Tech Progression Too Fast?

[need my speed]

They are not as bad as they look.

Some of them outright ignore - are not aware of, do not see - resources near their cities. That baffled me.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Some of them outright ignore - are not aware of, do not see - resources near their cities. That baffled me.

Yes, that's the downside of being successful let's players. You have to act and speak, can't stop and look often, so many things miss their attentions. Still, they have really good planning, tactics and so on.

 

[Al Bundy]

Is not China who has a bonus on Eurekas? Seeing how powerful they are now, China could be scientifically unstoppable in the right hands.

 

[treadwin]

I think the difficulty here is a significant factor.

I know in Civ5 a lot of even experienced Civ players had a challenge on King level (me). The vast majority of players never made it out of Prince. That meant that there were 2 or 3 difficulty levels that were very under-used.

Ideally you would only keep one difficulty level for the hard-core and make it so that most players will be playing on immortal or emperor by the end.

We wouldn't think it was odd if these players were beating the game by 1500 on Chieftain or Warlord level so if they have slipped the difficulty a little, then there is no cause for alarm. It may also be that the science rate is a factor in the difficulty level now.

In the past, if anything, the Civ games have been too hard at the top level for most players, and they have always needed the top players to "cheese" the game somewhat. I doubt that the designers will make it too easy at every level.

 

[Sansa_Stark]

Has anybody actually done some research about how many eurekas youtubers actually got? I think there is a HUGE difference between chances of getting early ones and later ones, and that people are overestimating how many they actually got without using some hard data.

Here's random tech decision in Marbozir game (part 13, turn 213). He has 5 choices and not a single eureka. He also has
- 0 Forts, 0 military engineers to build them, and not even an armory to recruit one right now (building one at the moment)
- 1 Harbor coming soon, but no other city to build another
- 0 banks I think (not sure, maybe he has one)
- 0 Knights (and no war ATM)
- 0 neighborhoods, and not even required civic

Spoiler :

 

[elitetroops]

Has anybody actually done some research about how many eurekas youtubers actually got? I think there is a HUGE difference between chances of getting early ones and later ones, and that people are overestimating how many they actually got without using some hard data.

Here's random tech decision in Marbozir game (part 13, turn 213). He has 5 choices and not a single eureka. He also has
- 0 Forts, 0 military engineers to build them, and not even an armory to recruit one right now (building one at the moment)
- 1 Harbor coming soon, but no other city to build another
- 0 banks I think (not sure, maybe he has one)
- 0 Knights (and no war ATM)
- 0 neighborhoods, and not even required civic

Spoiler alert: he'll get four of those in time for researching the tech.

He's missing a few here and there, but I don't see him doing any very extensive planning for them either. I mean, he does for sure look ahead a bit and does actively pursue them, but there are occasions when they seem to come as a surprise to him and he researches stuff without the boost that could have easily been boosted.

 

[Sansa_Stark]

Well I hope he doesn't get another Harbor at least

 

[elitetroops]

Well I hope he doesn't get another Harbor at least

Nope, he doesn't. But even that would have been easily possible as well. Madrid has one and he shouldn't have had any problems conquering it had he wanted to. Of course, conquering Madrid only for the boost is not worth it, but I can see plenty of other reason why he should have done it a long time ago.

 

[juanpavo]

I have a feeling there will be more natural nerf on higher difficulties. Instead of "let's get all the eurekas" we'll see "screw them, I need those muskets as fast as possible"

Interesting observation, you could be right. It does seem unnatural when the players jump around the tree, optimizing for eureka bonuses. Hopefully the higher level AI will force a more natural progression.

 

[narmox]

Comment about boosts:

Throughout this whole discussion, I see a lot of focus on the easy early-game boosts as a justification for "boosts are too easy". The more I watch the LPs though, the more I notice that boosts are less and less common as the game progresses, even in Quill18's or Marbozir's games. They end up very often saying "we probably won't get the boost for that but let's research it anyway".

So perhaps the early game boosts are meant to be easier and based on land around you, but still the decisions you make early on will have impact throughout your game - ie where you build your districts will perhaps not allow you to build neighbourhoods on Breathtaking appeal tiles, which will prevent you from getting a certain boost (conservation? or something). Seems like they're not all automatically easy to get, as the game goes on?

 

[joncnunn]

Comment about boosts:

So perhaps the early game boosts are meant to be easier and based on land around you, but still the decisions you make early on will have impact throughout your game - ie where you build your districts will perhaps not allow you to build neighbourhoods on Breathtaking appeal tiles, which will prevent you from getting a certain boost (conservation? or something). Seems like they're not all automatically easy to get, as the game goes on?

Indeed, they do appear to be more expensive to get as time goes on:
1. More expensive tech to get more advanced civic / more expensive civic to get more advanced tech
2. More expensive hammer and/or gold cost to get the boost.

