I think other changes, made to slow down the colony rush, are responsible for your economic problems, not the tech inflation.

Try leaving tiles unbuilt on until your population grows enough to support them. Exploit econ resources. For worlds with no manufacturing or research bonuses, turn them into cash cows by building lots of trade centers/stock exchanges and building up the population (more taxpayers).

Hopefully Brad will get Trade restored to what I think is its intended performance, which can help out a lot with your economy (but doesn't now in TA).

Well, since I'm brand-new to GalCiv, I've been really enjoying TotA despite the research problem, but I think I'm finally done until the patch. Thank goodness that's supposedly sometime this week!

In my current game, colonizable planets are pretty rare, and I'm doing quite well to have four of them.

I got seriously lucky, however, because one of those planets has a 300% research bonus AND a 700% research bounus! If that wasn't enough, one of the other planets has a planet-wide +14% and a 300% tile.

Needless to say, my tech compares favorable to the other races.

So, why am I giving up for now?

Planetary Conquest is going to take me 32 weeks to research. With tech rate set to "very fast".

I'm funding a total of 124 little research icons, and it's going to take over two and a half years of clicking the turn button.

Specifically, Planetary Conquest starts out costing 665 points, but it's now sitting at 3786 points. That's a 570% increase.

So, bring on the groovy patch!

What exactly does bug do? I bought the game a week ago (digital download) and it has already been updated to version 1.9.1 from 1.8 when I bought it. I dont know if that fixed the bug you are speaking of......cuz I haven't noticed a bug. What does it do again?

How can you notice a bug, when you don't even know what we're talking about? Read the thread!

I'm glad this is getting fixed. I had thought it was intentional, to keep research at about the same pace. I always play with research at very slow, and immense maps. This meant that eventually, you'd get a ton of labs going, and research would be down at 1-2 turns for the easy stuff, and maybe 10 for the top. Now it seems that I'm usually stuck with 5-6 turns for the simplest things. It's still kind of annoying to plan your research out and have the cost for something jump up 2-3 turns before you get to it.

Well someone had to notice the bug without 'knowing what we're talking about'. Thats why this thread even exists.

I was just asking for a quick breakdown to save the time of reading two pages of thread.

Now that I know what we're talking about. I actually thought it was done purposely to have every races individual tech tree have a slow down point (or a new breakthrough point that takes time to master) along different branches.
Example: Its takes two turns a pop to research the whole deflector line but when you switch to sheilds....well that takes 20 turns to research the first one in line because its a new tech. Then when you research lvl 2 of sheilds it goes back to 2 turns.

Now I never played GalCiv2 DL or DA. I started right with Twilight. So I don;t know what it was like during the first 2 installments

@Razor:
No, someone WAS familiar with the game. They've been playing it for months. So they were able to compare with months of prior history and discover that the game was behaving differently.

@Seth:
No reason not to provide a simple answer.

Answer:
In previous versions of the game (before the Twilight expansion pack), research costs stayed the same throughout the game. The problem was that people could easily attain so much research per turn that they would get eventually get all the techs. This had the potential to become even worse in Twilight, since they added a new, larger universe.

To combat this, in Twilight, they made a tweak so that every tech you researched would make the unresearched ones increase in cost. The intent was that this would be a very small increase, fractions of a percentage point.

The BUG is that this is a very large increase, sometimes 50% or more.

As you can tell, anybody with experience before and after Twilight would easily be able to tell when a research cost stays the same vs dramatically increasing. By contrast, anybody who has only played Twilight (Razor) wouldn't know anything else, so they can't tell the difference.

Yep. That sounds like a great idea, actually. It'd make you have to specialize in certain techs more, instead of just picking up every one of the cheap ones.

Unfortunately, the present "system" seems completely random, and just means that I'll never see a large class ship. (I'm not willing to spend 60 weeks researching them any more than the AI is.)

It's early june...where the patch?

/sigh

Thanx. It sounds like the new tweak is a good one if it worked properly. I really thought that certain techs just were expensive for some reason.

Hmmmm, my game (digital download) just upgraded from 1.8 to 1.91. I'll start a new one and see if the bug is still there.

I think it's scheduled for Thursday or Friday. (Sigh, I'm going to be out of town for a week and won't be able to jump on it right away (:( )

Some techs ARE expensive for some reason - but not all of them. No reason at all for "Laser theory" to ever take 22 turns when you have entire research planets. The scaling research cost is allright, but I think it's more of a fix for the fact that at high levels, you can research the endgame techs too fast, more on a comparative level than anything else.

Oh please. The game has been borderline unplayable for me and others since this bullshit poorly-tested unneeded 'release patch'. Thank GOD my laptop still has the last beta version still on it. How fucking pathetic is that, that the BETA product is better than the RELEASE one?

