Geoff the Medio wrote:The tech victory should presumably cost a lot more then, so that there's a reason to want late-game research boosting content.
A little while back I boosted the victory tech cost up to 25K, so someone wanting to pursue that path does currently have something to spend a fair chunk of RP on. But it's currently a decidedly uncelebrated path that I think no one chooses (at this time). (on a side note, I think it does eventually make it onto the AI research list but I currently have the AI putting an ultra-low priority into research at that point.)
Geoff the Medio wrote:Based on Bigjoe5's experience earlier, in which the research rate with the tomography bug penalty was reasonable, I think a better change would be to make most techs more expensive.
The tomography bug caused research to be much greater than it should have been for some star types, and only lowered it for some; I don't think we can take any experiences about it as indicators of the reasonableness of tech costs.
Increasing a number of tech costs might very well be a good move (I think probably so) but I think trying to increase the cost of all techs that take 4, 6, 10+ turns so that they are expected to probably use all or nearly all of the empire RP at some projected phase deemed/expected for them to be researched at that point, would work out very poorly. I think the number of turns needs to be reduced, though perhaps not down to 1 or 2; perhaps down to the 1-4 range.
Also, to further address Geoff's concerns about people saving small tech for later and then racing through it:
- I want to first note that you can't overly focus on research tech and then pursue everything else, or (A) you will likely be overrun, and (B) even if you choose a large enough universe that you weren't overrun, you would be building & expanding your empire so slowly that it would be an inefficient path, not an exploitatively good path. I really don't think we need nor should design the tech system to specifically penalize that approach beyond making sure it would carry its own attendant balancing costs, which I think it does already, as noted.
- I like yandoman's suggestion of constraining parallel research to only a specified max number of techs, which potentially could be increased a little via tech, and of the top bar display.
- Also, not all techs being researched in parallel need be treated equally. It could be that we allow the first tech in queue to get it's full allotment, but the next gets a 20% reduction to it's per-turn-max, the next after that a 40% reduction, etc., and that 20% reduction could again be subject to improvement via tech. I think that, by adding situational turns-required, would do a great deal to mitigate Geoff's concern about people racing through then-cheap tech (even a single-turn tech would have its full cost as its base per-turn-limit, and reducing it's allotment by any amount would make it take 2 turns, doubling the time until the successor tech could start research). It would certainly put more strategic emphasis on queue planning (which I think there is a pretty decent amount of now, but a bit more wouldn't hurt).
I'd also like to second the motion for more celebration
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