That particular one quoted is in large part a luck based one; most of these are actually towards the very beginning, but the actual benefit (it's indeed conservation) appears rather weak anyway.

 

[elitetroops]

That particular one quoted is in large part a luck based one; most of these are actually towards the very beginning, but the actual benefit (it's indeed conservation) appears rather weak anyway.

Not really, it's one you should be able to get every game. There's no luck involved in appeal, we know the exact rules for how it works.

+2 for adjacent Natural Wonder
+1 for adjacent Holy Site, Theater Square, Entertainment Complex, wonder, Mountain, Coast, Woods or Oasis, or if tile is on river or lake
-1 for adjacent Industrial Zone, Encampment, Airport, Spaceport, Rainforest, Marsh, Floodplain or pillaged tile

Breathtaking appeal requires a total of +4 or higher. It should be possible to plan all your cities so that there is a tile available for a neighborhood with breathtaking appeal once they are unlocked. It's more housing for the same amount of hammers, so maybe this is exactly what should be done. On the other hand, in some cities you might want to give up this opportunity for better adjacency bonuses earlier, this is all up to you. However, making sure that you have at least one tile available with breathtaking appeal is for sure worth it, because the first one not only gives you 6 housing, it also gives you 570 culture in the form of an inspiration.

 

[pietro1990]

Its the Eureka bonus that speeds up tech tree.. They should make it 25% insteed of 50%

 

[Khalid]

What concerns me is that quill managed to fly through the tech tree even though his early campuses were crap. He build a campus in capital (useless), then a second campus in hois second city (nice +3 adjacency bonus), but it took him 30+ turns to finish that campus.

What was a huge boost early were the two scientific city states where during the classical era 25% of his science was comming from city states.

I wonder if the science bonus from city states is not too high. If you meet one just right at the beginning, it will double your science. I seems strong compared to other bonuses like 2 gold (you start with 5gpt), or 2 production (units from militaristic or buildings from industrial).

 

[pietro1990]

goody huts olso seem overpowered would dissable them. speeds up tech a lot

 

[RohirrimElf]

just increase tech by x % when ahead in tech level like eu4 or 1,5x as hard should fix it. I`m not that displeased with current tech as long as AI knows how to deal with eureka`s/inspirations.

New players would not notice much on prince probably. For myself, i wont ga all in on one particular area but spread out my districts.

 

[Larsenex]

Personally, before calls to make tech more expensive I would rather see what the pacing is on Epic or Marathon.

I prefer Epic speed and it may be that teching takes longer. I also suspect a that game pacing was somehow tweaked faster for the pre release build than we will see at release but that is just my opinion with nothing to back it up.

 

[Haggbart]

Personally, before calls to make tech more expensive I would rather see what the pacing is on Epic or Marathon.

I prefer Epic speed and it may be that teching takes longer. I also suspect a that game pacing was somehow tweaked faster for the pre release build than we will see at release but that is just my opinion with nothing to back it up.

Sure, teching probably takes a lot longer on Epic, but the issue is in part that pacing is relative to age/number of turns on a given game speed. And if the norm on standard speed (which will probably be used by more people than epic speed) is by playing reasonably well you will reach modern era several hundred years before IRL, that tells me that they need to adjust the teching rate somewhat.

Personally I'd prefer a nerf to eurekas before adjusting tech cost, but maybe a combination of both is needed. Or maybe a completely different approach, like increasing cost of later era tech buildings so that you need to make production and gold a priority also. Or put more of the late game tech bonuses in the civic tree, to give more incentives to go for culture as well.

 

[alextarg]

Sure, teching probably takes a lot longer on Epic, but the issue is in part that pacing is relative to age/number of turns on a given game speed. And if the norm on standard speed (which will probably be used by more people than epic speed) is by playing reasonably well you will reach modern era several hundred years before IRL, that tells me that they need to adjust the teching rate somewhat.

Personally I'd prefer a nerf to eurekas before adjusting tech cost, but maybe a combination of both is needed. Or maybe a completely different approach, like increasing cost of later era tech buildings so that you need to make production and gold a priority also. Or put more of the late game tech bonuses in the civic tree, to give more incentives to go for culture as well.

A small mod I used to play with in Civ5 was slomo science with different version of it (100% 200% 500% etc)
Personnaly, I've always played with slomoscience100% (2x longer) on epic pace. I feel it's the most enjoyable speed and I've never played without it after I tried it for the first time. You have plenty of time to enjoy eatch era and you can't spam lots of units if you get DOW so you need to keep a good number of troops even if you don't want to get in a war sooner or later.IMO it's more realistic this way.

 

[Big J Money]

I'd like to play a mod where Eurekas are prerequisites for teching, rather than boosts.

That would certainly be interesting...