The problems with lowering all the late game tech costs would be massive. Considering RAs become more efficient than research already by early-mid renaissance, you are talking about cutting down a significant portion of the game.
Further, doing so would not improve the value of mid to late game buildings nor really weaken RAs or GSes. You'd just use them in combo with hard research rather than have it replace it, as it does now. So instead of finishing the game at turn 250 of 550, one would finish it at like 180 or so.
I'm not sure I was clear here. Since release, the cost of the techs at the back end of the tree has more or less tripled, while the cost of everything until about mid-Renaissance has remained more or less the same. Things in between more or less scaled according to their relative position; an early Modern tech costs about double what it once did.
Now, you might think that increasing late game tech costs makes it slower to get through the tree, but it doesn't. I can count on one finger the number of Industrial and Modern techs that I'm going to research with
. The rest is filled in with RAs and GS bulbs.
Because that's the case, there really isn't any
payoff for a wide empire. If you lower late game tech costs to reasonable values, a huge empire can produce enough
to rip through the back end of the tree at the pace of a tech every few turns. You used to see 40-50 city, 15-20 pop/city empires during the initial release pumping out 1000
per turn. Now the game is at least as ICS friendly, but no one does it. Since even a wide empire can't hard tech Modern efficiently, there's no real payoff for all the
invested in settling or conquering. Small, vertical empires end up being the most efficient researchers, as they get through the critical
phase (start to mid-Renaissance) the fastest.
In fact, lowering late game tech costs will actually
slow down vertical empires with low
output late in the game. A significant part of proper research strategy right now is to open up enough 5400
techs to blow through the bottom part of late Renaissance and Industrial in just a couple of RAs. If techs in the back end of the tree were cheaper, it would add another 10-20 turns of research before the vertical empire could RA/GS bomb its way to victory.
I don't think that would be quite enough to shift equilibrium strategy, but it would be a start. Getting rid of the National College would put a much larger premium on early
growth to drive
, which would at least push players towards a mid-size, 5-6 city empire.
On the other hand, weakening RAs would greatly enhance loads of features they presently completely obliterate. Having more options in a strategic game is always the goal. Thus even if you call RAs a feature, they are a feature many of us don't enjoy.
I'm surprised that you've never run across the bug/feature meme before. Maybe it's too old school. One of the more infamous ways for support staff to avoid work is to label unintended behavior a "feature" rather than a "bug". The devs' insistence on trying to stick with the "one tech per RA" model despite its clear flaws and a bevy of rebalance suggestions since release closely resembles that approach.
That said, nerfing RAs is going to do less than you think. All you'll accomplish is move back the dates when players want to RA/GS bomb their way out of the game. You're not going to get players to broadly build Renaissance buildings; they're still badly overpriced.