Tech Progression Too Fast?

[Haggbart]

Yeah this is my main concern with the game now. I hope they do three things before launch

- Lower the eureka bonuses to maybe 35-40%
- Make some eurekas harder to get, Quill got the 6 farms one by coincidence, if only the number was 8 it would at least require a more active effort
- Increase the tech costs about 25%

I mean, I don't mind if expert players manage to tech quickly, but the LPs we've seen have done so effortless.

 

[Redaxe]

Most Eureka's seem way way way to easy to get (did I say way enough)? They really should have steeper requirements so you rarely get them - i.e. you have to disadvantage yourself by doing a lot of something to get it....

Irrigation for instance - just one farm? You should have to farm a few tiles at least to get a eureka...

Writing - Meet another civ? come-on, in every civ you usually meet another civ within 15 turns.... At least be realistic and make it meet 3 civs or something...

Horseback Riding - Build a pasture??? seriously you get pastures almost from the get go so that is practically a give-away eureka.

The way it is now you may as well not even have the eureka they are that easy, just give the +100% to science the the eureka essentially provides..

Its a very good system the eureka, don't get me wrong, but it needs to be tightened up significantly...

 

[Krajzen]

In my opinion either
a) Costs of all techs should be increased by like 25% or
b) Eurekas, being so easy, should give smaller bonus, like 33 instead of 50%.

 

[Lord Lakely]

focusing on tech breaks the game. I think Techs should be more expensive in general, and that is luckily easy enough to tweak. (especially because production costs are high, to the point most wonders aren't built until the endgame!)

 

[cazaderonus]

Yeah the pacing of tech progression feels really off. I had made the same observation with the previous LPs we had from the firaxis event. Quill had gotten crossbowmen very fast without building any campuses in his england playthrough.

And those news LPs seems to confim this. I really expected the tech costs to be a lot higher considering they trimmed the tree hard to create the tech one. And weirdly, the former seems to be a lot more balanced and its pacing looks a lot more adequate.

Imo, this isnt a big issue and can be easily solved by buffing the tech cost over the board. It s not normal to see techs allowing spaceports in 1500 on prince. Imagine what it could be on deity when the ai actually pull you toward better results. I really hope it s fixed on release, otherwise i fear that any game with sumers snowballing science starts will end up with some unbelievably short science wins

Eurekas are not that much of a problem here imo, they should give a significant buff, but there still should be a lot of teching needed even when you get one, and not 4/5 turns as we can witness now

 

[criZp]

One thing that I think of the eureka/inspiration system is that it s very simplistic: find/make/kill one X, get -50% research cost on tech Y.

Why not make it so that, on irrigation for example, if you build a farm you get -25% research time, build another and get another -25%, so if you build 4 farms and get the tech for free. It seems more realistic that it scales like that, and it gives more choice too. It's not a binary decision, it actually gives 5 different choices.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The late game techs seems to be very cheap. Only like 1500 for an endgame tech and that is not even counting in the eurka.

The spaceship race feels more like a production victory then a science victory because it need a latge game investment of like 15000 production, ten times as much as a late game tech without eurka.

I dont think eurka is a big offender, what is are that tech are so cheap.

 

[Redaxe]

In my opinion either
a) Costs of all techs should be increased by like 25% or
b) Eurekas, being so easy, should give smaller bonus, like 33 instead of 50%.

Or just make the Eurekas harder to get, not a free reward as many are now.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

The build eurkas are rather expensive given how cheap tech is compared to production.

 

[Krajzen]

I dont think eureka is a big offender, what is are that tech are so cheap.

I disagree a bit, while techs are too cheap, eurekas are so easy to get and so powerful that increasing tech costs without nerfing eurekas would still make tech progress fast. Not to mention that would even worsen the balance because if techs are long to discover unless you get easy eureka, then tech progress would become dramatically biased towards getting eurekas instead of improving science yield.

