Info on Next Patch

"I'm so tired of people on Civfanatics saying the game isn't playable."

Yes, that style of argument is called hyperbole, and it appears on a lot of internet forums.

It sucks, and it is annoying. In fact, the use of hyperbole ruins literally all chance of a productive discussion. Wait, whoops... ohh NOOOO!!!!

Perhaps an inefficency coeffcient needs to be brought into play as regards research rather than simply juggling the numbers in the research tree. The more cities and/or population, the more inefficent the research, or perhaps bring in a corruption factor in which research points are lost or stolen which could then be reduced with courts and somesuch. Another idea to consider is to have an increase cost factor with every new research, which is added to the base research cost.

I do not understand the complaining about Tech overflow. Or rather, I understand it, but don't understand why it's such a big deal.
My attitude is C'est La Vie
A little wastefulness shouldn't be a big deal.

Rohili said:

IMO, a proper tech pace should require a strong player to be close to 2050 when he finishes the tech tree (and weaker players would not be able to finish it at all).

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Very much agree with this. Except I hate the way Civ3 did techs - forcing you to complete an era before advancing (one of the main reasons I hated that game).

I think a solution (in having tech overflow) is to significantly increase the cost of techs. Keep the beelines but make the pace (on standard, moderate emphasis on research) about 8-15 turns per tech.

I do not understand the complaining about Tech overflow. Or rather, I understand it, but don't understand why it's such a big deal.

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It's not that hard to understand -- if overflow is lost, then that it is essentially waste. An efficient civ avoids waste.

In the past, to avoid research excess, you could scale down the research slider and gain extra gold (or culture or espionage). Or, if you didn't want to micro-manage, then you would just apply the overflow to the next tech......

However, the way this game is set up, the overflow is lost. But, in this new system, there is no slider and research is mostly produced by population combined with buildings. So, there is probably less a player can do to lessen the amount of research your civ is producing in order to avoid the waste. On the other hand, if the player is running a bunch of science specialists or producing research in the production queue....or working jungle tiles with universities and a few other things, then it is possible that the player could reduce the amount of research being produced to reduce waste. However, without the slider, reducing the amount of research could require a lot of shifting specialists, production, and changing tiles. This would be much more annoying than simply taking a slider down a notch or two.

YoHo said:

I do not understand the complaining about Tech overflow. Or rather, I understand it, but don't understand why it's such a big deal.
My attitude is C'est La Vie
A little wastefulness shouldn't be a big deal.

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Say I'm accumulating 150 beakers/turn, and every tech costs 550.
I'm getting a tech every 4 turns, with 50 wasted beakers.
when this happens 11 times(44 turns), wasted beakers sums up to 550, which is the same with tech cost.

Now I lost a Great Scientist effectively, and yes, it's huge.


In real standard-speed games, if one completely don't care about beaker overflow, he would end up with effectively 2 lost GSs.

It wouldn't care much in marathon speed, btw.

I disagree. As long as the AI players waste beakers in the same manner then it doesn't matter - everyone is playing by the same rules. Besides it only seems natural that there should be waste in scientific research...

moyang said:

I'm getting a tech every 4 turns

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So you would be happier if you got a tech every 2-3 turns instead?

More realistically, rather than a fixed cost to get a tech, there should be some sort of random variable. Master Of Orion gave a percentage chance of getting a tech once the base amount had been paid for. Perhaps the overflow could contribute to increasing the probability of the tech being discovered that turn.

The Rusty Gamer said:

Perhaps an inefficency coeffcient needs to be brought into play as regards research rather than simply juggling the numbers in the research tree. The more cities and/or population, the more inefficent the research, or perhaps bring in a corruption factor in which research points are lost or stolen which could then be reduced with courts and somesuch. Another idea to consider is to have an increase cost factor with every new research, which is added to the base research cost.

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I like the idea of less efficient research as the tech tree advances if you don't have era level science buildings in the city.

