I downloaded a few days ago BTS 1.0 after a year's hiatus from civ4.
One thing that caught my eye was the TECH_COST_MODIFIER value: thanks so much for making it easy for me to control that value. One of the main things that turned me off from civ4 was that you could research techs so quickly that you don't have enough turns to make one unit and you already researched the tech for a better unit.
For the first time ever, I'm playing with following settings:
epic, no tech trading, no tech brokering, TECH_COST_MODIFIER = 50
The reason I for this post is that your comment for TECH_COST_MODIFIER is misleading and wrong.
<!-- This variable allows the throttling of research rates, effectively changing the cost of all techs: so 5 makes techs effectively cost 5% more, -5 makes costs 5% lower. -->
This comment led me to believe that the tech cost formula was something like:
tech cost = original tech cost * (1 + TECH_COST_MODIFIER)
which is wrong
for example, i tried TECH_COST_MODIFIER = 100, expecting to double the cost to research a tech, but instead it made techs cost something like infinity.
Anyways, getting to the point, it seems that what is modified is not the tech cost at all but , rather, your research points per turn. The research cost of a technology is always constant. The formulas look sorta like this:
ACTUAL_RESEARCH_POINTSperturn = RESEARCH_POINTS_PER_TURN * (1 - TECH_COST_MODIFIER)
#TURNS_FOR_RESEARCH = TECH_COST / ACTUAL_RESEARCH_POINTSperturn
so a value of TECH_COST_MODIFIER = 50 means you are halving your research points per turn, effectively doubling the time to research the tech.
and TECH_COST_MODIFIER = 100 means your research points per turn are reduced to about zero.
At the start of my games, I tested out values 50, 75, and 100. Clearly 100 is bad, but for some reason 75 is bad as well (time to research a tech will never decrease as you skip turns).
So, basically, I'm suggesting you change the comment for TECH_COST_MODIFIER.
