Longturn Forum

wieder wrote: Since it's you who decides the rules, what are the rules going to be?

Or, in other words: who rules the rules' ruler?

So, if it is Elrik to decide, please do it ASAP!!!!

Free tech trading is a bug. Due to the long break between games and completely new server admin missed that:) Its a bit too late for voting too. So in this situation i gave a suggestion:) Its not like i have to decide about it but... in this game and this time someone has to:) Next game we will definately make a poll about it!

New settings will be like that:
- min trade dist 999
- chance to lose tech when giving 20%
- chance to lose tech when receiving 70
- penaulty when getting tech from trade 100%
- penaulty when getting free tech 0
- penaulty when getting tech from conquer 0

I asked Marduk to send mass email about it

sounds fine to me

elrik wrote: - chance to lose tech when receiving 70

This means that receiving tech by stealing or conquering IS enabled, we just have 30% chanches of actually gain it. Am I wrong?

you are right. we have 30% chance to keep it and 20% that source lose it

Done, settings are changed

Great to have the final rules! Thanks you very many as the Leningrad Cowboys used to say in the 80´s.

I bet it's not possible yet but will it be possible, at some point, to get the new rules for a local test? I'm just curious to see how this stuff works.

Just asking, nothing more

They are not part of ruleset but standart game settings:) You can test it local in every 2.3.2 game

No matter what king of exchange do you try, there is 20/70% chances of losing. The only difference between stealing and trade is that with stealing you have to pass 70% diplosuccess test first.

conquering can make BOTH sides lose tech,
stealing can make it too
diplomacy agreement can give it as well!

conquering can make BOTH sides lose tech

conquering

Now this is a stretch.
The more wars player enters the more techs will he lose? You should enable starships then.

Unfortunately its not that easy. If i remember right we had once a game with techlose settings sum ~115% not 90% like here. And even then science progress was faster than losses

Archont wrote: The more wars player enters the more techs will he lose?

As I understand it, only if they are the losing player! As long as you're the one capturing cities (Recieving player) theres no risk of losing tech you already have, just of not getting the enemies tech.
If these settings apply to all forms of aquiring technologies as Elrik says, I think this will be a very interesting, and violent, game!

As I understand it, you can get techs via conquering cities? Then there is no penalty and just the 14% risk of losing that tech for both players?

To make it perfectly clear for everyone:)

Tech can be transfered in 3 ways:
- diplomacy agreement
- stealing- with action success rate 70%, diplo can steal once per city, spy more
- capturing cities

Each time you perform ANY of this actions game make 2 test:
- if source lose tech (20%)
- if target lose(70%)

that means each time there are 4 results possible:
1, 1 - 0,8*0,3 = 24% (Wieder you are probably right that it is too high)
1, 0 - 0,8*0,7 = 56%
0, 1 - 0,2*0,3 = 6%
0, 0 - 0,2*0,7 = 14%

If you choose a diplomacy agreement as a way of tech exchange and you pass techlose test target will get penaulty of 100% cost of traded tech.

As Wieder wrote in game chat, you can use hub cities for exchange without penaulty but before spies you have to use conquer. So each try will give pop lose too.

Please test this settings how they work and how can we tune them in next game. Not only how can we use it for victory. They have some work to do and I hope that we all want them to do that work good:)

I really didn't quite understand before this what you were trying to do with these changes.

Before today I understood that you (as you people) wanted to ban trading techs because you thought trading techs was evil just because trading techs is evil. Now I'm no longer sure about that.

Are you (ayp:) actually trying to reduce the alliance size by making tech transferring techs very hard to do? Assuming that is the intention, let's speculate a bit with some issues we had in LT30. I now assume that this was an actual problem in LT30. Here are a few cases what happened there.

With the LT30 rules you can:

1) Tech trading inside alliances.
a) Makes it possible to prevent stealing by not giving some techs for the border states.
b) Makes it possible to specialize developing techs. This is the researcher/banker/war maker scenario Monamipierrot was talking about earlier.
c) There is actually no limit for the alliance size if some people are not looking for winning the game.

2) Tech trading between alliances.
a) Really easy because you can choose what techs to give
b) The cost of the trade is for the players to decide. You can give the tech now and receive another tech for payment even turns later.

3) Giving out techs for tiny alliances or independent players.
a) In exchange for some gold or something else. This makes techs just another merchandise.
b) For free just to prevent some countries falling. In the end of the LT30 this option was widely used just to prevent advanced countries destroying the small ones.
c) Giving techs almost without planning.

The rules for LT31 will probably keep the 1. section as it was in LT30. The players will probably do this with hub cities with walls. That's how you don't lose population when the city is captured. The problem with this one is that it requires the hub city and someone can't ally the others in the game. With islands this is probably not such a problem.

The 2. section is probably going to suffer because it's not so easy to give just one selected tech via conquering. However this can still be done if it's planned well enough.