I think the balance needs simultaneous nerf to Eureka (from 50% to 33-40%) and icreased tech costs overall (by for example 20-25%).

 

[Krajzen]

Or just make the Eurekas harder to get, not a free reward as many are now.

I don't thunk that's possible. You can't easily "just make them harder to get" because many of them have so specific conditions that you can't linearly just double or triple them without destroying balance between eurekas and making some of them much worse than others.

For example, there is eureka that requires you to build farm, and one that requires you to discover a continent. Making the first one requring building two farms and second one discovering two continents makes the first one much easier to get than the latter. Do that on a tech tree scale and suddenly a lot of it becomes internally unbalanced with many eurekas far easier or harder than others.

"Making eurekas harder" would probably require carefully revamping dozens of them in comparision to each other, that's not that simple...

 

[Captain Fargle]

Tech progression overall doesn't seem to be too fast to me. It's that late game techs aren't scaled up enough compared to early ones. Industrial and Modern techs in particular seem way too cheap. Industrialisation and Flight in particular come too early and too easily for how powerful they are.

 

[Abraxis]

The speed may be artificially fast just for testing purposes. Remember, while these are preview builds meant for the public to see, they're very much built off the testing builds they use. I'm sure they try and keep the game pacing as high as possible for these builds in order to cut down on testing time.

I wouldn't worry about it though, while it may not be perfect on release, they have never really starved us for pacing options, and I remember configuring an .ini file to slow down my tech progress on civ5 release day in about 20 minutes and being satisfied with the results after finding it all way too fast compared to production and movement -if it's a problem, it won't be for long.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Robotics, an end game tech have a base cost of 1560 and that is halved with eurka. In terms or production cost the marsh project part it unlock cost 3000 production.

 

[Calcifer]

The first time I read about eureka system I thought: "Wow, 50% of the tech for free is insane!", then I just assumed that they would have doubled the total science costs too, so getting most of the eurekas would have been the standard instead of being a bonus.

I agree that either a slight nerf to eurekas and increase in tech costs are needed.

 

[Captain Fargle]

At the same time I do feel the need to say that this is an early preview build. On Prince. It could be that the reason teching seems too easy at the moment is the lack of threat or pressure on the players. There's no hard choices at this level. No desperate rush for key techs or civics. You want to get the eurekas for just about everything? You can absolutely do it here but on higher difficulties where at the very least you're going to need vastly more significant military investment to not get rolled?

Maybe.

We'll see in three weeks. And if not? Tweaking the tech tree a little with some mods hopefully won't prove too difficult.

 

[King Jason]

I haven't seen a let's play video that's been on a difficult higher than Prince. I'm pretty sure half of us here would tech just as fast in civ5 on a prince game. Until I do, I'm not overly concerned at all.

 

[Redaxe]

Ultimately its reasons like this why its not wise to buy the game from scratch. Lets be realistic its going to take a number of patches and expansions for the game to be working as people would like it to... just a matter of patience I guess...

 

[Jabulani]

Jabulani no need to be worried, Its not that hard to change the value of each tech, for example if irrigation need 50 science all they have to do is change that to 100 or whatever

That is similar to the game speed concept, ok, but my main warry comes from the fact that civ vi is being exploited 3 weeks before its release, when it will hit the shelves it will be exploited by a gazillion of expert players and it will take 3 patches to work right....

 

[Siptah]

I don't think eurekas should be much harder. The very essence for including them was that you should get a bonus for what you have nearby and what you do anyway. But I agree, science progression is was too fast. The best solution to me seems ~ doubling all tech cost, while keeping the eureka very large, but not 50%, maybe something like 35%.

On the other hand, districts should be more balanced. As it is now, people build campus, holy site, industrial zone primarily as it seems. The others should be more important. I haven't seen much cultural districts in non-greece videos and only one or two entertainment districts. If techs needs more science, that will only lead to more campuses and even less other districts. That's also why the solution 'reduce science per pop' is not the best way to nerf it.