"Tech jumping"

The basis on this article relies on this forum post:http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146163
(research explained)

Definitions; prerequisite's tech: A tech that has prerequisite(s) and gain a 20-60% bonus on beakers. (Depending on how many prerequisite(s) techs it has) Tech jumping: the name of this trick. None prerequisite's tech: A tech without prerequisite(s) techs that has a 1.0 modifer. (you gain no bonus beakers.) Maximum carriover: Make sure you get as many possible beakers carried over from one tech to the next. Often done by adjusting the science slider the last turn down to the maximum that will give 2 turns left. Then next turn set science slider to 100%.

Basically the trick is this:
You may use the carryover effect of techs with prerequisite bonus (see the other article) more efficent if you carryover to a none prerequisite's tech for one turn, then switch back to a prerequisite's tech and do a maximum carryover on the none prerequisite's tech again. (And repeat until none prequiste's tech is finished)

To give a more "civ" example:
Pottery has a max of 2 prerequisites (fishing, the wheel, agriculture - the weel is required and you may have agriculture or fishing as an optional prerequisite) this will net a 40% bonus to your beakers if you research this after you have the prerequisites. You make sure to carryover as much as possible by adjusting the turn you can research it (1 turn left) so that it will be 2 turns left (switch to the maximum amount that still gives 2 turns). Then next turn you go 100% science. Now you get carryover of this 40% bonus to your next tech. Lets say we carryover to writing for a turn. Then after a turn of researching writing, we go to another tech with prerequisites. Lets say Monotheism (prerequisite:masonry) this will net you 20% beaker bonus while researching. Do the same steps for maximum carryover as last time. Then let the carriover go to writing. See where im heading here? You jump between techs with bonus and then back to techs without bonuses.

To see the effect in numbers we could say hypothetically you are researching at 100 beakers for the whole time of the example. this will net you 40 and then 20 extra beakers for a total of 60 free beakers. thats 60% of one turn of your research. Quite siginificant. In this situation we also think that you have so little left that you get to carryover the whole of the bonus. (WIth that i mean that if you gain 20% bonus you must have in this exampel 80 beakers max for your prerequisite tech the last turn so the 20 "bonus" beakers carryover to the none prerequisite tech. This bonus is even more pronounced in team games where in a 5v5 game you would earn 60x5=300 beakers for free!

You may improve your research speed somewhat by using this trick, but please remember strategic considerations also have to be taken. This tactic will delay some techs that may be vital for your strategic situation. (I wouldnt recommend delaying gunpowder if the enemy is knocking at your door.)

I can see how, if you're researching a tech anyway, you might micromanage the completion to gain a few beakers. And that's especially true early with the no-prereq techs which don't gain the 1.2 speedup that normal techs have. (No prereqs: Fishing, The Wheel, Agriculture, Hunting, Mysticism, Mining.)

But it could apply any time where you have optional prereqs with some techs, but not others. I'd guess that most techs have a 1.2 modifier. There's no gain to be had jumping between them. So one question here, what's the list of techs with 1.4+ modifiers?

This is an obvious exploit that should be fixed with a patch. The whole reason that firaxis came up with the carry over idea was to do away with micro managing your slider each time you had one turn left to discover a tech. You've found a way to exploit that with even more fine tuned micro managing. I don't believe this is a strategy at all. It's merely an exploit that takes away from the games objective to have fun. or maybe to some people it is fun to find a loophole to gain an imbalanced advantage that was never intended for the game

Man, what a waste of time.

Comments: First i have to comment the fact that someone says this is a waist of time. Well it might be for you but guess what there are actually people that find ways to improve they're gameplay usefull and interesting. This teqnique takes me maybe 2 seconds to do and infact it takes me more time to use teqniques like the cheesy circle etc... So i think that comment is just a waist of letters...

And for people thinking this is an explot- Firaxis put the modifiers into the game..if they didnt want people to use tricks like this they wouldnt have the modifiers there in the first place. I love the fact that i can discover new tricks for civ4 even after playing it intensivly for quite a period. This is really funny because the last time i posted a tip (The settler chop while growing) at once people tought it was a cheat but as time passed people accepted it and found it usefull in spesific situations.. just like this tip.. Oh and lastly there is allready an article about this modifier thing and nobody yelled cheat then..im just taking it one step further with a bit micro. So dont know why every time i find a usefull trick people yell cheat...

