RAs worth the price?

[Martin Alvito]

Yes, this happens to me enough that I've stopped RAs altogether. ICS strat researches everything in <=8 turns anyway, once you're in Classical.

You have to micro what you research so that you're finishing techs at the right times and not wasting the RAs.

 

[alpaca]

You have to micro what you research so that you're finishing techs at the right times and not wasting the RAs.

When going for a spaceship you will typically skip anything on the bottom half of the tree after cannons. That said, I don't think 250 gold or something is a bad deal for being to upgrade my units to mechanised infantry instead of having to rebuild them.

 

[Martin Alvito]

It's the same basic problem when you're going for Diplo. If you don't need Rifles for further conquest or defense, you delay Gunpowder in the hopes of RAing it and not opening up a tech line with useless techs.

But the point I'm making is that there are a lot of different research costs in the Renaissance tree, and you can usually put a sequence together that causes your RA to land just as you finished researching something.

 

[snipperrabbit!!]

Well, you can bottleneck the tech tree to just having one tech available for both normal research and research agreements, namely it's steam engine. It's very awful timing to have it completed the same turn your RA end.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Well, you can bottleneck the tech tree to just having one tech available for both normal research and research agreements, namely it's steam engine. It's very awful timing to have it completed the same turn your RA end.

You have to plan ahead and delay signing the research agreement. You should have a good idea of how many bulbs you'll be pumping out per turn, and the tech costs are right there on the tree.

Alternately, you should have been saving a GS or two for whatever your endgame plan is. If you find yourself in that situation, you should burn a GS to clear the bottleneck.

 

[ChevalierdeJstn]

Converting gold to research means that gold can be used for just about everything in the game. Gold can buy units, upgrade units, buy buildings (=happiness), buy tiles, buy culture and buy food (CSs). With the option of RAs gold can buy techs as well. This flexibility means that building gold in a city is almost always the best option, except for a few production/GP wonderhouses. Since you're building gold anyways, the choice is whether to spend 250g on a new tech or 250g to, for example, upgrade a few units...this decision, of course, depends on your situation.

Or you could spend 250g on upgrades, capture and pillage a couple cities, and use the pillage gains on an RA...

I'm not sure why you would decline an RA even with a more advanced AI. You're both getting a free tech. Unless the game somehow skews techs in the AIs favor (I have no idea how that would even be possible?) at worst the RA makes you both equally more advanced.

What I can't figure out is if the RA gives you both the same tech? That would seem to make the most sense...but I don't see it spelled out anywhere. I suppose if the RA is giving you Gunpowder and your opponent Flight, then no, that probably isn't a good trade.

 

[CultureManiac]

One of the other benefits of an RA is it keeps a tech out of the hands of another AI. I've frequently seen that when I turn down an RA offer, the AI goes off and gets one from someone else. It's better for you and one other AI to get a new tech, than for two AIs to get one and leave you empty handed.

 

[Law Lord]

One of the other benefits of an RA is it keeps a tech out of the hands of another AI. I've frequently seen that when I turn down an RA offer, the AI goes off and gets one from someone else. It's better for you and one other AI to get a new tech, than for two AIs to get one and leave you empty handed.

+1. In the games I play, if I don't sign the RAs, then the AIs will sign them with each other. In fact, I find that the AI perhaps places too high a priority on RAs, but I don't have any concrete evidence to back that up. Given that RAs are quite important, it's maybe not surprising to see the AI go that way.

 

[WeaselSlapper]

I'm not sure why you would decline an RA even with a more advanced AI. You're both getting a free tech. Unless the game somehow skews techs in the AIs favor (I have no idea how that would even be possible?) at worst the RA makes you both equally more advanced.

What I can't figure out is if the RA gives you both the same tech? That would seem to make the most sense...but I don't see it spelled out anywhere. I suppose if the RA is giving you Gunpowder and your opponent Flight, then no, that probably isn't a good trade.

Research agreements give both parties a free tech that they can research. So if you sign a research agreement with someone who is ahead of you in tech they will gain a more valuable tech than you. Weather you're hostile with that civ or not this will give that AI an even bigger tech advantage with you.

Now if that civ is going to sign an RA with someone else if you decline you are better off having only 1 civ gaining ground on you than 2 but normally I try to sell that civ something so they don't have the gold to sign the RA with someone else.

 

[Irgy]

The AI getting a more expensive tech than you doesn't necessarily make it better for them than it is for you. The growth of empires in civ is generally an exponential curve, the more stuff you have the faster you grow. Research is part of it too. The higher the technology level, the faster the research rate. Sometimes directly through new research buildings, sometimes indirectly through development that in turn leads to more research.

So I don't think it really works to think of it in terms of raw values, I think of a tech difference in turns. The important question is how many turns it would take you to catch up with the level they're at now. With the exponential curve that development is on what matters then is the price of the tech relative to the current research rate, which in turn is likely to correspond to the current technology level.

So overall I'd say generally the value of a single technology is actually about the same at every tech level. Subject of course to a lot of other factors when you get into the details such as how each empire is set up, faster and slower eras in the tech tree and so on.