Library require for par level beaker output in classical. no Library in the city and science output is -20%, etc Each era degrades further and requires additional building in city for par level research.

JBConquests said:

As long as the AI players waste beakers in the same manner then it doesn't matter - everyone is playing by the same rules. Besides it only seems natural that there should be waste in scientific research...

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I agree. The playing field is relatively even and its not much of an issue in my books. I can see where it could be a problem (hyper competitive multiplayer) but for most people I just can't see it being top of the priority list of issues.

Gort said:

You know, you don't actually have to micromanage like that. Unless you've got OCD or something.

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Oh no, here comes this argument...

ohioastronomy said:

Especially on fast game speeds there really is a huge premium associated with micromanaging technology spending - which is now far more tedious with no global slider.

So, yes, you don't technically need to - you will just advance much. much faster if you do. And it's utterly unnecessary - you shouldn't have mechanics in the game which favor players having to do tedious things.

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Pretty much what ohio said, but let me put in my own view:

In the current game, especially playing quick speed, when you are researching techs at the rate of about 1 per every 4 turns or so, the amount of waste can be massive. It's so massive that hiring a single scientist specialist in only one of your cities can have an equal impact to putting a library in every single city.

It's not just about OCD and people obsessing over waste. It's about what is logically the best way for a player to increase his science rate. If managing the construction of science improvements in your cities has a roughly equal effect to micromanaging one scientist, then it's just a bad design of input to feedback.

civzombie said:

"I'm so tired of people on Civfanatics saying the game isn't playable."

Yes, that style of argument is called hyperbole, and it appears on a lot of internet forums.

It sucks, and it is annoying. In fact, the use of hyperbole ruins literally all chance of a productive discussion. Wait, whoops... ohh NOOOO!!!!

Click to expand...

nice one.

JBConquests said:

I disagree. As long as the AI players waste beakers in the same manner then it doesn't matter - everyone is playing by the same rules. Besides it only seems natural that there should be waste in scientific research...

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If you want to play by 'the same rules' as the AI, you may as well throw your injured units at the enemy and move just about every one of your units in some random direction every turn.

Yes if you ignore overflow/waste then you're sort of playing by the same rules as the AI, but you can spin that the other way and say that the current system is too easy to abuse and play by rules that the AI doesn't get to take advantage of.

I am really disappointed to see people advocating beaker waste. The series made a small but important leap forward when it implemented beaker overflow (and hammer overflow is similarly important). In my view, advocating beaker waste is worse than advocating the re introduction of whack-a-mole pollution and other tedious and unfun game mechanics. One of the goals in the design of a game like civ may be to "not necessarily get rid of micromanagement entirely, but at least reduce its effectiveness in comparison to the types of management you want the player to be doing (e.g. building libraries and universities or increasing population)".

As far as game mechanics are concerned, not avoiding research waste can be a real disadvantage. But, the lack of a slider makes avoiding waste very difficult without a lot of micromanaging. I'm wondering what the creative solution is....

Time dumping v. inefficient government is a no win choice for the player.

Realistically though, completing research on fishing, let's say, has no significant carry over effect on researching iron working. Maybe carry over from other research projects carry over into another research project -- bronze working to iron working possibly. But, I don't really see allowing overflow for some but not other tech combos as a solution.

Maybe technology overflow, or a percentage of it, could be converted into wealth or culture.....I dunno....the easiest solution I guess would probably be to just allow research overflow and be done with it!

But really, research balance in general needs some serious re-working.....

We don't need any fancy dancy solution to beaker waste. Carrying beakers over to the next tech (aka 'beaker overflow') is by far the simplest and most intuitive solution. Converting to some other type of currency would likely just open up other micromanagement - again either avoiding the conversion as much as possible or abusing it as much as possible. Think about the stone-protective wallchops in bts. In that situation hammers got converted to gold (because overflow was capped at a certain point) and the mechanic got abused. The result was that it was completely 'gamey' and was only taken advantage of by the people taking every measure to optimise their game.

