Technology Research Explained....

Requies said:

Repercussions

1) It can be VERY important to establish contact with all the other civilizations in order to speed your beakers applied count. You could potentially be making 28% (17 known civs w/ tech/ 18 civs total) more beakers than you normally could on a tech. This is especially true on harder difficulties. If you just meet half of the other civs, your research on techs known by the others would improve by 14%. This is probably the biggest repercussion of the calculation.

Req

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In the first example you give, you'll only be making 0.3*(17/18)/(1+0.2) -> 24% more beakers, because of the prerequisite 0.2 modifier that applies to everything but the starting techs. The percentage will be slightly smaller if more than one prerequisite modifier applies. The same effect means the 14% is wrong, too.

Just thought I'd point this out to help you improve an already excellent guide.

Actually the valuse stated are correct because the Tech knowm modifier and the Prerequisites known modifier are multiplied, not added as so many other ones are.

Krikkitone said:

Actually the valuse stated are correct because the Tech knowm modifier and the Prerequisites known modifier are multiplied, not added as so many other ones are.

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Oh yeah, you're right. My bad.

If tech overflow does work like hammer overflow then there might be a factor that I didn't see mentioned.

Hammmer overflow is limited to your base hammers I believe. (I checked once but it was a quick check - there is definitely a limit however - you can't build a wonder in 1 turn by building explorers and building up the surpluss).

If tech was also limited to your base number of beakers, then hitting one beaker below what is required would be bad because you would get a multiplier of 1.0 with the rest being lost.

It might be worth investigating if there is a maximum overflow for tech. It would change where you want to aim to maximize your beakers.

The maximum hammer overflow is equal to the production cost of the previous just finished project. If a similar limit existed in research, then it would only possibly hurt you if you were researching at a rate close to one technology per turn.

Also Research does not have something like Projects/ Wonders that you are not supposed to 'store up' for. There would be no reason to put a cap on overflow.

This whacked out formula kind of messes up a mod im trying to make. Basically I need to figure out how many research points are actually getting put into a tech each turn. Obviously simply calling the function getCommerceRate(CommerceTypes.COMMERCE_RESEARCH) wont give me an accurate number because it doesnt include all the factors in this formula. Is there another .get command that will provide me with the actual number? Or is there a way to subtract the current turns research progress from what it was the previous turn in order to get the real number?

LordTerror said:

There is annother factor that you missed - team penalties.
*snip*
1) If you have a LAN party, it's more profitable to NOT be a team, and instead get a permanate alliance very late in the game. One person should to Alphabet, and the other person should get other technologies. When you meet eachother, continue to get seperate technologies and gift them to eachother when they are completed. Because it requires so much communication, I wouldn't reccomend it except on a LAN.

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Hm ok now I know why the AI somewhat manages to keep up when I play team with a friend vs. AI.

But I'm not sure if the advantages of gleaning the 33,3% on research is greater than the teaming-up advantages of somewhat linked starting positions, the early health/happyness resources trade and shared wonder effects to name a few?

Thanks for doing so much gruntwork and analysis! Once I'm awake enough to understand half of this, I'm sure it will help a lot.

I don't know why the program works as it does, that is giving you extra research which you can, in play, only detect because the increments of research per turn are larger than the amount of flasks reported. It would have been simpler for the player if the shown cost of the research was modified. This would in a way show how many other civs had a tech, as its research cost to you would fall progressively as the game progressed, rather than there being the concealed boost which is the subject of this thread.

The problem is any change in the cost of something can have much wierder effects than increases in the production rate.

In any case they should just have had the Flasks reported on the empire level show all the effects (ie X flasks from Cities + x% from modifiers for this tech)

Hi Requies,

Thanks for such a wonderful article! It was made even better by the work of all of the additional contributors.

Further to that point, the fact that you kept the first two posts up-to-date is what really made your article very useful. If everyone followed this intuitive and collaborative approach, it would make their contributions that much better and more appreciated.

I would like to note that there were a couple of points in your first post which I found to be ambiguous. Maybe you can help by cleaning up the wording just a slight bit.

Specifically, where you wrote:
"2) Divide by the number of civilizations which STARTED on the map and ROUND DOWN to the hundredth place (0.01) of the quotient."

it might be a bit clearer if you changed it to something like:
"2) Divide by the number of civilizations which STARTED on the map, including your own civilization, and ROUND DOWN to the hundredth place (0.01) of the quotient."

It wasn't until I read through your repercussions that this point was clear for me.

A similar clarfication could be made in your example, to re-inforce this point, or for the benifit of those people that only read the example:
"You produce 37 net beakers per turn and you have met 3 other civilizations who know it out of 7 who started the map."
->
"You produce 37 net beakers per turn and you have met 3 other civilizations who know it out of a total 7 civilizations, including your own civilization, who started on the map."


Further, where you wrote:
"Tech Known by Civilizations modifier = 1 + RDDW (0.30 * # known Civs who have the tech / # of Civs who started the game"

does RDDW mean RounD DoWn? I was first misled into thinking that "RDDW" referred to some strange constant that I'd missed, until I read through your example.

