Technology management

Post by **Corbeau** » Thu Dec 17, 2015 1:34 pm

There was talk about this in the Winning Conditions thread, but it's a completely different topic, so beter discuss it here.

We had one game with tech sharing and tech upkeep and, in my view, it's working perfectly (if set up right, which it actually wasn't at that game, but it still made perfect sense). It doesn't allow limitless tech sharing across the board, but it does allow flexibility and some reasonable adjusting for different play styles. I would highly recommend it for this game.

Post by **wieder** » Thu Dec 17, 2015 2:20 pm

I'm fairly sure we will skip tech trading even with tech upkeep. Tech upkeep is used for LT36 but with the default values from civ2civ3 ruleset. It's probably best to see how it works out on a real game. It shouldn't be anything too restrictive - at least didn't look like that with the test games. The unknown element here is the tech leakage that will make techs cheaper to research while still maintaining the upkeep cost.

I will take look at the root techs. That definitely makes sense.

HanduMan · Post by **HanduMan** » Thu Dec 17, 2015 3:37 pm

Not sure ifthey have fixed it but sometime in freeciv history there was a serious problem with the combination of tech upkeep and root-req'ed tech tree. If your bulbs went negative you lost a random tech. If it happened to be one of the early ones then you'd loose the whole chain of techs starting from that one. That is, when all techs had one of their requirements as root.

Might be a good idea to check that first before going further with this.

Post by **Corbeau** » Thu Dec 17, 2015 4:06 pm

wieder wrote:I'm fairly sure we will skip tech trading even with tech upkeep.

Be VERY careful with this. It could cement the more technologically backward players even further. The second-most advanced player simply got fed up with not being able to advance AT ALL and quit the game in frustration.

And anyway, I don't see the point of tech upkeep if there is no tech trading. Seriously, why? These two things are exactly meant for each other, one is a patch for the other and together they work better than none.

As for "no problems with the test game", this kind of quick-test can easily skip the long-term dedicated logistics buildup required for proper technological development.

HanduMan wrote:Not sure ifthey have fixed it but sometime in freeciv history there was a serious problem with the combination of tech upkeep and root-req'ed tech tree. If your bulbs went negative you lost a random tech. If it happened to be one of the early ones then you'd loose the whole chain of techs starting from that one. That is, when all techs had one of their requirements as root.

Might be a good idea to check that first before going further with this.

No such problems with our game. All lost techs were the newest ones.

Post by **wieder** » Thu Dec 17, 2015 5:04 pm

The current level of tech upkeep is really low and it's there just because it was on as a default feature of the civ2civ3 ruleset. We will test it again of course.