Who wants the late techs to cost 600% compared to the standard price?

[wieder]

We can easily make that change. No problem. Just want to make sure about it.

[Corbeau]

You omitted the information that early techs will probably cost roughly the normal amount.

[wieder]

The early techs will cost about 160% of the normal. The mid techs about 300% of the normal and the late techs 600% of normal.

[Slacker]

Increasing sciencebox as you likely suggest would make early game much slower, prolonging the phase where everyone fights with warriors, and archers are supermega units, and there is nothing at all to build in your cities except the said warriors. That could make some players bored, creating idlers. "Experimental" (so first two tech columns are cheaper) and sciencebox 120-150 is about maximum I would personally still like.

This is offtopic here, but what should be done is implementing steeper tech curves we discussed with Caedo in Discord maybe half a year ago. Like, x^3 is steeper than x^2, so advanced tech will be significantly more expensive while starter tech stays about the same. It would require adding maybe 10 lines of C code to freeciv project, so Lexxie and Andreas didn't support it at the time. Maybe it's time to do it now? Not for LT43, but for future games?

[Corbeau]

Actually, I think every tech combination has an option "use ruleset number, if it isn't there, use equation". So if you are afraid of too expensive early techs, we can always make some of them cheaper manually.

[wieder]

We can't manually change the tech costs if the experimental tech price is used. The experimental will ignore the ruleset costs and calculates the costs.

I think we will do experimental and 150%. While too fast games are not a good idea, making that massive changes is a risk and this will already make the costs considerably higher. The early techs should cost about 20% more than usual and with tech leakage it won't be that bad.

I know, it might be too little but then again the web-players are used to fast games and I would personally prefer a bt too fast compared to a bit too slow if the game is also a learning experience. And it kind of is with the native client.

[Corbeau]

For the record, in LT41 I just got Seafaring for 4 bulbs

[Corbeau]

One thing that would greatly help a quicker start and early tech exchange and avoid people falling behind: contact without Diplomats. it's a server setting in the "Military" tab that allows players to have embassies for X turns after their units get in contact. Later on you can get an official embassy permanently, with a Diplomat, but this would make it possible to do everything practicaly from T1.

[Pandolio]

I like the idea of having higher cost late tech, but if this game has the rupture grown active, that could end up in great differences between nations.

On the other hand, the idea of free embassy I think is nice but not for tech exchange, just for peace or money exchange. It could be like a embassy with limited features. At the end of the day, forcing to create a diplomatic to exchange tech makes sense to me, and I don´t think is a good idea allowing to have an full featured embassy only for X number of turns and then revoke it.

[ptizoom]

yes tech prices should increase exponentially with its level to beat the geometrical growth of cities and bonuses from wonders and buildings,
why not using a Fibonacci !?

[Corbeau]

There are only a few in-built methods. All are exponential, but some are more than others. I think we'll be using the most rapidly growing one.