And wrech i think you misunderstand the consept - fishing etc have no techs.. but all techs that have only one path also has a 1.0 modifier..but techs that has one path and a tech required for it (like wheel for pottery) gains 20% .. and techs that has two different paths and a tech required for it gained 40% etc.. That means there are a lot more techs gaining this advantage. (Like gunpowder for example.)

Oh well i guess if people are this happy about new tricks i should just stop posting new information like this.. Bleh.. Especially the waist of time comment got me..Guess what..i think your post is in fact the one that is a compleat waist of time..

I had a waist of letters once. They were F-A-T-B-A-S-T and I forget the rest.

maybe it qualifies as an exploit, but hardly gives such a big benefit. researching the optional techs just to get the 1.2 or 1.4 modifier is hardly compatible with a beeline that can give a bigger boost to research. more of a strategic decision like chopping.

It is an exploit and I agree with Aegis: it is a waste of time!

Willburn said:

Oh and lastly there is allready an article about this modifier thing and nobody yelled cheat then..im just taking it one step further with a bit micro. So dont know why every time i find a usefull trick people yell cheat...

Click to expand...

Nobody yelled cheat in that thread because it wasn't presented as a strategy but as one of the consequences of how research works (the article explains in detail how research works). However, a lot of posters complained about the overflow effect in that thread. Even the original posters of the thread who figured out the overflow bug (and every other detail about research) didn't like it and has said so in that thread.

A similar bug was present for the production overflow and has already been fixed in the last patch. They might fix this one too, although this one has less consequences as the bug for production overflow. If they know about the bug and it proves easy to patch, then it will probably be fixed. The fact that you posted another thread about this makes it a little bit more likely that it is fixed.

I don't care what you do with your own game by the way. So in my opinion, there is no reason to flame you. But on the other hand, if some people think that a certain aspect of the game is a bug, then it is understandable (but not excusable) that they flame someone who presents it as a strategy.

Roland Johansen said:

The fact that you posted another thread about this makes it a little bit more likely that it is fixed.

Click to expand...

I didnt vomit up the same stuff I spesifically first mentioned the article and then mentioned a trick that can in some cases improve the research. This trick was not mentioned in the article. (Jumping between techs to max your beaker bonus)

Edit: I will just have to take all this piss (even from someone i did respect like roland) and grin my teeth together and focus on more articles. Im sure sometime in the future someone understands that im just trying to help out the community by offering information. Frankly i have no problem with fixing any of the bugs. But the modifiers isnt a bug per se - but the carryover is.

Something worth considering is the beaker decay on techs you aren't actively reserarching. I dont' know how substantial it is, but it could turn something like this into a waste of time.

That aside, with the early game example given, I'd say that your civ will probably benefit more greatly from having a technology like hunting, masonry, agriculture, or whatever, earlier than delaying to speed your research. On Marathon for sure. 40 beakers sounds pretty good, but that's about 4 turns of an ancient city.

Still, a good post, and I hope they patch this away so I don't feel like I'm playing a weaker game because I'm too lazy to adopt this.

Willburn said:

I didnt vomit up the same stuff I spesifically first mentioned the article and then mentioned a trick that can in some cases improve the research. This trick was not mentioned in the article. (Jumping between techs to max your beaker bonus)

Edit: I will just have to take all this piss (even from someone i did respect like roland) and grin my teeth together and focus on more articles. Im sure sometime in the future someone understands that im just trying to help out the community by offering information. Frankly i have no problem with fixing any of the bugs. But the modifiers isnt a bug per se - but the carryover is.

Click to expand...

Sorry, but I didn't want to insult you. The sentence that you quoted is trying to say the following: "the more we talk about the 'overflow effect', the bigger the chance that Firaxis will 'fix' it". You probably read it as saying something like:"you are talking about a strategy that was posted earlier" which was not the thing that I wanted to say. Whether you consider it a feature or some other people consider it a bug is not the issue. A very similar overflow effect for production was 'fixed' in the previous patch 1.52 by Firaxis. So it is likely that this will be 'fixed' if Firaxis reads more about it.

