Tech rate penalty for number of cities

[Bickerstaff]

This, with penalties applying on a gentle curve. Small empires become more, not less competitive. Large empires become more competitive relative to 10-city ones, however. At the same time, on any kind of enlongated geometric curve, astronomically large empires with many poor cities would still be in difficult technical straits. (Super-Russia, etc.)

I couldn't have put it better.

On the other hand, British Empire and Second French Colonial Empire.

Exactly. So I think that empires that were large as well as comparatively advanced should not receive that penalty, or at least with much lesser intensity.

I don't think we need to make exceptions like this, because the reasons why France and Britain were so advanced even with large empires are adequately represented in the game. Okay, so DoC doesn't really show how India remained underdeveloped and was basically milked for raw materials and used as a captive market to fuel British industrialisation, but making it good real estate with lots of food and commerce and crummy production is a neat approximation. The commerce and food (for specialists) make it a net economic plus, and its resources also have the nice effects of boosting your happy cap and improving your corporations.

I've won the British UHV, and while the number of cities had a painful effect on my research, I was still teching very nicely compared to the AIs. So basically, it's already the case that empires which were historically large and advanced can overcome the tech penalties because of their good real estate. The penalties are much worse for civs like the Mongols and Russians, which is how it should be.

But the consequence being that most of the times places like Africa, Australia and some parts of the Americas always remain empty.

Fear not, the AI's love of worthless cities cannot be cured, by this or any other panacea. For smaller civs and those late to Astronomy, many suboptimal city sites would still be worth it; even with a 10% penalty (which I think is too high), many civs with four or five cities could benefit from settling Australia or New Zealand. And I don't think it's so bad to further disincentivise the really marginal locations, like Namibia and Somalia.

Maybe the tech penalty should depend on total population, not number of cities. This wouldn't address the urbanization issue mentioned by Bickerstaff, but it would avoid the arbitrary cutoff problem.

While I see how this would deal with the arbitrary cut-off, I don't think it could be implemented without creating frustrating situations where players micromanage their city populations to avoid research penalties from growth.

 

[Lone Wolf]

I don't think we need to make exceptions like this, because the reasons why France and Britain were so advanced even with large empires are adequately represented in the game.

It will disincentivize their expansion, though. And Namibia and Somalia don't really need further nerfing.

even with a 10% penalty (which I think is too high),

This I agree with.

I don't really see the low AI tech rate. I do disable the plague, and improve some late AI's performance.