Requies said:
If you or someone else has a save where someone is isolated, I could check to see if this effect exists.
I just looked at such a save, where i am in 1270AD, after a long war while isolated on a small island with one other civ. That civ is destroyed, and i met Victoria recently. Setting is Monarch, standard size, normal speed, 7 civs.
Everything seems to go as Requies said: for exemple, i skipped researching Meditation...which at such a late date, i expect more than one AI to have. However, the "number of civ" modifier is clearly 1.04, as should be expected from "1 known civ out of 7 starting civs knows the tech".
As a side note: i wonder if dead civs count or not? My destroyed neighbour was even more backwards than me, so i can't check on this save...but what would happen if he had researched Meditation before his death? Would the modifier be 1.04 or 1.08?
Roland Johansen said:
1) Reduce the science slider to 0% and acquire 1 scientist in your empire.
2) Note how many turns of research it takes to acquire the technology
3) If it takes 350 turns to research a technology, then the research costs are between 349*3+1=1048 and 350*3=1050.
4) Now you can look at the basic cost of the technology (say 1200) and see that your research bonus is between 1200/1050=1.143 and 1200/1148=1.145.
5) Comparing this with the research bonus that you should get from prerequisite technologies and other stuff, allows you to get a pretty accurate picture of the number of opponents that know the technology. Comparing that with the opponents that actually have the prerequisites of the technology, maybe even allow you to make an educated guess about which opponents have this technology.
6) The science slider was only lowered to estimate the actual cost of a technology. It can be moved back to its original setting.
I'm not sure i understand that. From Req's article, i understood that the "number of civs" modifier was applied to the generated beakers, not the cost of the tech (and that is indeed the result i get in my saves).
If we use 1 scientist, we generate 3 beakers, then multiply by the number of civs modifier (between 1 and 1.3), and take the floor...which still gives 3. So the number of turns should not change, whatever the number of civs who knows the tech.
Thanks though for the idea...for the test described above, i set the research slider to 0, and then used from 1 to 8 scientist specialists to get a controlled amount of beakers.