How to slow down technology discovery?

Actually, instead of messing with tech costs individually or by era, you can do it by game speed.

I should warn you, though: no matter what you do, you're upsetting the game's nonexistent balance. Can you imagine how abusive Quechas would be if you made techs cost 100x the normal amount?
 
Dude, the Middle East is pretty backward, but they're not THAT bad. They all have electricity, and Iran has even discovered nuclear fission.
 
Dude, the Middle East is pretty backward, but they're not THAT bad. They all have electricity, and Iran has even discovered nuclear fission.

The countries, in some places, all have electricity. In many countries, a large amount of people don't (Afghanistan for example, even Iraq which was pretty advanced compared to many of its neighbors... speaking from first hand experience).

But they haven't really contributed much scientifically of their own for quite some time. Discovering something that has already been discovered is just technological plagarism really.
 
What MATTERS is that they have the technology. How they acquired it and whether they're taking full advantage of it or not are irrelevant.
 
Uh... my initial comment was based on this statement:
If you want to pull a Byzantium, just set your science slider to zero and enjoy the Middle Ages longer.
If you really think the Byzantines didn't learn from other civilizations while it hampered its own science, you have it wrong. The point was, the Arab world has pulled a "Byzantium" for centuries.

My comment was perfectly appropriate.
 
A couple of interesting ideas here.

1. Edit costs of inividual technologies - time consuming and you may be forever trying to balance your changes (I tried this).
2. Bottlenech Technologies - nice idea, but would seriously cripple technologically backwards civs (once you're past a bottleneck you'd have a very long time to research better techs and use this to your advantage. Worse, if you're behind and stuck at a bottleneck and someone else gets an advanced unit, how do you stop them overwhelming you before you get past the bottleneck - very difficult).
3. Change Era % - good, simple way to do it imo as long as you can get the balance right. I confess I thought that this value was simply for which era you started in, but may be wrong.

4. The way I've done it is to change CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml by adding "Transmarathon" - exactly the same but with <iResearchPercent>500</iResearchPercent>.
This will simply extend the research cost, but be careful because you'll find the early technologies very long to research (more of an issue on higher levels where the AI starts with many techs). I counteracted this by getting the palace to provide more commerce, so that initially you'll have same research times but these will slowly and gradually increase. The benefit of doing it this way as opposed to #3 is that you can research your initial techs in time to use them, and it's a smooth transition from ancient to classical era which you wouldn't get with #3.

I can upload my edited files if you're interested. It definitely gives a longer game while keeping the very early game as balanced as possible.

Hi. Is there a way to make this work for Epic? I have not modified games much before, and I don't really know what I am doing. What I would like is to have the units and buildings on an Epic speed (perhaps with the units training a little faster, depending on how hard it is to change that) and the research more like Marathon.

Or perhaps I would prefer to have units and buildings on Normal while research is on Epic, since I don't play all that often and don't want games to take forever.

Anyway, I would appreciate your thoughts.
Thanks.
 
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