I guess maybe just an additional line defining RDDW, something like the following, would add a bit more clarity:
"RDDW = ROUND DOWN to the hundredth place (0.01) of the quotient"

Overall, masterfully explained.

Oh, and one further thing. I believe I read in another thread that the bug represented by Repercussions 3) and 4) was corrected in patch version 1.61. Do you know if this point is true? Maybe someone else can confirm it. If it is true, maybe you can make note of it somewhere at the top of this thread, such as in your second or third post?

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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

Dhoomstriker said:

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!

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This always happens, if your research is at 0% so you're only generating 1 beaker per turn. It's not a "usability nightmare", at all.

Agreeing with DaviddesJ, the real usability nightmare would be when you're in the middle of anarchy or simply running at 0% science and all of your techs say they'll take an infinite number of turns. You wouldn't be able to, at a glance, determine which techs are more expensive than others. The 1 beaker per turn minimum avoids this scenario nicely.

Anyone notice that in 1.61, tech overflow is lossy? Instead of getting either the current multiplier (which would be the correct behavior) or the previous multiplier, overflow beakers don't get any multiplier at all -- in effect you lose at least 1/6, often more, of your investment. So, overflow is no longer exploitable, that's a good thing... but on the other hand, this brings us back to the situation we had in previous versions of Civ, where you were usually compelled to micromanage the last turn before discovering a tech.

Dog of Justice said:

Anyone notice that in 1.61, tech overflow is lossy? Instead of getting either the current multiplier (which would be the correct behavior) or the previous multiplier, overflow beakers don't get any multiplier at all -- in effect you lose at least 1/6, often more, of your investment. So, overflow is no longer exploitable, that's a good thing... but on the other hand, this brings us back to the situation we had in previous versions of Civ, where you were usually compelled to micromanage the last turn before discovering a tech.

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Is this true? Nobody seems to have commented/confirmed this... but if it is true, it makes this entire thread dated (at least all the discussion specifically about overflows) and would have a huge implication in terms of micro-managing...

Is there any direct way within the game to check what the overflow is? I have been trying to see, and am having some difficulty. When one finishes researching a technology and is asked to choose the next one, it always shows the current research status as '0 beakers out of X beakers' (where X is the cost of the new tech, of course), instead of showing the 'overflowed' beakers as already inputted into the new research. Then in the next turn, it shows 'Y beakers out of X beakers' as the amount of research you have accomplished into the new tech. Y always seems to be more than the number of beakers you are actually generating (as shown by the Finance advisor) but it is not clear whether the excess is due to 'overflow' from the previous tech or because of the 'modifiers' for the new tech which have given a bonus on the beakers generated in the first turn of research into the new tech. Is there any way to see what the overflow actually was?

allnightplayer said:

Is this true? Nobody seems to have commented/confirmed this... but if it is true, it makes this entire thread dated (at least all the discussion specifically about overflows) and would have a huge implication in terms of micro-managing...

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It's certainly not "huge". You can just turn your research rate down to the minimum to complete the research, on the turn you finish it. This is what most people tend to do anyway, for flexibility, I think.[/QUOTE]

It's much less of an issue than the cases, in previous versions, where you sometimes wanted to maximize overflow, rather than minimizing it.

Anyway, it's a known issue, and I believe it's going to be fixed in the upcoming Warlords patch.

DaviddesJ said:

You can just turn your research rate down to the minimum to complete the research, on the turn you finish it. This is what most people tend to do anyway, for flexibility, I think.

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In Civ3, I used to do that too - because there was no 'overflow' and the excess beakers on the last turn simply used to be lost. One of the nice thing about civ4 was this notion of 'carry over' (for hammers, beakers etc) so that one didn't feel the need to micromanage the last turn.

In any case, to repeat my question, is there any way to actually CHECK what the overflow of beakers is? In the case of hammers, the overflowed number is explicitly shown by the game (within the city screen). Why isn't this the case for beakers? Are we even sure that there IS an overflow? (or could version 1.61 have gone back to the civ3 model of 'no overflow'?)

allnightplayer said:

In Civ3, I used to do that too - because there was no 'overflow' and the excess beakers on the last turn simply used to be lost. One of the nice thing about civ4 was this notion of 'carry over' (for hammers, beakers etc) so that one didn't feel the need to micromanage the last turn.

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True, in principle, but it's much, much less of an issue with beakers than with hammers. With beakers, you often want to turn down the research rate anyway, as it preserves flexibility as to what to research next (and how quickly). With hammers, it's a huge problem, both because you have to do it in every single city, not just one global screen, and because there's not always something to do instead of generating hammers, while you are almost always happy to take gold instead of beakers (and then beakers instead of gold, later on).

And the effect is also much smaller than in Civ3.

Especially if it's going to be fixed anyway, it just doesn't seem worth getting worried about.

In any case, to repeat my question, is there any way to actually CHECK what the overflow of beakers is?

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I don't see why this is hard. Just play another turn, with research at 0%, and see how many beakers end up in the research project.