I feel really unhappy when finished researching all techs in late games and feel like the game comes to its end.
Is it possible to make some "repeating techs" that can be researched over and over again? Every time when a repeating tech is researched, it provides some bonus on economy or military...... So that my empire can still make technological progress even in very late game.
Wish someone from Stardock Games can read this......
Several things that should/could be done here.
1. Repeating techs that are crazy expensive but give decent bonuses... there should be one or more of these in each of the tech trees.
2. once all techs are researched, all "specializations" become available to go back and research.....
3. Stardock just needs to make more techs so that the research win is an accomplishment... not an expectation... (I always disable it cause it is so easy to get)
I disable research wins as well. There needs to be one at each line, kinda like how other 4x have which is 'Future tech' and it puts you on a cue and each 20 spent give your empire a 10% global econo, or food, or attk, or def, or move or influence, or mining resource bonus.
It's been suggested many times, unfortunately at this time there hasn't been much of a conversation from Stardock on this feature. Personally I love the idea.
The tech tree should definitely be a little bigger. Nothing crazy but it seems like the tech tree runs out about 30% too soon - I don't want it just slowed down since the tech race is what lets you get ahead and win wars - you don't want everyone with 2 laser for longer really - just a few extra big ones added at the end.
The tree should be more branchy... have a few more side techs that do interesting things...
Repeating future techs for empire bonuses at the end of the tree seems like a very simple solution to the I researched the whole tech tree and now my research points are wasted and that makes me sad issue. Many games do this. It works pretty well.
In addition to the points already mentioned I think the research cost for the more advanced technologies should be massively increased.
I usually play at least large maps but with game and research rate set to the slowest possible pace. At the start, with only a few planets, the research rate is indeed slow and research duration of 10 and more weeks is the norm. That is ok with me. However, in mid to late game when the empire gets bigger and the research capacity is increased, you start to blow through the tech tree like crazy. Even the techs at the end of tree can be research in 2 or 3 weeks.
The consequence is that for example in the missile weapon branch, it is a big deal to get up to harpoons and missile ships with harpoons are the norm for a long time. Once I get to research the next tiers, it isn't worth to design ships with the photonic warheads etc. because I will be able to reach the end of the branch and get nightmare torpedoes so quickly.
Even the acension techs can be researched in only a few weeks - and they are supposed to be those almost magical steps in scientific advance.
Now I don't want techs that take a hundred turns to research, but the current state is to crazy.
The real issue is how we do research. Near end game if you have 50-100 planets, each one is going to be producing some research. All this piles up and snow balls and when you have 2, 3 or even 8 specialized research planets this compounds the issue of how fast we finish techs. The end game techs are fine but if we changed how the values were arrived at. For example make Phasors require 6000 points and an amount of time as a % of your total output. If you are cranking out 5000 per week, then you need (6000+10% of 5000). I am not sure how this would work, but my feeling is research is completely different based on maps and planets. The above is just a thought and maybe silly and it was not my intention.
Larsenex...The +10% idea would act as a global tax or break on research... I'd rather not have escalating costs that increase math that the computer has to do in the background.
I think it would be better to just have more techs... or have a global production hit for empire size... again GCII did this via taxes and moral.. GCIII does not have an effective way of capping huge empires to limit them across the board...
Tasilios, I know what you mean but (I thought) with this game Paul, can unload that work onto the GPU which are ideally suited for number crunching ( I may be completely off the mark here).
The issue with our tech tree is that, on HUGE and larger maps the tree can be completed prior to 1/2 the map being revealed.
Either we scale our research costs based on habitable planets at start of game OR we lengthen the tech tree. I would love to see another age between War and Ascension that drags out the game another 250 turns. That would also entail re balancing all the Ascension techs or moving some into this new age and creating newer techs for Age of Ascension.
I keep hearing about scaling according to number of habitable planets and having it apply to various areas of the game. I hope this is one of the areas that is being considered for this approach. Just as in real life, research accelerates research. The effect is definitely exacerbated by the synergies available in a very large empire. It gets even crazier if I invade other large factions and find research oriented planets to exploit. With a research oriented custom faction, when I establish my sprawling empires, I always end up with this incredible spike at the end of my game's research power graph and zip through branches of the tech tree.
Theroetically you can offload the math to the GPU.... and if you are running an AMD system (who seriously does that now a days... oh um me) This does even better than if you had an intel system.... either way that is one more calculation that I would rather the game spend on AI figuring out how to kick my butt...I think this is one thing that is several fold.....
1. They don't have the full tech tree out yet. They don't have any of the espionage techs for example..
2. They removed the large empire penalty but have not replaced it by some system wide break mechanism.....
3. The AI is not very good at invasions and war right now....Walk, Crawl, run.... we want to be running right now but I think StarDock is looking at the big picture and seeing the ripples further out in the pond than we are...To properly balance Research they need to do some fundamental changes to the base game... a quick re balance might hide the issues.. but doesn't actually fix the issue... and if they go to far and fix something that the Humans exploit, it might break something the AI needs to function....
^^^ This leads me to believe that the 'Expand-Alone' will do more for the game then we know. I am really looking forward to the changes that Frogboy has planned. I think the entire game will get an overhaul.
Rather than a bulk 10% across the board, repeating narrowly focused techs are more fun. For example, after I've got all the beam additions, let me spend some large amount, that goes up exponentially, to gain a linear improvement to beam weapon mass or beam weapon damage. Makes things much more customizable.
Hmm yeah I really quite strongly agree with this. It would be awesome to keep adding 3% to lasers or whatever and make your huge tech lead, and the tech focused empire you built up not suddenly become useless when the tree finishes.
Currently if you play for a 'tech' type race and balance towards dominating technologically you have a huge edge over say a production focused AI (lols that's all they do...) in terms of fleet strength but you're often heavily outnumbered on ships as you may only have a few mega production planets that can actually pump out ships with ridic numbers of nightmare torpedoes piled on. The problem is that from late-mid game suddenly your tech edge is vanishing since you have nothing else to research to keep your fleet strength advantage.
I don't think on the higher difficulties it's even practical to compete on sheer fleet numbers with the AI... the cost of one good ship can be like 100/turn in maintenance... and the AI can field almost unlimited fleets with the stationed ships let off and the bonuses they get.
I kind of like the old Master of Orion 2 model where you keep researching tech and it keeps reducing the size of ship components, so you can really pack stuff in there after a while.
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