I like the concept of tech' diffusion, but I've come to dislike a certain aspect of its implementation. Specifically, I don't like how one's beaker production is inflated (sometimes drastically) when researching a tech' which many others have.
The issue is that in tech' trades it's no longer possible to tell whether a trade is a good deal or not. If I'm swapping a 1000-beaker tech for another 1000-beaker tech', nominally it's an equal trade; however, if for one of those tech's my beaker production would be inflated by a factor of (say) five the trade is clearly very unbalanced - and there's no way to see that on the trade screen.
Am I right in that the inflated beaker production is reflected in the GNP statistic also, leading to huge spikes in the time-series graph during periods when widely-known technologies were being researched?
I think I'd prefer that tech' diffusion were implemented similarly to the tech' learning from captured cities: that is, if you're a long way behind, you get some free beakers added each turn to tech's which are known by other civ's with whom you have contact. In this way you'd be able to judge the trades accurately, and you wouldn't have to open the science advisor to see how long a tech' will take to research. This also seems more intuitive to me: my civ' would start learning about the technology through contact with other civ's even if I didn't apply my own scientists to study it.
Does this bother anyone else?
Cheerio.
This way does make more logical sense.
Though it probably requires a lot of programming.