Bring back beaker overflow. Even if we don't get it in a patch, it'll almost certainly be possible after the core sdk is released and we'll be able to mod it in less than 10 seconds.

PieceOfMind said:

We don't need any fancy dancy solution to beaker waste. Carrying beakers over to the next tech (aka 'beaker overflow') is by far the simplest and most intuitive solution.

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But how can reconcile that with the overpowered speed of researching techs? The solution cannot be simple because it has to be paired with a counterbalance. You, of all people, should not be strongly advocating a simple solution that makes something overpowered even more so.

Buccaneer said:

But how can reconcile that with the overpowered speed of researching techs? The solution cannot be simple because it has to be paired with a counterbalance. You, of all people, should not be strongly advocating a simple solution that makes something overpowered even more so.

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You raise a good point, but really it is not one that is difficult to solve. I'm sorry I forgot to mention it in my posts here. Counter balancing it would merely be a matter of adjusting the tech costs. The adjustment could be made more severely at the faster gamespeeds than the slower ones (because the faster gamespeeds get the biggest effect from micro'ing scientists), but really this is only necessary if you are really strict about maintaining the current differences between the gamespeeds. Realistically a percentage increase in tech costs across the board, adjusted mainly with normal gamespeed in mind, would work best. The main disadvantage is the immediate outdating of any hard copy documentation (e.g. the paper tech tree in the game box).

So you are right that it will potentially require the counter balance, but really that is not rocket science either.

PieceOfMind said:

Realistically a percentage increase in tech costs across the board, adjusted mainly with normal gamespeed in mind, would work best.

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I agree that tech costs should be increased, but don't think an across-the-board percentage increase would be appropriate. I would rather the game designers went through each and every tech, recalibrating them individually so that the tech costs reflected the usefulness of that tech, instead of the bland situation now where every tech in the same column pretty much costs the same.

If that is too troublesome, then they should at least have different percentage increases in tech costs for different eras. I think the early era tech costs should be increased only slightly, while later game tech costs should be increased by more.

Hmm, sorry I wasn't very clear. When I said 'across the board' I meant to imply across all four gamespeeds. In other words, apply the same adjustments to all the gamespeeds. This was because I had made the suggestion of changing the tech costs more for quick speed. (Think about the difference between saving one turn off five compared with one turn off fifty).

Yes it's possible to adjust all tech costs again individually as part of a rebalancing of the tech tree, but for the sake of simply adding in beaker overflow it's not necessary. What I'm trying to say is they're two separate issues.

Buccaneer said:

But how can reconcile that with the overpowered speed of researching techs? The solution cannot be simple because it has to be paired with a counterbalance. You, of all people, should not be strongly advocating a simple solution that makes something overpowered even more so.

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I'm of the opinion that research speed is actually not overpowered right now, and if anything, it could stand to be a bit faster in the first half of the game. The problem is that increasing research speed gives more time to build bigger armies, which will clog the map and make warfare more tedious.

And bear in mind that adjusting tech costs doesn't really change much, since you can get so many techs for free from great scientists (and other means).

pi-r8 said:

I'm of the opinion that research speed is actually not overpowered right now, and if anything, it could stand to be a bit faster in the first half of the game. The problem is that increasing research speed gives more time to build bigger armies, which will clog the map and make warfare more tedious.

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I don't see how that is a problem. You *should* want to have more time to build more armies/fight more battles before your units become obsolete. If you find that tedious, then you are basically finding the game itself tedious (especially since Civ V is so geared towards warfare).

pi-r8 said:

And bear in mind that adjusting tech costs doesn't really change much, since you can get so many techs for free from great scientists (and other means).

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That is another issue altogether. There have been many suggestions that great scientists should be nerfed to give only a set amount of science output rather than an entire tech.