Stardock dumped an extremely crappy game-breaking patch on us, and then left us with cold feet, a broken heap of crap I'd never have paid for if this is what I knew the final result would be.

Brad's already told one person that they can get a refund. Feel free to join that person.

No, it's basically just you. Your ideas of tech costs clearly do not have the popular support you wish they did. As I said in the other topic, mod it yourself.

Otherwise, bring on the involuntary refund and banhammer, Frogboy!

Just me? You mean me and the other pages of complaints?

And popular support amongst whom? I've seen COUNTLESS threads about people wanting SOMETHING done about tech trading, and very few (actually, next to none) saying it should stay the way it is. And you're going to base this on what, these forums, that are lucky to get 30 unique posters a day?

How about this - for every 'tech speeds are perfect' thread you can give me, I'll give you one 'tech speeds are broken', AND a 'tech trading is broken' thread!

Uranium:
Dude, I'm annoyed at the tech bug too, but my blood pressure never went up because of it.

It's only a game, remember?

That's possibly one of the stupidest things I've seen you post, and that's something when you're involved. Why would anyone start threads NOT complaining about things? How often do you go to a tech support board and see people whining "My computer works fine!" People who don't have a problem with the status quo, don't complain about it. That doesn't make their opinions less valid than a relative handful of highly vocal malcontents.

Show me all those posts, and I'll show you the same dozen or so people in each one.

"Oh well the reason why you're wrong is because everyone who disagrees is too busy playing the game".

So, let's take this thread. Are you going to say that the people complaining about lousy Korx AI performance are wrong because clearly the people who think they're fine aren't responding, because they're playing against the Korx right now?

So go ahead, tell me where you get the impression that we're a 'minority', show me where exactly you get this idea from, because, hell go FIND those threads about tech speeds and tech trading - nearly everyone wants a change, and they're usually lengthy, lively discussions about how the trading works, and debating how we'd fix it. The issue is what KIND of change. Extremely few people say that it should be unchanged.


Maybe you never noticed but these forums aren't exactly a lively place. Or here's a thought you clueless dolt - it could also be because the active posters here actively support a general tech tree cost / trade nerf overall! So if long-time, active posters like Scintor, Iztok, Zyxspilon, or others support something, it doesn't mean anything because remember: people who disagree just aren't posting their opinions.

You're justifying your position based soley on the fact that:
- Not enough random nobodies appear to support it.
- They all post in threads about it.
- They're wrong anyway because everyone else disagrees, they just don't use the forums to say so.

Most people here support a change to either tech trading or tech speeds, or both. Fact. Go prove that wrong if you want to make a fucking point one of these days.

This is interesting.

I assumed the "bug" was to deal with all the massive bitching about the tech trees being plowed through too quickly. When I played a game on an immense map, I had no trouble getting the techs I needed even though I did see the costs rising (and sometimes pretty fast). My main enemies had large ships and decent weapons and shields. Transports were all over the map, mine and theirs.

I have a theory. Tech cost goes up based on number of techs you have, not amount of research you've done. If this is true, then those of us who play with tech trading off have no real issue with this bug, because we don't accumulate a dozen techs in a single turn due to trade.

If Stardock must fix this bug, I certainly hope they leave it in when tech trading is turned off. Made research actually feel like it mattered, which wasn't the case so much in the beta.

My issue with the 'feature' is that, well, obviously getting one tech and watching EVERY tech explode through the roof by 2000 weeks was really quite unsettling, and I'm not sure I completely agree with increasing the costs of EVERYTHING.

It feels very Oblivion-esque, with that god-awful level-scaling.

I think I would've rather seen research itself follow an exponential curve, both production and on the tech tree.

The tech tree costs follow a very linear trend, with a few exceptions. Research production potential also follows a linear trend, but far more steep than tech costs. This means that if you match research progress with expansion, techs will generally be about as cheap as the last tech you researched.

If research output production followed an inverse exponential curve (meaning research potential 'caps out' after a while) while matching a normal exponential curve on the tech trees, that would mean that early-game techs would be easy to jump-start a civilization, and a modest amount of time would be spent mid-tech. The end-game techs would be very hard to reach and require a heavy investment.

Seems the idea solution, but the thought of changin all the tech values sounds... daunting.

Ah, missed that there was a page 2. So yeah, SD put in this system to combat speedy teching, but made the formula too aggressive, perhaps.

Either way, I'd like to keep some kind of escalating cost in place. Really did make my game more interesting (and made planetary invasions far more useful - random crappy techs most of the time, sure, but now and again I'd get something really nice for free).

Uranium, shut up. Seriously, all you do is whine, and not even in a constructive way. A) Happy customers are something like 50-75% less likely to comment on a product than unhappy customers. Basic business sense. Return your game if you hate it so much. C) Whatever else you choose to do, make sure you choose to do it far from here.

(So naturally as I'm typing that rant, he posts something constructive. Damn it.)