What do eras do?

[magicalsushi]

I've asked this before but no-one was able to tell me. However, I have some new information this time.

We all know that acquiring certain techologies causes you to advance into particular eras, and that the appearence of your cities changes depending on the era. We also know that the existence of eras gives players the flexibility to start a game beyond 4000BC.

But they do more than this. I recently found an XML file with some interesting era-related contents. For each era, there were tags for things like TechRate or AnarchyLevel or something along those lines, along with some others I can't remember. IIRC, TechRate was 100 for the ancient era, then declined by 10 for each later era. The anarchy figure didn't change for the first couple of eras, then I think it started to fall. Anyway, the details don't matter - it's quite easy to find this data. My question is: what do the numbers in that file do?

For example, TechRate (or whatever it was) seems to drop with each new era. Does this mean your tech progress gets slowed down, or speeded up? When this happens, what do you see on the F2 screen - the raw total number of beakers, or the era-adjusted number? That'd be very useful to know. I'm also a little curious about the other figures, although less so. Has anyone looked at the code and seen what these numbers do?

(sorry my info from the file is so sketchy; I have a rotten memory and no Internet access at home.)

 

[KMadCandy]

heck i don't know. but i can confuse you a bit more, aren't you glad?

the game always considers itself in a certain era, call it X. you can be in Era X+1, and another opponent can be in Era X-1, but if enough AIs are in era X then the "game era" is considered to be in Era X is what i mean. i don't know whether that applies to your tech rate and the stuff you're asking about, but i do know that some stuff varies by "game era", not necessarily the era that you personally are in. stuff like like how many units you get when you flip a city, AI WW factors, etc. i think the barbs also get all the previous era techs after the game has been in "new era" for such-and-such period of time.

 

[magicalsushi]

Aha. Interesting. I've no reason to suppose that the data I saw was related to "personal eras" rather than "game eras". In fact, I think some of the numbers were to do with barbarians, which suggests they were all "game era"-related. I still want to know exactly what each of them do, but thanks very much for your input - I certainly *am* confused now, but at least I'm confused in a closer-to-the-truth kind of way. Hopefully.

 

[Elros]

There are two possibilities I can think of here for the tech rate. Actually, the possibilities are damned obvious, but two explanations present themselves.

1) If you're advanced you research faster. This would presumably be to make it more worthwhile to grab the techs you missed?

2) If you're more advanced you research slower. Could that be to balance things out, punish people for beelining? It could be to balance the space race victory with the others?

 

[CivDude86]

I think all that has do with the starting era.
I know you get more WW for each era.

 

[nbcman]

All that I am aware of is that it changes the types of random events that are available or if you havent finished a quest event before the start of the next era you fail.

 

[rabidveggie]

Next to nothing. It changes the animations, and apparently the random events. I guess it reveals just how far ahead or behind your opponent is.