I don't think it is a bad thing that you post a strategy that will allow people to speed up their research. I was just trying to explain why people will sometimes flame you for posting about something that you consider to be a strategy and they perceive as being a bug. Your article is not for those posters but for the ones who see it as a strategy.

I must say that I don't like the strategy, but that's a personal thing. I also don't like Moonsingers deity anarchy strategy (also an article in this strategy articles forum). But it really doesn't matter what I think about these strategies. If some people like them and will use them, then it was a good thing that you posted it here. If lots of people flame you then the thread will stay in the top of the forum and be read by lot of people, so you could view it as an advantage and just laugh it away.
I you felt attacked by my post, then I'm sorry for that.

edit: edited for further explanation.

Willburn said:

To see the effect in numbers we could say hypothetically you are researching at 100 beakers for the whole time of the example. this will net you 40 and then 20 extra beakers for a total of 60 free beakers.

Click to expand...

But didn't you waste TWO turns to get this so-called 60% bonus? At the same time, you could've earned 200 beakers instead of 60.

For some reason I have serious doubts that this even works. It seems like you're speeding up the last of the three techs by 60% or 80% at best for only one turn. In order to do this, you moved the research slider to less than 100% two times, setting you back two turns. If you're lucky, you break even for all three techs. Regardless, you pushed the first two techs back one turn each just to save one turn on the third tech.

Chinese American said:

But didn't you waste TWO turns to get this so-called 60% bonus? At the same time, you could've earned 200 beakers instead of 60.

For some reason I have serious doubts that this even works. It seems like you're speeding up the last of the three techs by 60% or 80% at best for only one turn. In order to do this, you moved the research slider to less than 100% two times, setting you back two turns. If you're lucky, you break even for all three techs. Regardless, you pushed the first two techs back one turn each just to save one turn on the third tech.

Click to expand...

This strategy assumes a difficulty level where you can't research at 100% the whole game. So the player using this strategy makes some money in the turn just before researching a technology, which can be used to research at 100% in the following turns. You don't lose research points in that way.

The gain is achieved by using the research bonus of the previous technology for first turn of research of the next technology.

The OP can probably explain it in more detail when he is online.

Yep as roland says. Also you can gain some even if your running 100% all the time by allways getting only one turn with teching for a tech without prequisites and then back to something else. Aka tech jumping. This will delay the tech your jumping back and forth to but it will earn it more beakers. So your delaying it for a more efficent reseach in the long run basically. Not often usefull but sometimes.

To try and simplify it if your running 100% all the time lets say you finish a tech with 40% bonus..the carryover will be 40% bonus and you research 1 turn on a tech with only 20% bonus.. This way you carryover the bonus and efficently earn 20% more beakers. Then you switch to another tech with 40% bonus.. research it finish and jump back to the 20% only bonus tech and gain another 20% more beakers for a turn. repeat until the 20% only tech is researched finished or you decided you need it fast.

On the subject of micromanaging production at high levels, I remember reading a tactic that was to always run science at either 100%, or 0%, due to the fact that Civ always rounds non-integers down. Doing this I guess you would save a small number of bulbs and gold in the long run for disappearing in the rounding black hole, does anyone have experience with it?

friskymike said:

On the subject of micromanaging production at high levels, I remember reading a tactic that was to always run science at either 100%, or 0%, due to the fact that Civ always rounds non-integers down. Doing this I guess you would save a small number of bulbs and gold in the long run for disappearing in the rounding black hole, does anyone have experience with it?

Click to expand...

My understanding is that any rounding goes into gold coins (i.e. cash) so I you're not really losing anything. I think the details are in the thread linked at the top of this one.

The commerce -> beakers conversion is not affected by rounding.

The beakers -> beaker_bonus conversion IS affected by rounding. So as soon as you build a library, it pays to run 0% or 100%.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOring

geek_knight said:

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOring

Click to expand...

I must say that your contribution to this thread is very interesting indeed.