it. Few of us would be sitting here right now, talking and reading about the mechanics of a totally awesome game, just because of a seemingly simple change that would give the appearance of very buggy software.
Another implication of getting a tech selection screen without founding a city would be that the concepts of "having cities" and "researching techonologies" would be de-coupled. Consider a first-time a player who chose to move instead of settle on their first turn. They'd run into this situation. Sure, eventually people would figure it out--you need cities to actually make a decent amount of research. However, a first impression is a strong one. The impression would be that cities are not necessarily relevant to technological research. The association that you want to build in the minds of new players is that they must build cities in order to properly research technologies, and such an association would be lost.
Any of you reading this post could easily extrapolate that "yes, the +1 beaker is minimal compared to even just the contribution of your capital with its +8 commerce palace and its initial center square of +1 commerce, in addition to any commerce from your first citizen working a tile. Therefore, it should be obvious that I need to build cities". However, how about the initial impressions of someone just learning the game, like your girlfriend? She'd think that it was very stupid for the tech rate to jump around from 120 to 10 over the course of one turn. She probably wouldn't play the game past the first few turns and she would likely convince you not to play it, either.
Personally, I think that this game has a very strong appeal to both sexes, unlike a lot of games that you have probably played. So I'm quite happy that they did not introduce this potentially disasterous usability issue and that both my girlfriend and my brother's girlfriend enjoy playing this game.
LordTerror said:
It is one way to get rid of "integer divided by zero" errors.
What I would have done is to make my OWN dividing function, and to make an exception for zeros. When dividing by zero, I would print "???" instead, to show that you have no research beakers. It's really annoying when it gives unrealistic estimates when you are in anarchy.
Building on what kryszcztov said, LordTerror makes an interesting point about how the whole concept of the +1 beaker breaks down and might have been better designed.
However, my point is that since they chose to use the +1 beaker concept, they could not afford to give it to a player, at least at the start of the game, until a player has at least one city.