Questions of Era (none) techs and on flavours.

Can someone who has actually used these educate me on how they work?

I've seen some mods with techs that have the era set to 'none'. It appears that these techs cannot be traded - is this correct? What other issues are there with them? Is there use for setting starting techs for civs?

Secondly: About flavours. It also appears that techs with a certain flavour can only be researched and traded by civs with the same flavour - is that correct?

If so, what happens to the pre-requisites of these? What happens if a flavoured tech is the pre-requisite to a non-flavoured one? Do civs without the correct flavour just skip it (can research the next one without the 'pre-requisite'?

Also - what about the flavour relations? If (say) there is a tech with a Greek flavour, and the 'sparta' flavour has a 100% relation to the greek flavour, does this mean that 'sparta' flavoured civs can research and trade 'greek' flavoured techs? What if the relation is 50%?

Any info? Thanks.

A non-era tech cannot be traded, and it won't appear on the tech adviser screen. So the idea of these is to act as prerequisites for civ-specific techs, allowing different civs to research different techs, build different improvements, etc.

Flavours don't restrict techs to specific civs. Rather, they are used to encourage a civ to research certain techs (or build certain improvements). That is, you use them to make the AI behave in certain ways. If a civ has one flavour with a 100% relation to a certain tech, it will definitely research it. If it has a 50% one, it has a 50% chance of researching it, etc. Same logic with improvements.

This doesn't have any effect whatsoever on civs that don't have the flavour in questions, and they don't have any effect on a player-controlled civ, since obviously the player can build or research whatever they want.

Thanks for the quick response.

Plotinus said:

A non-era tech cannot be traded, and it won't appear on the tech adviser screen. So the idea of these is to act as prerequisites for civ-specific techs, allowing different civs to research different techs, build different improvements, etc.

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Thanks - so they're assigned as starting techs, and then used as pre-requisites to civ-specific buildings, unit etc - great.

Flavours don't restrict techs to specific civs. Rather, they are used to encourage a civ to research certain techs (or build certain improvements). That is, you use them to make the AI behave in certain ways. If a civ has one flavour with a 100% relation to a certain tech, it will definitely research it. If it has a 50% one, it has a 50% chance of researching it, etc. Same logic with improvements.

This doesn't have any affect whatsoever on civs that don't have the flavour in questions, and they don't have any affect on a player-controlled civ, since obviously the player can build or research whatever they want.

Click to expand...

Strange. That is what I thought (I thought it was a modifier on research probabilities etc). However, it was reported in this post that "Protestantism" could not be traded with some other civs, and on looking at the BIQ, it appears that it can't be traded with civs that don't have the protestant flavour. Does this mean that you can't trade it with them, but they can still research it themselves?

That is odd and I don't know what the reason for that could be, as I see that the tech in question does not have "Cannot be Traded" flagged. I suspect that perhaps there was some other reason for the problem in that particular game, as I'm sure flavours should affect only AI behaviour, not the options available to a player.

OK - I think I've got it sorted through testing.

A human player can buy any tech of any flavour that they have the pre-reqs for.

An AI Civ will only buy a flavoured tech if they have a relation with that flavour. It appears that if the sum of the relations each way is less than 50%, then they will not buy it; if its greater, then they will. Not completely sure of the details, because it almost appears that it checks 2x the highest relation number between flavour A&B and B&A. But the results seem to be consistent.