The 3. section is going to suffer because getting the hub city can be tricky. The solution for this one is probably giving the techs via trading because the receiver is probably never going to invent anything anyway. That's why the penalty for the receiver may not be a problem for the trades.

I have no idea how easy this is going to be in reality. This is all just theory.

But because Akfaew has this great rule about the right to complain (not complaining really but anyway.. only if you have an another solution for the problem, here is one suggestion for LT32.

- chance to lose tech when giving 20%
- chance to lose tech when receiving 0%
- penalty when getting tech from trade 20%
- penalty when getting free tech 20%
- penalty when getting tech from conquer 20%

This would make trading with techs possible but it would cost something for the seller and the buyer. Not too much but enough to prevent techs from becoming completely free for everyone. This would also make it possible to negotiate trade deals while making the deals something you really have to think about. Lots of people really like trading and making deals. Taking this away from the game will make it considerably less fun for those players.

Making those deals really is one great aspect to the game. I really think preventing this makes the game less fun while the problem stays as techs can still be given out if you are willing to the work.

wieder wrote: b) Makes it possible to specialize developing techs. This is the researcher/banker/war maker scenario Monamipierrot was talking about earlier.

Actually, I wrote that free tech trading REDUCES specialization benefit to 3 choiches: researcher, banker or warrior, which is boring (expecially for the researcher and the banker).
Banning trading (or making it VERY difficoult, as this rules clearly set)* will open a greater specialization benefit inside the military productions: there will be countries specialized in naval egemony, in defence, in attacking, in marine style D-Days, and so on. You can't develop ALL techs, you have to choose and behave properly.
Parallel to this kind of military specialization there will be still the choiche to go for the techs or to go for the production/$. In the first case, you bet on the quality of your army, in the latter on the size.
All of this is in IMHO the great advantage of no free trading.
As I already wrote, I also find free tech trading annoying cause it adds too much complexity to trading, a complexity in which luck and chaos rule, and players need LOT of time to have some advantage from it.
But you're true: for small countries/alliance it will be quite HARD to catch up, and this is IMHO a issue. Anyway, we have to discover how does it work the rule which makes it easier to research tech that people with whom you have a embassy already own.
Anyway, as big alliance will not trade tech, smaller players will have time to build defenses on their islands and be ready to repel them to the ocean.
This is going to be a LONG game, believe me!!!

Great post Wieder! And very good arguments! I completely forgot about walls(Thats why penaulty by conquering is still 0)... Why don`t you write it so before?:)

There is so many possibilities there... I`m sure that we will find the best solution in next game:)

I really didn't quite understand what were you trying to gain with this. I'm also trying not to complain about stuff if I don't have anything better to offer.

It's easier to find solutions if you know what is the actual problem

I like idea of a flat rate for tech trading just because the game is less complicated that way. That way there is do difference between selling the tech or getting it with conquer/stealing.

Actually I think that the 20% chance for the giving party to lose the tech is not such a good idea. However if it's not possible to make a 20% penalty for the giving party, this is a good compromise. In a perfect world, for this idea, we could use 20% penalty for someone giving the tech. It would seriously limit the sizes of alliances just because with every additional 5 players the costs for developing the tech would double. Unfortunately I doubt that's not possible to implement without additional coding and coding is something to be avoided for several reasons.

It will be really interesting to see how the LT31 turns out

Having read all your insightful posts, I have also been swayed to see the benefits of making tech trading more risky (I was a tech trading lover before). I will certainly think twice about trading technology - in any manner - since there is a chance that I will lose bulbs, and entire technologies I have already researched.

However, I agree with monamipierrot that a game ruleset such as the current one that encourages players to specialise in a complex way (i.e. with specific units having to support each other in military campaigns) is far more interesting strategically, than no specialisation (which you'd get with free tech trading) or rough specialisations like banker/warrior/scientist (which you'd get with low penalties).

I presume the ruleset will be frozen soon, as the first players meet. I am already strategising for my specialisations

Cheers, Xercise

Players have now seen each other, so now is the time to deep freeze the rules! Deep freeze with liquid nitrogen!

Has a aetting been changed to affect the transfer of gold through diplomacy? From what we can tell, the giver will lose gold but the receiver will get 0 gold.

I haven't seen a setting anywhere, but maybe I haven't looked close enough. Can somebody else please test this with 1g? We lost 30g initially as the diplo/embassy price

I cannot directly confirm this but rumors state that yes, trying to give money to someone results in the giver to lose the money but the reciever to never recieve anything. IIRC, this was intended in the ruleset design, and I have not investigated if the helpfiles and/or ruleset code actually mentions it.

As far as I'm concerned, normal monetary transactions seem to be disabled in LT31. Then is someone figures out a way to transmit money between cooperating countries, well, then I would sort that under the "getting an advantage by being clever" umbrella and not regard it as a problem if anyone uses it but rather as wizardry in the realms of dark freeciv knowledge.