improvement for useless research

[Kyborgi]

Many of us must have noticed that scientific research is next to useless in Civ3 other than chieftain and maybe some warlord games. Here is a short list of things I came up with to make research more meaningful.

-Larger tech tree with a lot of cheap "sub-techs" that make some variation of some unit available or some improvement or wonder that is not crucial.
-No minimum or maximum turns for researching.
-Splitting up research points to research more than one field at time.
-Categorized fields such as in Master of Orion series.
-Designing units (like in MOO, again.)
-Techs become cheaper when more civs know them.
-"Capturing" techs. For example if your inferior unit wins a combat with an advanced unit, it can "capture" some important information of that tech, e.g. taking a rifle from a dead soldier and bringing it back to one of your cities would give additional research points for that field or even reveal it completely.
-Research alliances. To share certain advances with your allies and share research information to make the new techs cheaper for your allies.

 

[socralynnek]

Many of us must have noticed that scientific research is next to useless in Civ3 other than chieftain and maybe some warlord games.

I totally disagree, get a tech lead and your game is almost won, because you can take the money from the other civs to research even faster.
And with SGLs you are also rewarded.

Here is a short list of things I came up with to make research more meaningful.

-Larger tech tree with a lot of cheap "sub-techs" that make some variation of some unit available or some improvement or wonder that is not crucial.
-No minimum or maximum turns for researching.
-Splitting up research points to research more than one field at time.
-Categorized fields such as in Master of Orion series.
-Designing units (like in MOO, again.)
-Techs become cheaper when more civs know them.

Thats already in Civ3

-"Capturing" techs. For example if your inferior unit wins a combat with an advanced unit, it can "capture" some important information of that tech, e.g. taking a rifle from a dead soldier and bringing it back to one of your cities would give additional research points for that field or even reveal it completely.

Wouldn't that discourage civs from researching themselves?

The other proposals are ok, imo.