Civ4 tech moves too fast!

Hey dudes new to this forum. Anyways on topic

I know about XML editing and the whole researchpercentspeedthing jargon and I've already adjusted the research accordingly. Don't get me wrong the speed is brilliant all the way up until the end of the medieval era. Then obviously you can build Universities, observatories, etc, etc....and the game seems to speed through the latter eras easily.

I was wondering if there was a way to specifically slow down certain eras.

Also sorry if this has already been resolved.

Do you mean you want to increase the cost of specific technologies to slow down research? Or do you want to apply blanket modifiers to slow down the rate of advance based on what age you are in?

Civ4Scorpion said:

Hey dudes new to this forum. Anyways on topic

I know about XML editing and the whole researchpercentspeedthing jargon and I've already adjusted the research accordingly. Don't get me wrong the speed is brilliant all the way up until the end of the medieval era. Then obviously you can build Universities, observatories, etc, etc....and the game seems to speed through the latter eras easily.

I was wondering if there was a way to specifically slow down certain eras.

Also sorry if this has already been resolved.

Click to expand...

NEVER play without checking the option "No Tech Brokering". That in itself will reduce tech research considerably. Maybe you could even try No Tech Trading, to put a brake on the tech whoring and force everyone (and yourself) to research their own techs (or steal them ).

If you are new to civ4, you should try No Tech Brokering first and see how it goes; it will considerably reduce your ability to exploit tech trading, and the consensus seems to be that by doing that the difficulty is increased. Try it.

Play on Marathon, you'll see how much more slowly you'll go through the eras.

Everything will be 3 times as slower except building units, which will be 2 times as slower. And, of course, they'll move much faster because everything else is slower.

That way you'll get a much better feel of each era.

I agree that the post-industrial techs go by too fast. Economies in that era grow at a huge rate, not just because of universities and observatories, but also because you get stuff like biology and the corporations - which give a huge boost to population, and then with representation that gives a huge boost to science... and so on. There are lots of factors at play, but anyway, I agree that it's too fast in the end game.

In my mod, I try to adjust for this in a couple of ways. Firstly, I've (slightly) slowed down the later eras directly, like you've suggested. But also, I've also tried to increase the value of the culture slider: there's a new source of unhappiness which kicks in late in the game, and culture is generally more useful.

So you could try my mod; but it might not slow it down enough for you. I haven't been heavy handed on changing the tech rate.. it's just a minor tweak so far.

Unfortunately, changing the tech rate by era isn't really easy in the unmodded game. The xml settings that I use in my mod came as part of the 'BetterAI' mod. So you could get that mod and change their xml values; or you could make your own mod with just the tech-rate thing; or you could just change the cost of each tech individually...

Hey thanks for the replies. I'll try out the tech trading thing and I'll also be checking out the mod you created. If I still can't get things to my liking then I might go the hard route and adjust all the tech values for the late eras. I'm sure there was a file in Civ3 that let you adjust research points needed for individual techs so hopefully Civ4 will have something since it seems I won't be able to adjust tech speed specifically for certain eras.

Thanks again for the help!

Sorry for double post. Just edited the Techinfo xml file thing. Edited the cost for all techs in the medieval, renaissance, industrial and modern era. Increased them all by 50%. Might reduce the medieval one down to a 25% increase if 50% is too much. If the test runs well then problem sorted! =D

It's not really much of a mod but more a half hour edit of the tech XML file. If it runs well and there's a high demand I could post it up but I'm sure most people know how to edit the XML thingmajig and some others might do a better job than me but HEY if it runs well I can post the file up if requested.