Research

[GoodRevrnd]

Will there be an attempt to rebalance the costs on modern / late industrial era techs or are you preferring to wait and see if Firaxis ever gets to it? I've seen this complaint elsewhere in the forums about how every column of modern techs has the same cost. I think this can lead to more bizarre/unrealistic circumstances where you can sprint too far ahead on one side of modern and still be barely post-industrial on another side. This could probably be fixed by mixing up the RP costs a bit and/or increasing the number of overlapping prerequisite technologies in the modern era.

One of the most annoying examples is I feel like Mech Infantry comes way too early. The unit should probably be unlocked with computers and Plastics added as a prereq. Other things that don't make sense: Telegraph & Radio as separate techs on the same plane.

 

[Thalassicus]

It is not possible to alter vanilla research agreements in any way. It's handled entirely in the c++ part of the game only Firaxis has access to.

by the time I "discovered" the old world, their centuries of DOFs put the rest of the world about 5-12 techs ahead of me.

This is something that's part of playing on a "real earth" map. Even in vanilla they'd still be signing lots of research agreements that puts their science ahead.

Will there be an attempt to rebalance the costs on modern / late industrial era techs or are you preferring to wait and see if Firaxis ever gets to it? I've seen this complaint elsewhere in the forums about how every column of modern techs has the same cost.

Actually... in vanilla I think every column of units, buildings, wonders and techs in every era now have the same cost. I'm guessing they are just using this as a baseline... but it doesn't make much sense to keep because some things are clearly more powerful than others of their era.

Tech prereqs don't overlap much from the military to diplo/science half of the modern era because it allows peaceful players to push ahead of militaristic players. I think this is reasonable and makes conquest more challenging. Firaxis actually lessened this somewhat in the latest patch by adding a Radar -> Combustion connection.

Mech Infantry were nerfed and tanks buffed, so I'm not too concerned over balance between the two anymore.

It's not possible to always have every tech realistically named in the same order and position they were "researched" in historically, so minor things like the Telegraph I wouldn't worry about too much.

 

[bwoww78]

thanks for the feedback Thal and Ahriman. actually, after putting in 60+ turns into the industrial era, i'm closing the gap pretty well. first time on the west side of the atlantic makes a big difference.

 

[Thalassicus]

I've been doing some research into trade deals.

No event is triggered when deals expire, and without access to the c++ we can't directly use the same code that spawns the "deal expired" notification. This would have been the simplest way to do things.

The second solution I thought of is to check the deals for every player every turn, and if they had a deal last turn they don't have this turn, it's expired. The problem is at "turn start" they might have the deal. If this is the case it's even more difficult to detect when deals expire. I've asked about this in the main modding forum, and if there's no conclusive reply, I'll do some further testing.

The third, most difficult solution is to calculate the length of the deal when we first detect a player has the deal, and set a countdown timer that's stored in the savegame file every turn. Each turn, check if players go to war, and if not, when the timer expires the deal is done. This I think is a feasible way to change the per-turn research bonus to a deal-expired bonus. I estimate it will take about 10 hours of work, and I'll look into it more when I have the time. It's on my todo list but not a high priority, because from a gameplay perspective the two approaches are almost identical, and the per-turn approach is easier and already in place.

 

[SlightlyMad]

I prefer the per-turn approach honestly, because I still don't trust overflow in the game. I swear it doesn't always happen.

 

[Ahriman]

My understanding is:
Overflow from researching techs from beaker income works; overflow from great scientists (and probably research agreements?) doesn't work.
I haven't tested this though.

 

[SlightlyMad]

RA's are supposed to overflow, but I think the overflow code in general is just wonky, and I've seen it not happen, so I tend to micro everything anyways.

 

[Thalassicus]

I also like the per-turn approach because it leads to a less "spiky" game. Large spikes of income at periodic intervals can usually be exploited more easily.

 

[Thalassicus]

What do people think of the current late-game research pace? Too fast, slow, just right?

 

[Ahriman]

Maybe a little bit too fast. By industrial/modern era I'm usually getting techs every 5-6 turns.

 

[Atlas627]

Maybe a little bit too fast. By industrial/modern era I'm usually getting techs every 5-6 turns.

Ditto. Though a tiny bit slower, but thats because I go culture usually.

 

[Txurce]

If I look at it from the pov of what is the late game missing, I'd say competition. To a much lesser degree, would come enough separation between Industrial and Modern. This is most evident in warfare, where the upgrades come a bit too quickly for the melee units. Otherwise I don't feel the game "ends" too quickly in comparison to other stages.

 

[void_genesis]

I would agree. Late game techs come too fast to do much with them. Stretching it out to about 8-10 turns per tech for a strong science civ would be better.

 

[Seek]

Agree a slowdown would be nice - my last science vic was at turn 251.

 

[Txurce]

Agree a slowdown would be nice - my last science vic was at turn 251.

That's very good with the later versions of VEM.

 

[Seek]

That's very good with the later versions of VEM.

Thanks, though it was Korea.. (And I had DoFs/OBs with every civ throughout.)

 

[Sneaks]

I would probably 1.5x costs of Industrial, double costs of Modern and 2.5 Future

 

[Ahriman]

I think that would probably be too much, and would be a big boost to cultural victories. Lets try the smaller increment and see how it plays.

 

[Sneaks]

I think that would probably be too much, and would be a big boost to cultural victories. Lets try the smaller increment and see how it plays.

Personally, I would like to add a pre-req tech to Utopia Project (Mass Media for the humor?) to fix that

 

[Atlas627]

I think that would probably be too much, and would be a big boost to cultural victories. Lets try the smaller increment and see how it plays.

Would it really? You already need 6 policy branches, so the earliest you could win is medieval + however long it takes you to get all the other policies. You won't be focusing on tech to win that early, so opponents will be far superior to you and could probably conquer you. You will have several useless branches if you go that early, and that would make it actually really hard.

So you wouldn't want to win that early. You'd still want to get into the industrial era for Freedom/Order right? Without the techs you are missing out on some awesome policies (in Freedom mainly), some great wonders, and some good culture buildings.

It would definitely be a boost to culture, and a nerf to everything (but less of a nerf to conquest). Would it really be so much that it would unbalance it though?